Episode Summary:
Meet The Hosts:
Brian Moir
Solidity and React Developer | Blockchain Enthusiast | Decentralized Internet Advocate | Crypto investor since 2012
https://twitter.com/moirbrian
Logan Ross
Blockchain Analyst @ Benzinga | President @ Wolverine Blockchain | Crypto investor and educator since 2016
https://twitter.com/logannross
Ryan McNamara
Bought sub $90 ETH during the bear market | Liquidated on ByBit | Was into DeFi before it was cool | Ran ASIC mining operation in 2016 (sorry planet Earth) | $UNI Bag Holder
https://twitter.com/ryan15mcnamara
Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.
Unedited Transcript:
Yo, yo, yo, what is good? Everyone. Welcome to flight 63, aboard the moon or bust rocket, ship your home for all things, all coins and defy. My name is Logan Ross, and I'm going to be your host for today's show. I'd like to welcome everyone to the crypto show at Benzinga. If you're out there in the chat, I want to know what you guys are looking at.
What projects you have your eyes on this week. So drop them in the chat right now. Uh, will I go through all of the important links that I got to show you guys? So, uh, and make sure while you're down there, hit that like button and make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you're not already. So let's get right into it.
Boom. All right. On today's show, we will be talking to artists writer and filmmaker, Andy blood, and then we will be interviewing the project lead of . This is a huge crypto project. You guys don't want to miss out on this insight exclusive interview. Uh, so make sure you stay tuned. We'll be talking to Jake a little bit later on today.
Uh, so Ryan unfortunately is not able to make it, uh, but you are rocking with me. So, uh, I want to know what you guys are feeling, what you guys are thinking about the markets today. We will, uh, have lots of time for chat interaction. Um, and if you're new around here, we appreciate you tuning in, uh, hope you'll subscribe, hit the like button, and we also have a.
They a telegram community where you can join, it gets 25% off discount on the moon or bus merge, like this sweet hat. We got the moon or bus logo right here on the side. It's pretty hype, uh, and always, uh, as always make sure to hit us up on Twitter and connect with us there. So let's just get right into the markets, uh, for today.
There's a lot of cool stuff that I want to talk about. Um, and I want to switch the camera angles so you could see my full screen here. Okay. So what has been going on, uh, on today's market? Boom, like button click initiate. Thank you, Maxwell. Um, okay, so I'm just going to go over, uh, what, what I think is interesting until you guys drop some projects for me to look at and the chat.
Um, but we see a theme has been moving sideways a little bit. Uh, these, these are the hourly candles here and for the past, you know, maybe day, day and a half, uh, we've been kind of cooling off usually in the first half of the week. Uh, we, okay. Screen is too small. I can, I can fix that. What if I do one of those joints?
Boom, just like that. Okay, cool. Uh, so hopefully you guys can see that a little bit better now. Um, as you can see. So the second half of the week, the later half of the week, crypto usually cools off a little bit and the first half is really when it's ripping. So, you know, going into the weekend, the close, uh, of all of the, uh, you know, the Bitcoin futures, ETF and all these, uh, OTC market traded products.
Uh, it's just a little, usually a little bit quieter, but, you know, uh, okay. So we see Bitcoin has, has not been. Anything really interesting. These are the daily candles it's been moving sideways for quite quite a long time. Now, almost a week. It's kind of range-bound between, you know, this, uh, previous all-time high resistance.
Uh, and then this support that we have around 59,000 that came from, you know, much, much earlier in the year. Um, so let me know what you guys think is Bitcoin or ether going to take off first? Are we going to see. Uh, you know, it starts to take over and really control the market cycle because we've seen eith at three new all-time highs, whereas Bitcoin has only done one so far.
So, you know, is this, is this signaling the beginning of the flipping? Uh, we'll have to see, but let me know what you guys think in the chat below. Uh, so back to. You know, the top 100 overview, uh, some exciting news happened this week. Solana has finally flipped car Dano. Uh, I think this has been a long time coming.
If you, if you've been tuning into Mooner bus before you guys know that we, you know, we really prioritize on chain transactions in the ecosystem around these, these competitor blockchains. So we see a ton of stuff going on on Solana and Ethereum, but not too much has been happening in the Cardona ecosystem.
Uh, despite that the market cap has been over $60 billion for quite some time now, but Solanas is finally catching up, uh, $71 billion market cap. Now it's really taken a firm lead distance itself from car Dano. Uh, and that's pretty exciting. So if you guys are looking into Solano ecosystem, let me know, and I can talk about some projects that I'm looking at in the ecosystem, uh, and maybe take a look at some of the projects you guys are looking at as well.
Uh, Boom. Okay. So we got to chat here from sneaky won. He won one of the giveaways for the swag and he is repping letting us know that it is quality. I can confirm myself as well as I did make the hat. I did design it and create it myself. So, uh, head on over to swag.benzinga.com and you can see the full lineup of our products.
We got that. No chat, you centralize everything. We got to get technical shirt. Benzinga news, go Burr. We got tons of dope stuff. And then here is all of your crypto, alright. Back to the markets. So we see ripple, uh, is up 7% on the week. This one's kind of interesting. Uh, it looks like there. The lawsuit with the sec might be coming to a close.
And I think ripple is the winner here. You know, the sec might slap them with a fine try to make it look like they won, but they did not rule ripple as a security. So we might see it start trading on U S exchanges again pretty soon. And I think that is the main driver of this price increase over the past week.
I also heard some news about a ERC 20 wrapped version of ripple, uh, that, you know, despite whatever legal issues are going on, this wrapped token is kind of a loophole in the current law. So we might see Coinbase, uh, you know, list the wrapped version of ripple ERC 20 based, and that would allow us investors to get, uh, exposure to ripple once again.
So pretty bullish, uh, news going on for ripple. Uh, let me know your price target. And if you guys are trading it down below, we also see polka dot ha has finally gotten a little bit of shine. I've been calling this one for a while. Um, it's been, you know, very undervalued compared to the rest of the smart contract blockchains.
I mean, if you take a look at Cardinal versus polka dot, so let's just break it down. Both of them were started by theory. Co-founders okay. Cardona was started by Charles Hoskinson the motivational speaker. Uh, that's a joke. And then poke it out was started by Gavin wood. Gavin wood is actually the co-founder of Ethereum that I would prefer to place my bets on as he was the one who created the Ethereum virtual machine.
He created solidity himself. Uh, so he was really one of the biggest builders of, uh, you know, Ethereum. And I think that that will make his, his project polka dot much more successful longterm and polka.is more focused on connecting blockchains, becoming an interoperability protocol. Um, and for that reason, I see a more bullish future for polka dot than cardiac.
Uh, you know, most definitely, maybe even, maybe even Solano on some of these other projects, it has been pretty slept on though. The technology is kind of advanced. It's more of a fundamental play, which, you know, doesn't really take priority in a bull market. Uh, as you can see, you know, memes, hype speculation take priority in a bull market.
And that is why this, uh, beats here dog meme, uh, has a $30 billion market cap. But, uh, yeah. So poke it out up 16%. We're going to keep our eyes on that. Uh, let's see, what do we got here in the chat? Uh, Yoshi wants to take a look at BTC and rich says Eve moves first, and then she, that's very interesting. I'm curious to hear more about that, but we did take a short look at Bitcoin, but we could take another look.
Uh, so you can see here, I've had these lines going for a really long time. You may have seen them before, but basically, uh, I drew this triangle here, uh, and it turned out to be pretty decent as soon as we broke above the triangle right here. Uh, you know, I speculated maybe this green line could be our path to the top.
And what do you know over the next two weeks? It literally wrote it. Exactly. And I, I basically just got lucky, you know, all indicators are wrong, but some might be helpful. Um, I definitely like to point out the, these lines of resistance and support. I think that those are kind of good tools for saying, okay, if it breaks up here, uh, you know, this is where we might go, or if it breaks down, this is where we might go.
We just want to know the levels to look out for, uh, and be ready to react based on what might happen.
What's up Hadid. I see you out there in the chat. Welcome back. Appreciate you tuning in once again. And if you're just joining the stream, this is moon or bust your home for all things. Alt coins and DFI drop the coins you're looking at in the chat. And while you're down there, make sure to smash that like button, send it to the moon.
All right. Back to the charts. So we might've talked about this on Monday show, uh, but I think it's worth going over one more time. So you guys saw Facebook announced their name, change to Metta. They're trying to pivot to the metaverse and that has sent a couple of these metaverse cryptocurrencies, like literally straight to the moon.
So if we go, uh, take a look at decentral and this is one of the biggest and, and currently active, uh, metaverse blockchain applications right now and on the let's see, where can we see the seven. It's ranked number 41. So I'll just scroll down to boom. On the seven day decentral land is up 121%. Uh, it got to like almost $4.
Now it's back under three. Um, I think that this is, you know, it could be a good play long-term, but I'm looking at some of the other, uh, metaverse plays that haven't quite blown up yet. And one of them that I want to point out to you guys is a little project on Solana called star Atlas. Uh, Let me know in the chat, if you've heard of star Atlas before.
Um, but this is one that I'm insanely bullish on. I have been for a long time, I picked up some tokens earlier this summer, and basically I'm just forgetting about them for the time being, I think start less could be a huge, huge project, uh, you know, 10 years from now and, you know, picking up. Piece while it's the 264th biggest crypto.
Uh, I think it might be a good idea. So star Atlas basically is like an open world, blockchain game think like GTA and star wars combined. Okay. So you can form guilds, you can buy planets. All of these are represented by NFTs on the salon of blockchain. And you can also form guilds like interplanetary, guilds, and team up with your friends, battle against other guilds and steal their NFTs.
Uh, I think this is just a sweet concept. Um, and SPF himself, uh, sandbank been freed, the owner of FTX. Uh, he says that the team behind star, you continues to impress him. And, you know, I trust SPF. He, uh, has done nothing but write for my portfolio so far. So I'm going to continue, uh, to hold this Atlas token.
Let me know what you guys think of Atlas. And if there's any other metaverse plays you are looking at right now, uh, another Solano ecosystem project that I think is interesting is radium. So this is a decentralized exchange on Solana, and it's one of the most popular, if not the most popular. And I have some of these tokens as well.
I picked them up around the same time as Atlas earlier this summer. And I'm probably just going to ride it out, you know? Um, I want it to hold some Solano, but I figured I could get more exposure to the salon ecosystem by, you know, diversifying my funds into these smaller tokens. Then once, once more people start using Solano, realize what it is, they'll eventually find their way to these protocols.
So that's my thesis there. Mush wants to know if I have any. Man up predictions. So, you know, from a price standpoint, Manoj is really hot right now. Um, and that could mean two things that could mean that it's about to cool off soon. And it could also mean that this is going to be seen as like the blue chip metaverse play for crypto.
So the hype could be just starting in my opinion. Uh, but it's also kind of risky to buy in right now, just based off of the recent price action, uh, and the hype surrounding the metaverse. I think that if you're planning to hold, you know, for at least six months, it's probably going to work out for you. Um, but you know, always, always keep that risk reward in mind.
We see a fully diluted market cap of $6 billion right now for decentral land. And obviously Facebook or Meadows market cap is much higher than that. And we'll see who ends up, uh, you know, having the better product longterm. All right. Let's see. Max wants to take a look at C R O so we will do that. And then pretty soon here, we will be doing our first interview on today's show.
Uh, and you guys don't want to miss it. Okay. So CRO is crypto.com. The exchanges coins kind of like BNB, for example, uh, except crypto.com has a few interesting features that aren't offered by Binance and their token, uh, is used to support those. So one of the things that I think is pretty cool from them, uh, are their visa, cryptocurrency credit card.
So you can actually earn a cash back in crypto in CRO, uh, with these credit cards by staking their CRO token. So let's say you want to ball out, you stake 400,000 CRO tokens. This will get you the obsidian card and the obsidian card gets you access to the private jet partnership. So if you're balling out, uh, with that CRO, uh, you could really take advantage of it.
If you got in early, especially then, you know, you, you could probably get some nice perks. Pretty cheap. Uh, I personally don't have one of these, but I know some people who do they like them. Uh, and I think that they're only going to get better with time, but yeah, let's take a look at the price of CRO year to date.
Oh, wow. I did not realize it was taking off, like that's up 40% today alone. That's pretty crazy. I mean, we're seeing crypto.com uh, you know, launch a bunch of new advertising campaigns, uh, and, you know, get those sponsorships like on ESPN. I've been seeing them. Uh, so I think that they're probably just gonna gain more eyes and exposure over the next six months.
It might not be a bad play personally. I don't hold any CRO. Uh, but if I did want to get one of those credit cards, that would definitely be the move. Let me know what you guys think about these products in the chat is a crypto credit card. Something that, that you are interested in, uh, or would you prefer to, you know, hold most of your crypto in, in cold storage or, uh, and you know, not spend it, just spend your USD instead of.
Uh, so Brandon Brandy wants to know where do I go to buy Atlas? Uh, so actually the exchange I just showed you radium. So radium is a decentralized exchange on Solano where you can get access to all these salons tokens. So this is where I went to buy Atlas. Um, but you can also buy Atlas on a couple of exchanges.
Probably you can find out by clicking the market tab on coin market cap. Yeah. So it's on FTX, which is not available in the U S but you can get it on radium and the serum decks on Solano as well.
All right guys. And with that, it is time for our first interview of the day. So here with us, we have Andy blood. Who's a creative genius ex strategist at Facebook. He's launching the first ever minted book and publishing rights via a non fungible token. Andy, welcome to lunar bust. How are you doing today?
Kiarra, Logan. Nice to meet you. I'm doing good. Beautiful morning in Oakland. Oh, I'm so glad to hear it. Um, and I'm very glad you're able to join us today. So Andy, I want to know a little bit about how you got into crypto. What was the creative path that led you there? I was, um, I was at Facebook for five years and I was leaving in June, just as the company was tilting towards being, uh, the metaverse company.
And mark Zuckerberg gave his, his vision about, um, their future creators. The economy and how has the chance will all creators all over the world to, to, to get paid for what they're really good at doing, which is furnishing the world with creative ideas. And, um, that was immediately a path I wanted to get involved in.
And, uh, the, the last chapter of the book and there's, here's a, here's a hard copy of the book it's called, it's called fall blade. And the very last chapter, the closing chapter deals with the Playboy NFT Playboy's most successful NFT ever, um, is an image of a centerfold called Laina Soderbergh. Now in 1972, her image became the first ever digital digital image, the four runner to the JPEG.
And I'll show you a quick picture. Now, if you study computer science or mathematics, Or AI, that's an image. You'll know it's in thousands of white papers around the world about the, about the field of, um, image, image recognition, algorithms, AI, et cetera. And we'd made a documentary about Laina Soderbergh's life.
She's known as the first lady of the internet or the patron state of JPEGs. And Playboy reached out to us and said, look, we've seen the documentary. We love it. Can you put us in touch with Lena? Who's now a 72 year old woman in Stockholm. And, uh, we went sure. Why and Playboy said, well, we've got a great idea.
We've got an amazing back catalog that we're mentoring as NFTs. It's given us a brand new place to play in the modern, in the modern world with his archive. We've got, that is unlike any other. And, um, if we sell the or Soderbergh image NFT, then the funds or some of the funds will go to her. So actually five decades after her image was used by male scientists to create the JPEG, she was going to get paid via non fungible tokens in the very latest digital cash.
And that was such a beautiful bookend, that entire story and the closing chapter of the book. So the lane, his story, plus the pivot to met to metaverse, um, and then getting involved with the Damien Hirst, um, currency NFT, um, project in June, July suddenly became, this is where I'm going. And then the chance to launch a book as a world first NFT project became, okay, this is going to get headlines.
It's going to create a conversation, you know, is this book, is this a book? Is this an artifact? Um, is this a publishing deal? Because the reserve price was us $50,000 for the NFT. It's deliberately not cheap. And it just raises all those conversations about, you know, how are we creating for the future and the proposed metaverse and what forms can these creative endeavors take?
Okay. So I have two questions for you. One, could you tell me a little bit about, a little bit more about your involvement in the Damian her's currency project, and then, uh, I'd like to know what makes the, the NFT book a world first, what specific features of it are novel co unintended? Oh, I've been, yeah, no great punk.
I've been, I've been following Damien Hirst since he was a young artist in 93, 94, and then he exploded onto the British scene in the global scene. And in the last few years, I've been fortunate, fortunate enough to pick up a few of his physical pieces of. So in June, when he, when he went public with the idea that he was publishing 10,000 pieces of physical art known as currency, um, each individually recognized as an NFT.
Um, I just thought that was an amazing project to, to jump in because he attacked it from so many layers. You know, he's giving all the people that were, um, fortunate enough to be involved, um, the chance to either keep the art or keep the NFT, but you can only have one, you can't have two, you've gotta, you've gotta make that choice between the physical world and then, you know, the digital world or the metaverse.
And again, that's brilliant, you know, conundrum to juggle in the mind. Yeah, I know the code is our aspect of it is very cool. Yeah. And, um, I secured one and the prices have rocketed, um, at launch, uh, U us 2000 a piece of currency. And I think the floor, I think the floor price now is, uh, is about 30,000 us.
Um, will you be burning yours for the physical? No, I'm keeping the NFC. I'm keeping mine for my son because I think in, in 20 years he will probably think it's the best thing that ever passed on. Yep. I have to agree with you. Okay. So tell me more about the book, uh, what, where you launched it, what chain it's on, why you chose that, uh, and all the cool features about it.
Well, I'm based in New Zealand. So I wanted to, um, I found accessing NFTs from New Zealand, a particularly difficult thing to do unless you've got somebody handholding the process and the fact that, that. Um, you Zealand has a public blockchain called sens net. That was about to launch, um, an NFT platform for all New Zealand is called litho.
Um, at the same time that I was launching a book was, uh, was, uh, was a perfect opportunity for me. And it was a great opportunity for, uh, litho to, um, to go to launch with something that created a wider conversation about what could be an NFT. So for me, it was made in New Zealand mentored here for this audience, primarily because we want New Zealand is to get involved because we're missing out and then explore that opportunity because the, the litho centrality team also have a global audience space.
So there will be international interests, but it was also a domestic audience. And, and let's see if we can usher people to the world of NFTs and. The first collection, the full big bleed collection went up with 33 NFTs, three were related to the book in three additions, ones of ones. You know, I wanted to make them a unique opportunity to buy outright the ownership of the book and publishing rights so that you could, again, this could something that could be enjoyed in a digital form or an analog form.
And that's up to the that's beholden to the owner, the future on the side, what they want to do with that. And the additions were unique. They had, they had, um, unique covers that are different to the, to the paperback and Amazon edition. And then going one step further. Um, within the 44,000 words in the book, there is planted a 12 word C praise for a digital wallet on.
Now towards Thanksgiving, I'm going to make that address public. And then literally anybody who wants to, you know, try and crack that open, then go for your life. You know, if you, if you know how to pass 44 or 12 words for 44,000, go for your life, and I leave something in the wallet, um, you know, there'll be an undisclosed prize for anyone who might get in.
That's incredible. You know, it's the most creative way right now to publish a book. You can become the publisher. You can use the copy to crack open a wallet. You can enjoy the book, you know, and even the language we talk about owning a copy of a book gives you the chance to own the original. No, anyone can raise 5,000, you know, release paperback book.
You can own the only one that gives you the permission to own distribute and consume. so there's 33 NFTs. Three of them are special. Do all three of these come with ownership. Yeah. Okay. The book has mentored Mehta version. One is the full edition, uh, 70 chapters, 11 stories, ma Mehta version two is a 70 chapter edition.
And those chapters only focus on creativity. Massive version three is the black Swan edition, which is the 11 most remarkable stories in my career. The unexpected events, um, uh, you know, packaged in that edition. So there are three there's the master, the edit and the black Swan. And they come at different prices and the, um, the artwork sold out almost immediately.
So that collection has been live and the artwork sold out within 48 hours. Now the book NFTs didn't sell, but I think it's, it could be a year before people understand what that even means. You know, this is a kind of leading edge conversation with people. Um, I relisted them last night because of this interview because of the global audience.
So if they are live now for 48 hours, if anybody wants to, um, you know, have a crack at owning, owning the NFT, um, I've had, I've had offers behind the scenes from people who want to buy the book, then go and realist on open sea, um, for the secondary market. Um, so one way or another it's gonna work out, but also, you know, it's given me, you know, exposure to a market and an audience that I didn't necessarily have a connection or an infinity where there's given me huge headlines, great PR it's given me the open the door into the nit world, which I'm embracing.
I've got more collections coming up now, um, in collaboration with, uh, with an artist called red kitted out with, um, red kiddo who I work with a lot. And, um, this is what I'm going to do right now. I'm going to focus on this, you know, Or a market where creative people can get paid. So that means, you know, we've had 20 years where creativity was a loss leader for a media buy and now creativity has value and, um, you know, creatives in whatever form can now explore this space and take advantage of it.
You know, musicians, artists, writers, you know, uh, yet to be termed, you know, explore the space. So if you could really quick tell us where we could go to take a look at the NFT project and maybe place a bid on one of them, that'd be great. And then I also want to know, like, what do you hope to see, um, from your project?
Do you hope to see more artists getting into it, more authors getting into the NFT space? Uh, like if you could have one thing come out of your project, what would that be? Okay. Well, the, the, the book is NFC is available at leftover. Dot X, Y Zed. So litho versus the platform on top of the sense blockchain.
Um, so anybody can access Lissa leftovers. Um, you might need to, uh, transfer open up a sens wallet and do, to do some transfers. Um, what is the book about? The book is about creativity, um, to Isaac. So remarkable stories and hard won lessons from the coalface of creativity and the bleeding edge of advertising technology from, from some, from the point of view who, somebody who spent 30 years being creative for the world's biggest brands and Facebook, and to your final question, local, what Logan, why do this?
My entire career has been about lighting the fire of creativity within people, businesses, and organizations. And if this project can do that, and if this project likes a thousand flames, And produces a thousand more great ideas, then I'm happy and nothing else matters. Amazing. Andy, thank you so much for joining us today.
Uh, make sure you go check out litho verse.xyz, uh, to follow up on Andy's book and go check it out. It's still on Amazon, right? It's on Amazon paperback, Kendall and NFT. Thank you Logan. Awesome. Thank you for your time today. All right, next up on moon. Our bus today, we have another interview. This is the two interview special episode a and this one is equally as exciting as the first.
Uh, so here with us today, we have project lead and co-founder at Jake. Welcome to Moonbus. How are you doing today? Doing quite well. Logan. How about yourself? Doing very well, thank you. So, uh, let's just get right into it, Jake. So I want to know about your background in technology and cryptocurrency, uh, and how you found yourself where you are today, for sure.
So, uh, I've been a system administrator for like 20 years. So I, you know, I started getting interested in open source software back when I was in grad school, I used to be a science person. I was in a physics PhD program and didn't end up chasing that to the end of the game. And then I, uh, I got into cryptocurrency in 2013 because I saw that, uh, you know, cryptocurrency was really taking off and I thought it was a fascinating topic.
So I got involved. I worked on Bitcoin for a while. I got tired of that. And then, uh, we, we, uh, created an altcoin called D credit to address, you know, some of the issues that we saw as shortcomings in Bitcoin. Very interesting. So, uh, I'd love to hear when was decrim started and what were a few of those issues you, you sought to fix.
For sure. Um, decried wheat, we started working on it in February, 2014 and we did it in private. So it took about two years to go from an idea to a, to a launch. And then we launched it in February, 2016. We did an airdrop, we didn't do a, we didn't do the usual sort of insider pre-sales, uh, you know, that many of them, many other projects have done.
Half of it was airdrop. Half of it went to, uh, you know, developers as part of a small three mine. And then, um, the features that we, that we are, the issues we saw with Bitcoin were really three things is one is that minors had too much power in, you know, in the context of Bitcoin in the sense that they can block consensus changes, and essentially, and effectively.
The network from upgrading, that's obviously a big problem. Another, you know, another one was the tragedy of the commons that goes on with development work, which is anyone familiar with Bitcoin knows that it's hard to get and raise money to do development work. You have to have a product. You have to have some kind of a profit making activity to justify people putting millions of dollars behind your know, behind your team or to build something.
So it's hard to build things in that even includes, you know, the, the core software that is, you know, Bitcoin has the luxury of being the first and the, you know, the biggest cryptocurrency. You know how long that's going to hold up or, you know, who's going to fund all that dev work for how long is, is an open question, you know, Blockstream stepped in and same thing with, uh, what is it like chaincode labs.
And then I think the MIT media lab, uh, as well, so there's been a number of entities have been funding this development work for a while, but we decided to fund it ourselves internally. And then I, you know, I think the last thing that we, that we wanted to do to address was really just the, sort of the central planning committee nature of changes, which is that what we saw when we worked on Bitcoin was that a very small number of people had a huge amount of say in terms of, you know, what did and did not happen on the network.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does bring up a question of fairness. Is it really fair that just a handful of people run Bitcoin? When, in my opinion, one of the most interesting things about Bitcoin is that it kind of does away with the need for a central planning committee, with the Nakamoto consensus system.
Hmm. Yeah. No, very interesting. So, uh, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on kind of the modern venture capital landscape that's investing in these projects kind of centralizing them more, uh, and how differs from this. I know you said you funded it yourself. Um, but how do you continue raising funds on an open source?
Yeah. I mean, I th the, the process for raising money is, is, is a challenging one. When it comes to, uh, you know, developing technology. There's not a lot of people want to put a whole bunch of money on the table and risk it. You know what, just like with venture capital projects easily 90, 90 plus percent of these projects go to zero or very close.
So there's, so there's a lot of attrition in this game. So in order to meaningfully fund it, you need a lot of money to spread it across a lot of things. And then you can, you know, nine, nine out of 10 or nine, nine and a half out of 10 will, will crater. And the other ones are where you, where you make your make your money.
So th th that model in my view is, you know, it's, it's good when buckshot works. And then I, I feel like in the context of an open-source project is it's really challenging, right? Because anyone who's at all familiar with open source development knows that people do this kind of as. Matter of ideology, they care about something.
They want to go out there. They want to build something that maybe someone else hasn't hasn't built before, or hasn't built the same way. And then. And this idea that, well, how are we gonna make our money back? What are the investors going to say? Those two things are almost kind of, you know, inherently at odds.
So I feel like that's a real challenge for most projects that is that, you know, the project does well. And the projects price goes up because of investors and large, you know, big whale investors, but that's almost directly at odds with the ethos behind most open source software projects. And then in terms of how we deal with that, what we ended up doing is 10% of every block goes into a treasury fund.
And then that treasury fund is used to fund ongoing development and building out the network. Um, and we decided to do that because while we were working on Bitcoin, I was funding it and I just did it because I thought it was interesting. And you know how interesting it is really starts to be a question.
You ask yourself after a few years of doing that, it's like, okay, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doing something I think is interesting versus going, ah, you know, eventually I gotta, you know, figure out a funding model for this. So that's how we've addressed it. And, you know, I think we have something over 600,000 decrease, uh, you know, in our treasury and that's like over $60 million.
So we have a nearly limitless runway as a result. So we don't necessarily need a VC investment in order to keep the, you know, the, at least the core of the project journey. We'd always like people to show up and buy lots of DECA. That's, you know, that's the dream of every crypto cryptocurrency, right? Is that you have investors and you have demand, but, you know, but, but the reality is, is that we can keep, we can keep ticking, even if that doesn't happen.
That's awesome. So talk to me about your consensus model, how you kind of, uh, took away some of the powers from the minors that you thought was too much and how you implemented proof of stake as well. Okay. Um, the, the way. The consensus system works in D credit is, is that there's, there's really the three-way split.
I'll talk about three-way split. And then I'll talk about how the two components work is our subsidy of every block is split three ways. 60% of it goes to minors. 30% of it goes to stake stakeholders. And then 10% of it goes to the treasury, the treasury just accumulates and then gets spent as necessary as contractors perform work for the project.
Um, but the proof of work and proof of state components, most people are familiar with proof of work that is, you know, you're solving hard computational problems with computers. And then, you know, if you mine a block, you get the reward. So that's how proof of work works. But what we did is that we interleaved a proof of state component.
And what do I, what do I mean by this? Um, proof of stake effectively has the ability to Trump proof of work as, and I know that's a horribly overloaded verb at this point. So, uh, you know, I apologize if that triggers anyone. So, uh, so what it comes down to is that normally when blocks are made it's by the miners.
So the miners have an effective monopoly on a writing to the shared ledger in a pure proof of work of cryptocurrency. In our case, what we do is we actually have effect like a second authentication factor, where there, there are voters and they vote on that block. And that allows us to do things like change our consensus rules on the fly, and while we're changing it so that we can keep the chain going, people vote on the consensus rules, and those votes are tallied from the stakeholders, not from the minors.
And then on that basis, we can actually activate new consensus rules, even if the miners don't approve them or try to block them. So what it does is it is it creates sort of a separation between miners and stakeholders. A miner is welcoming to be a stakeholder. In fact, you know, my, my, my read is that there are a number of miners who are already stakeholders and they, you know, they may be very sub you know, substantial stakeholders, but this process has been.
But this process has worked out pretty well in the sense that it diminishes the power of the proof of work of the miners. The miners historically, uh, are, are almost entirely located in China, whether they're Chinese or not as an open question, because while the machines may in the facilities may be located in China, it's hard to know who really owns those facilities or who owns those machines.
It could be somebody from the United States. It could be someone from Europe. It could be, it could be anybody. So, um, who owns those machines? That's an open question, but when it comes down to what they can do as a function of mining, that, uh, you know, that is strictly limited by the stakeholders. So if you sell all your coins as a proof of work miner, you can't, you can't participate in the governance the same way you could.
If you staked those coins and participated in the state, Yeah, that's a very powerful tool that you've implemented there, but I'm curious to know, has it impacted at all, uh, in your estimation, the ability to attract minors to your network, uh, or has that dual consensus been a selling point to attract people to the.
I think that, um, minors show up because they like to make money. And, um, I think that in terms of attracting miners, th th the entire mining game is pretty, uh, is pretty closely, you know, it's pretty tightly centralized. And when it comes to, uh, when it comes to attracting minors, I don't know if any cryptocurrency project really tries to attract miners.
That is that, you know, there's an incentive. People show up in mine and if they don't want to mind, they don't mind. So, you know, in terms of a diversity of monies, I think we actually have a pretty small group of miners with the credit, as far as I'm aware. And that's, that's a good thing and a bad thing.
So, you know, there's, there's definitely pros and cons to that. And it seems like we've had plenty of mining, but then, uh, recently, particularly, uh, as soon as, uh, you know, the, the communist party in China decided to push out, you know, basically make mining, uh, forbidden or, you know, basically push it out. Uh, we've had all, we've had some pretty interesting things going on with our hash rate.
It's been going up and down quite a bit. So things are, you know, it's mining for deep red is more centralized than I would like. Um, but you know, in terms of attracting more minors, I don't know. I don't think it's necessarily a detractor. I don't think people don't mind decrease because of our consensus.
Interesting. So, uh, we have someone out there in the chat. Isaac has, has commented on the, the China mining ban, uh, and he's actually a long-term minor of cred. Uh, he has a concern about the hostility of votes towards marketing. Do you have any thoughts or comments? I think that, um, it's very easy. I feel like lately there's been a huge amount of, uh, there's been a huge amount of concern trolling, unfortunately, uh, within the community about marketing as in, oh, there's a stilted towards marketing and marketing proposals are getting voted down and yeah, they are.
And I mean, it comes from the fact that when we get reasonable proposals, we will usually approve reasonable proposals as a group of stakeholders. And it's no one person who decides all this stuff. There is, you know, there's the stakeholders and the stakeholders determine what is, and is not, you know, a past a PR uh, proposal, but when it comes to, you know, whether, uh, whether a proposal is reasonable, there's a lot more to it than just does the proposal look reasonable on its face.
What is the history of the person who's made the proposal? What kind of work product have they generated over? How long, who, uh, you know, what else do those, does this person do on, you know, on, on the regular or how much money are they asking for? What exactly are they asking for? I mean, there've been some, some, some really tough ones recently where it's the, you know, there was, um, there was a, there was a guy, a freezers, um, uh, Dominic Frisby who had made, uh, who had made a proposal.
It was actually a very large proposal, uh, to, for the project to bankroll a couple. I think it was either one or two of his films. I think it was one, and it was a very large purples. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars to bankroll a film. And in return, what we would get is we would get a logo in the, in the bottom corner of the screen.
Now, despite my finding, you know, Dominic to be a pretty personable guy and, and likable and smart and all of that, um, What it comes down to, is it comes down to, is this a good financial decision or not? And to make a multi hundred thousand dollars spend to back someone's project that has very little to do with, uh, you know, the deep red project and in exchange for a logo in the corner of the screen.
I mean, that's, I don't think you're getting a huge amount of value. And I think that when it comes to marketing proposals, we've tried a lot of different things. So we've launched a lot of spaghetti. And so if people are just like, Hey, I want to launch the same spaghetti again. That's not exactly a compelling proposal in the context of, uh, you know, we're looking for new ideas and new ways to, you know, to do marketing.
Yeah, most definitely. I mean, if you take a look at Tesla, they've spent basically nothing on marketing and yet they're one of the biggest companies in the world. So the fact that you're focusing the money towards development, I don't think is a bad thing at all. Um, but of course that decision is actually up to the Dow.
So could you tell us about a little bit more about the Dow, how to join it, uh, and how these proposals are. Sure thing. Um, I think something worth pointing out is, is that, you know, our, our decentralized autonomous organization is really, it operates at the project level. It's effectively a layer, one Dow.
Um, there's, you know, there's a lot of doubts that operate, uh, as tokens on a theory, um, and a few other, uh, you know, sort of, uh, what is it like. Uh, smart contract blockchains. And the thing that really separates us from them is that in their case, they are almost all entirely premium. That is that they, they were created within tokens.
And then there was the usual sort of Silicon valley insider thing where it's either you were in, you know, you bought into the, you bought into the, uh, you know, the initial launch or you didn't. And then later on there's no mining. So there's no emission schedule for these, you know, for these things. So it's a finite predetermined number of tokens.
So in the context of , you know, we have, uh, it's effectively, our whole blockchain is, you know, is run by a Dao and is in, is, is, is in a sense a whole Dao that is that, you know, the ledger is part of it. The treasury is part of it. And then the contractors who work on everything are part of it along with the stakeholders and the miners.
So everyone is working together there and, you know, the way, the way it works is it. Everything goes into the treasury. And then what happens is there are proposals in our proposal system and we have a proposal system as an off-chain, uh, you know, it's an off-chain voting system so that people make proposals and then the proposals go up and the, uh, you know, the stakeholders vote on them.
And then when the voting is done, uh, uh, proposals either approved or not. And then every month, those, those, the contractors who have a winning proposal, we'll use that to fund their work. So, uh, so they'll bill and they'll invoice and then they'll get paid out. So mechanically, that's how it works, which is that people bill for their work at the end of the month.
And then they get paid and they get paid based on a proposal that was, you know, approved previous. Gotcha. Cool process. Uh, so could you tell me a little bit more about your integrations with the lightning network? Sure. So we're one of the few, uh, blockchains that supports the lightning network. Um, we haven't really been working, uh, you know, in terms of integration, integration is, is a bit challenging from the perspective of even, even with Bitcoin.
There's a lot of activity on the lightning network, but not as much as even people who are diehard Bitcoin maximalists would like that is, you know, it's a, it's a difficult process to get moving because it is substantially different than using a normal layer, one blockchain where you have addresses and you send transactions.
There's a whole bunch of extra state that you end up having to track. So in terms of how we've integrated with it, with it is we actually ended up adding the same support for the consensus rules that Bitcoin has. That is a, you know, the Segra that came with their segway change set. So we support most of that in or within D grid and then lightning network rides on top of it.
And in terms of how it's integrated is that it's effectively identical to how Bitcoin does it up to the part where they wait their transactions with, um, where they wait in the witness piece, uh, differently. But you know, that's a pretty technical detail. Most people don't care about. Yeah, we won't have to get into all of that today, but I'm curious to know, do you see proof of work by itself as an outdated consensus mechanism?
Proof of work has, you know, it has its strength, sentence weaknesses. So I mean, one thing that's and maybe what I'll do, maybe what would be instructive is for me to compare proof of work and proof of stake, proof of work is, uh, has been referred to by a checkmate as. Uh, unforeseeable costliness. Um, another way of looking at it as a is that it's an irreversible mechanism performing the bulk computations that you need to do.
Proof of work is an irreversible mechanism. It releases heat, you know, you perform a computation and then there's an, a. So it's really good in the sense that you can't. So if you're talking about reorganizing a chain or having a, you know, having a big chain reorganization, that's good from the perspective of it being expensive to create a competing chain.
So if you're going to create a competing chain, it's expensive, but then there's some really bad things about it. And here's one of them. One of them is that when you mind, you could just mine a whole bunch of coins, and that gives you a certain amount of power in any proof of work, uh, you know, cryptocurrency, you can dump those coins right away, and it doesn't affect the, your sort of sovereignty in that system at all.
So what I would, what I would describe that as is that is a weekly aligned incentive so that, you know, the incentive of miners is weekly aligned with that of the network itself. Um, you know, and, and, and the, the thing that I like about it, that's, that's really positive to me is that there it's kind of a mirror nominally meritocratic process, but then if you look at proof of stake, proof of stake is pretty different, which is that proof of stake.
It is effectively reversible. That is, you know, there's no cost to create forks in the chain. If you have a pure proof of work chain, there's no cost in the absence of a slashing mechanism or similar or penalty system. There's, there's no cost to making a competing chains. So that's obviously bad. That's sort of the, nothing at stake problem with, with, with, uh, pure proof of stake.
And then from an incentive perspective, it's actually a lot better in the sense that if you are staking and you're a major stakeholder, you're highly incentivized not to dump the coins because you hold those coins and that's how you stay. So, you know, if you're staking, you're not going to be dumping. So that's really good from an incentive perspective.
Now, the part I don't, I don't like about proof of stake is that it has, you know, there's a component of it that is, uh, could be described as, uh, I think oligarchic is, is. Overstating it, but I think that it feudal would be more, a more appropriate term in the sense that if you have the coins, you continue to have some coins.
So that, that process of sort of like, you know, my daddy's rich. So I'm rich is, is to some extent present. And I, you know, I bet based on your smirk, I expect you you've encountered this game many times in your life and, you know, that's, uh, you know, that's really sort of the long and the short of it. I think that proof of work can be good, but proof of work can also be bad.
I mean, imagine, imagine, imagine two scenarios, one where I'm where a manufacturer distributes, uh, minors fairly to anyone who shows up and, you know, wants to buy them versus. Somewhere versus a manufacturer who hoards those, those machines and never lets anyone else buy them. In the first case, you have a nominally fair distribution mechanism.
And in the second case, you have a pretty questionable distribution mechanism because no one else can get the minors. So, so the fairness and how good, not good, um, you know, a consensus system, proof of work is it really depends on the conditions. Awesome. Yeah, I definitely, I try to emphasize that point a lot that stickers are better incentivize.
Um, but we often don't see the flip side of that argument that it's much easier to fork in, you know, kind of take your own chain. So that's a very interesting, uh, you know, point that you have there next, could you tell me a little bit about the DCR token and all of its value adds and benefits and use case.
Sure. So, um, D credit is really designed to be a store of value. That is as much as, as much as anyone wants to, uh, you know, is that everyone wants to say X, Y, or Z as a store of value. What we're trying to do is we're trying to replicate the, the ability to store and send coins from, uh, from Bitcoin and then add things that we think, you know, substantially improved the quality of the network, such as, uh, the ability to adapt.
And do it at the stakeholders discretion that is go, you know, Hey, these are the rules as they are right now. And then maybe in the future, the rules change. Maybe they need to change for technical reasons. Maybe they need to change for, you know, environmental reasons. There's a whole bunch of different things that could, uh, you know, they can come up.
So you gotta, you gotta be ready to flex and adapt and change the rules. The other thing is, and I didn't really mention that much about it is, is that, uh, the security, uh, there is a security enhancement that comes from doing proof of stake and proof of work, which is that you get the security, uh, ads from both of them.
Uh, so it, it, it's roughly linear, uh, so that you have one, you have another, so that, that gives you an additive security boost. And then the other thing is really it's about sustainability. Building a network that runs on open source software for the longterm, whether we're talking years or decades or centuries is something that requires foresight and planning and funding and preferably funding that doesn't come from.
People who, you know, who have weekly aligned incentives with, uh, you know, with the network, say people who just want to get rich and get, you know, enter and exit and clock a big us dollar capital gain. Um, when it, you know, in terms of the features is we do have something that I haven't mentioned at all here, which is we do have, we have the highest participation rate amongst opt in privacy projects.
Uh, you know, that we're aware of. And what that means is is that if you care about privacy and you care about all these other things, like having a store of value, having a say in where the, in where the token, you know, and where the, the token or the blockchain goes and that you care about the sustainability of such a project.
Not only that we give you privacy. So, so we deliver a lot of privacy over 50% of our network opts in to use to using, or the circulating supply, um, is using privacy. And we've been doing that for a long time. We support the lightning network. We may or may not have something very interesting involving the lightning network coming soon.
And, um, when it comes to, uh, you know, when it comes to a project that does many, many things well decreased is, is, is definitely among the top of those. Most, most, uh, cryptocurrency projects are a one trick pony. They either do privacy or they do, you know, governance, or they do, you know, uh, or they do lightning network.
It's sort of, it's pretty limited, you know, even, even Bitcoin with as much, you know, market share and network. And, you know, developers is, has, has been mostly a one-trick pony up until this point. So, so. We aim by sort of doing many things well, to be a Jack of all trades and, you know, and, and, and draw interest on that basis and going forward, you know, we'll, we'll continue, uh, seeing more proposals, voting, voting the good ones in and voting the bad ones down.
And, uh, hopefully, uh, we'll, we'll make the right decisions as a group, as stakeholders. Awesome. So, um, I know it's up to the Dow, but if you could kind of tell me what's next in your mind, um, maybe what the development team is working on and what are some of the Dow initiatives what's exciting. You the most right now for the next year or two for.
Well, what's exciting me the most right now is, uh, we, we have, uh, several, several minor consensus changes coming up, uh, thing there's, uh, some issues we've had historically, we're going to basically be able to do consensus bug fixes soon. I'm excited about that. I'm very excited about an enhancement to our mixing.
Our saw our privacies, uh, you know, component of the project, which is that we're having post, uh, post quantum secure mixing in our next release 1.7. And that means that even people with quantum computers, whether they're on or off planet can, uh, can not, uh, figure out exactly where all the coins went or who owns them.
So we figured that's a, that's a nice touch. I don't believe anyone else has done that yet. Um, despite the, you know, despite some things that people done with confidential transactions, Additionally, you know, w we're we're probably gonna have a number of fun consensus changes coming up in the, in the near future here.
Um, and you know, in terms of lightening network, I, uh, I can only say this to be ready for a surprise when it comes to the lightning network. I like the sound of that. Uh, and that, that quantum, uh, you know, consensus upgrade is really interesting to me is this, like, in the, in the case that shot 2 56 gets broken, you want to have, uh, you know, protection against that.
Does P equal NP well, well, what, what I'm, what I'm specifically talking about is, so in our mixing process, we use this thing called a it's a, it's a derivative of it's based on coin shuffle plus plus. So that process is doesn't use post quantum secure, um, uh, public keys, uh, public key infrastructure. So.
What you could do is hypothetically, if you had a big quantum computer, you could watch the mixing process and then grind out which, which coins went where now this is, this is a, you know, this is a theoretical attack, but what, what, what this change that we're making does is it makes it, so even if you have a quantum computer, you cannot do that.
And so the reason we decided to do this is because if you do this on chain, you make the whole chain, you know, PQ secure. Um, the size of transactions goes up by about, uh, like five X plus, which is obviously pretty undesirable. You don't want big transactions on a blockchain. It's expensive. So, um, so what we decided to do is to make the mixing process, which actually occurs partially off.
As we, as we will go post quantum there, because then we don't have to worry about the size considerations. Gotcha. Do you see the, uh, you know, the shuffling process as potentially a regulatory issue, do you see, you know, obviously public blockchains, like Bitcoin, the government can use them to track where funds are moving.
Um, but I'm concerned they might take a stance against them. Does this concern you as well? You know, from a regulatory perspective, I think something that's that I view as a sad direction that govern that nation, state governance has been going. I think a bit of a topic change, but is that, is that nation, state governance has been going towards the, because we can monitor everything.
We should monitor everything. I disagree with that at a fundamental level, this idea that, you know, you and I are as normal people need to be constantly tracked and surveilled in every aspect of our, of our human existence is, is ridiculous to me. You don't need to know every, every asset that every person has on the planet in order to be, to effectively govern them or to, you know, or to, or to keep your government were in good working order.
I think this, this notion that you need to be able to serve, you know, 100% surveillance, 100% of the time on everybody is, is a joke. And then that it's a bad way to run a society. So that for, you know, with that in mind, I really disagree with, with where things are going. Maybe it could be a regulatory problem, but I think as a matter of principle, I, I highly disagree with it.
And correspondingly, I think that all communications online should be encrypted and they should be done that way because no one, you know, if I'm talking to Logan on the internet, who else has businesses that other than me and Logan's, so it's a, you know, that. I believe strongly when it comes to, you know, thoughts, uh, speech and all of that is that custody is king.
And so other people shouldn't have custody of the things you're saying or doing it's, it's a, it's an awful rabbit hole. And then what what's bound to happen is the central planning committee that runs everything is just going to, you know, basically, uh, dictate what you can and can't do. I think there's you got to draw the line somewhere.
Yeah, no, I think that's what blockchain is all about. That's why I'm in this space. And I, and I truly hope to see a societal shift towards, you know, our viewpoints with the growth and expansion of blockchain. I think governments will end up realizing that they're kind of shooting themselves in the foot and forcing capital out of their borders.
Uh, and you know, if they don't, it will be too late for them. So crazy world we live in today. Yeah. It's um, yeah, this whole surveillance surveillance as governance. It's like guys, I think 99.9% of people are good people and that they're not, you know, they're not out there to, you know, saw people's legs off or, you know, commit awful crimes.
They're just trying to live their lives. And so this idea that you have to watch 100% of the people to catch the 0.1% who are like legitimately bad is ridiculous. You know, if people are, if people are bad, actors, governments need to get out there and catch those bad actors like they used to before everything was constantly surveilled.
Well, Jake, unfortunately we are out of time today. So I just want to give you the floor for one last time. If you want to make any shout outs or let the audience know about anything you've got going on, where they can connect with you now. The revolution will not be centralized. Decreed is where it is, where to look to see that revolution.
Uh, you're welcome to meet us out and meet up with us online chat.de kra.org or the website dickhead.org to check it out and learn more. Awesome. You guys heard it here first? That is it for moon or bus today? Uh, stick around for pre-market prep at the close, and I will see you guys back on Monday, uh, but until then have a great weekend.
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