If not you, who is?

Well, you know, we had a tripartite structure.

No one denies that.

EMURGO, the CF, and then put output.

I wrote the code and did the science.

That was my job.

That's what I was paid for.

It

What would success look like? Is it we reverse aging or we sustain our age? We slow down dying.

Well, you know, the grandfather of this was Aubrey de Grey, and he talked about this concept of longevity escape velocity.

And there the idea is that for every year you age, you extend human lifespan by a year.

So you effectively live forever.

Really, what I look at is the idea of a health span.

So lifespan is useless to me.

Like, would you want to live 20 years with dementia and diapers and an old folks home? And, you know, you have no quality of life.

What is your take?

It's always just black or just white.

Yeah.

Well, like the AFD just took over Germany.

First far-right party come in in 81 years in Germany.

And I can understand it.

It doesn't necessarily mean I agree with it, but I can perfectly understand it.

Imagine your lived experience.

So what is your wildest prediction for the next 20 years?

And You want to help Bitcoin grow and unlock functionality, but it's hard to get anyone to do anything like that in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

So the problem with Bitcoin, and I always start in Bitcoin.

I've been in the industry for 15 years, so I should have retired a long time ago.

And I'm just that grumpy old man who's here and, you know, you keep building.

But I started with a Bitcoin education project.

And back in the day, there was only Bitcoin and Bitcoin was under a dollar.

No one cared about price because there was no price.

Can you talk a little bit about why you think it's so important to have all this privacy functionality on chain? and how you see competition in the market and how you're gonna tackle that.

What do you think of Ethereum's plan and its trajectory?

Well, I mean, they've done everything wrong, and they keep doing things wrong, and, you know, it...

They don't give a shit about my, my statements, so you take them with a grain of salt.

But here's the thing.

Uh, we have an on-chain treasury, and even at our massively reduced valuation at $6 billion, we're able to pay more than $100 million a year for the ecosystem's growth and development and attract partners like an Alpha Growth or Draper.

The Ethereum ecosystem, if it was to just take 5% of the protocol revenue, give it to the Ethereum Foundation, they'd have $390 million a year to work with, but they have nothing.

And so they're laying their people off, and they're begging for money, and there's a tragedy of the commons problem.

And what I'm hearing from the audience a lot is, you know, when are prices gonna catch up with all of these developments? What are your thoughts there?

What do you think of Ethereum's plan and its trajectory?

Well, I mean, they've done everything wrong, and they keep doing things wrong, and, you know, it...

They don't give a shit about my, my statements, so you take them with a grain of salt.

But here's the thing.

Uh, we have an on-chain treasury, and even at our massively reduced valuation at $6 billion, we're able to pay more than $100 million a year for the ecosystem's growth and development and attract partners like an Alpha Growth or Draper.

The Ethereum ecosystem, if it was to just take 5% of the protocol revenue, give it to the Ethereum Foundation, they'd have $390 million a year to work with, but they have nothing, and so they're laying their people off, and they're begging for money, and there's a tragedy of the commons problem.

So, I think we're fundamentally right about the need to have a blockchain-based treasury, and at the all-time high, the Cardano treasury was worth $4.5 billion.

And what I'm hearing from the audience a lot is, you know, when are prices gonna catch up with all of these developments? What are your thoughts there?

Mm.

Like, what's the harm? And the problem is post-quantum stuff is much less efficient and much bigger in signature size than quantum.

Qua-, uh, than elliptic curve, excuse me.

Elliptic curves are awesome.

You know, uh, you have lots of, lots of optimizations, and they run really quickly, and they're very small signature sizes.

If you look at a Stark, for example, you're talking about a 40 to 200 kilobyte, uh, signature.

And when you look at a comparable elliptic curve, you're talking about, like, half a kilobyte or smaller.

Yeah

So it's nice and encouraging to have an institute chair right now who talks about it, but we know that doesn't last forever.

That's true.

I mean, you can have both.

I mean, it's a game of 21 questions.

Like, do I really need to know your name is Scott? Or do I just need to know some things about the nature of the transaction? For example, is it under U.S.

jurisdiction or not? Are you a credit investor or not? Is it in the state of New York or not? These are yes-no questions.

So you play a game of 21 binary questions as selective disclosure with things like a non-creds.

And, you know, you talk about a $2.5 billion loss, but I assume it's largely on paper, and there's a belief that those things can come back, right? So, you know, what are you looking forward to? What are you optimistic about, even in the context of all the sort of negativity surrounding this conversation?

And how do you think about that dichotomy?

Yeah, well, you know, it doesn't bother me too much.

KPIs and metrics, just to discuss that, it always depends on what you value.

So like Bitcoin has no DeFi market and very little TVL and it's all in layer twos.

So, you know, it's the most successful cryptocurrency and it's the one that everybody acknowledges is going to be around forever without any doubt.

And it is zero on many of these metrics.

And so Cardano is always like a hybrid where it has a lot of Bitcoin's ethos.

So,

How did you get involved in that?

So, uh, as I mentioned before, in 2021, uh, Ben- I met Ben, and we were talking about, like, a kind of a crypto Colossal thing, and, uh, I invested in Colossal quite early in the company's, uh, history, so they, they...

Before they had done any of that major work.

Uh, and so, you know, every six months to a year, you know, Ben and I would talk, and I'd go down to either Texas and things like that, and I'd kind of follow the progress and get to know, like, what are they working on.

And then after we founded a company together, then I started getting much more involved in these things.

But, um, we always knew that the woolly mammoth was kind of a horizonal goal, and the reason being is it's ridiculously hard to genetically engineer elephants.

You know, they have specialized machinery that prevents cancer, and that specialized machinery, uh, it keeps their genome very stable, uh, so it's good for them, but it's bad if you wanna change their genes 'cause it's really hard to edit things.

How did that start?

If we look at the next 1, 2, 5, 10 years, how excited are you?

Well, you know, it's a mixed bag.

Everybody had this belief that the minute Trump got elected, magically crypto was going to be the greatest thing in the world.

And there's certainly things that Trump has done that have been super good for crypto.

He had a war on exchanges.

uh well biden had a war on exchanges and gensler was like the the doctor doom he would just go and destroy one thing after another thing it was anti-clarity he went as far as he could just choke the industry you know debank people sue the exchanges sue the layer ones Ripple got the lion's share of it, but Coinbase was deeply hurt.

And then there was soft power, too, where even if you didn't get sued, what they would do is they'd be like, well, don't list this asset.

it's

When we think about governance in terms of a protocol like Cardano, what does it mean exactly?

So on-chain governance, well, first off, you have to decide, do you want a government at all? Or do you want like a ruling institution? Or do you want completely decentralized governance? So Bitcoin is anarchistic.

It has no government.

The advantage there is you can't change anything.

So and then Bitcoin, if you talk to a Bitcoiner, they say that's a feature, not a bug.

We really like that you can't change anything.

That's great.

the tariffs and the state of world trade and the global economy is to your industry.

And that's a focus for you and something that you were looking at very early and I think is raising a lot of eyebrows, even for critics, because now you're coming home to some degree.

Yeah, well, you know, the thing is that it's like we wanted Bitcoin to be better for many, many, many years.

I'm old enough to remember MasterCoin and ColorCoins, the founders of these projects.

And, you know, we all started in the Ethereum ecosystem as Bitcoin guys trying to make Bitcoin better as a layer two.

And it just couldn't do it because at the time we didn't have Taproot and these other primitives that existed or the Lightning Network.

But now when you look at the evolution of Lightning and Taproot, there's enough programmability and interactability inside that ecosystem where you can graft on a layer to do your smart contracts and still pay the transaction fees in Bitcoin and have fast finality and all these other great features.

So that's what we're doing with Cardano right now is we're working with Farigate on something called BitVMX.

Yeah, exactly