#12 Erik Voorhees + Shapeshift: Keynote Fireside Chat at Denver Startup Week

This fireside chat was the conclusion of an hour-and-a-half blockchain presentation at Denver Startup Week with Kirk Dameron, Raine Revere, Nathan Schneider, and Erik Voorhees. There was an awesome turnout, if a bit overloaded. It was the only session focused exclusively on blockchain, so we had 150 people in the crowd but another 150 people were turned away (see the pictures at the bottom of this article). I’ll be posting videos of these fireside chats over the next week. Hope you enjoy them!

In this keynote chat with Erik Voorhees, we “get philosophical” and dive into the societal and political implications of blockchain. This interview was inspired by Ryan Shea’s interview of Naval Ravikant (here). It’s also the first in a series of philosophical podcast interviews with blockchain philosophers like Albert Wenger and Trent McConaghy (plus leaders in the effective altruist/rationalist community!). I usually post a list of “top quotes”, but there were too many good ones here. Check out the loosely edited transcript below!

“Organizing people” and the “creating money” have been classically done by governments. How do you see blockchain and government working together going forwards?

• To be historically correct, money hasn’t been produced by government. Market-based money has been the norm throughout history, not the exception.
• I got into Bitcoin because I wanted to see honest money.
• Money was a good like any other good. It should be produced and controlled by the marketplace itself.

From a power perspective, how do you see the interaction with traditional institutions of power like banks?

• I think there’s going to be a battle. The question is — Who has sovereignty over their own money?
• We’ll see how big this can get before central banks realize that it’s an existential threat to their scam. I use that word very intentionally. They create money out of thin air. Everyone is impoverished by it. Not 1 person in 1000 understands that’s going on. Governments, banks, and central banks aren’t going let this transition happen easily or peacefully.
• I think Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has a chance to displace the dishonest money that people have been using for the last 100 years.

Thinking about Sapiens and storytelling. How do you see the Bitcoin and blockchain story?

• It is not this cold blockchain technology that we tinker with. It is a very human story. It has to be.
• It is challenging something that is fundamental to how we operate. We use money all the time. Bitcoin cannot grow and change without it necessarily becoming a human story.

How do you think about the feedback loop between technology and society? (Conway’s Law)

• To understand this, it’s powerful for us to look to the creation of the internet itself. Now instead of moving information anywhere freely without censorship at near zero cost, now you can move value anywhere freely without censorship at near zero cost.
• The real interesting parts are the new economic ways that people will interact with each other. Those haven’t been seen yet. Just like in 1993 how we wouldn’t have been able to predict Facebook. But I’ll be very excited to watch this unfold.

The internet reduced the friction on copying information and distributing it. Now we’re reducing the friction on sending and receiving value. Blockchain is, at a root level, decreasing the transaction cost of transactions. How do you think about speed and exponential rates? Are we in an age of “jerk”, the 3rd derivative?

• By reducing the friction of economic exchange you actually accelerate all the economic exchange that’s happening. The inverse of that is that any government or bank policy that slows down economic exchange is not just an annoyance. It’s slowing down the market and the development of the society. If it’s slow because of tools that don’t exist that’s one thing. If it’s slow because of arbitrary rules that certain people have imposed on others by force, that’s not just an annoyance that’s intensely unethical. That’s essentially what crypto is trying to break.

Do you think we’re going too fast? From an Nassim Nicholas Taleb and antifragility perspective, shouldn’t we slow down? What are your thoughts on some sort of SlowCoin?

• Tough to say. I won’t personally build it but I’d love for others to experiment. Crypto has allowed competition in a whole new realm of emergent behavior that couldn’t exist before. If you have an idea to slow things down, you have the ability to propose it to everyone else. Whereas before that could never be tried.

Let’s chat bubbles and ICOs! :)

• Bubbles tend to scare people. They think they’re wrong, should be avoided and a failure of the Bitcoin design. I think they are natural parts of markets and especially markets that have very binary outcomes. Bitcoin could take over the world and become the money that everyone uses 20 years from now…or the whole thing could fall apart and go to zero. If both of those are reasonable outcomes, what’s the value of a Bitcoin today? It’s really hard to know that. (Social Capital’s Alex Danco wrote a four-part series on bubbles recently. It’s here. 1, 2, 3, 4)

How do you think about centralization vs. decentralization?

• What crypto has done is allow those use cases and organizational models that would benefit from decentralization to now exist. And that is quite a few things. Money is the first and most important tool to be decentralized.

How should we measure our new world? Balaji S. Srinivasan wrote a post recently on Quantifying Decentralization. What would your KPIs be?

• 1: The market cap of all cryptocurrencies combined.
• 2: The transactional volume of all cryptocurrencies combined.
• 3: The exchange volume of all cryptocurrencies combined.
• Those three things capture the growth of this industry the best.

Final Thoughts?

• In 2011 the 1st Bitcoin conference that every happened was in New York City. I was amazed that there were real people that came out of the internet to talk about this thing. There were like 40 people. That was everyone in the world who bothered to come out to learn about Bitcoin. That was only 6 years ago. Every financial institution in the world is now investing in this technology. There are tens of millions of people that are using this all over the world. It is worth over $100B collectively. It’s driving a lot of very important people to be both very excited and very crazy. I would like to just take a moment for myself to just recognize that growth because it’s very exciting to actually see that. To see those dreams from 6 years ago coming to fruition. I thank you all for being interested in this stuff and for all the work and projects that you’ve all done to make it happen.

(Pictures from Denver Startup Week below.)

Lunch!

Thanks to Keith Klundt, John Desmond, Colin Wielga, Harry Lindmark, Joe Urgo, John Lindmark, Daniel Segal, Jacob Zax, Katie Powell, Jonathan Isaac, Ryan X Charles, Chris Edmonds, Ramsay Devereux, Ned Mills, Kenji Williams, Scott Levi, Peter Rodgers, Kenzie Jacobs, Jon Frechin, Nathan Schneider, and Kash Dhanda for supporting me on Patreon!

About Me: My name is Rhys Lindmark and I’m a social entrepreneur. I’m creating a humanist blockchain future at the intersection of Effective Altruism and Blockchain. I lead the Colorado chapter for Effective Altruism. I’m an alumnus of Techstars Boulder 2015 (Edify). I have a podcast and I coach/consult at a process-level around Lean/agile/OrgDev, especially blockchain companies. Please reach out if you’d like to connect or have feedback! I’m curious about what you’re working on. You can support me on Patreon, follow me on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: I own less than $100 of any given cryptocurrency, so my monetary incentive is not directly aligned with Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.