Welcome back everyone. I am Caspian Sea and I am here
as usual with my partner in crime Bennett Tomlin.
How are you doing today? I'm doing well Cass.
How are you? I'm doing good.
We are joined today by Oliver beige, who is an Industrial
Engineer turned Economist, who got his PhD at Berkeley, to
explore the internet and some of its aspects.
How are you Oliver? I'm very good.
Thanks for having me. So we, I wanted to speak with
you and we had no subject necessarily in mind when I
reached out. So, you suggested we discuss
cryptocurrency and, and how it has sort of Lent itself, to, to
tribalism. Can you open that discussion for
me, of course? Yeah, I mean, there's a bit of a
staple topic. I'd like to talk about a lot but
it's basically, I just felt like, my, my background is
Industrial engineering. So like talking about inside the
firm, but I moved to United States and 95, when does new
thing was happening the internet and it's not okay.
I wanted to study this and I wanted to study it from from the
other side, basically, from the market side.
And so I did a PhD but in economics but also at the
business school. So I'm always like in in between
the two sides, but Mikey interest was really sort of like
in the emerging Network competition, that the internet.
Enabled. And the, in the Orthodox View at
the time was really sort of, if you have positive Network
effects in any kind of networks and back, then we were talking
about like, Telecom networks, much more than and then the
internet, we've military typewriters.
All these, all these famous examples VHS versus beta once.
As soon as you have a positive Network effects, you have a
monopoly outcome and I come from Um, from like a graph, the you
network. See background, of course, the
network typically has a structure and sort of the
basically, both the engineering Orthodoxy and the economic
Orthodoxy, just basically assumed the structure of the
network way. And I was like, okay, what's
gonna happen? If I, if I actually look at the
network structure see how the network structure affects
outcomes within a network competition on that Network
Technology adoption? And sort of my point was very
much. This is the Monopoly outcome
which you get like VHS versus beta beta wins or the firmest be
famous. Like QWERTY versus the towards a
keyboard. Cody wins even though it's the
worst the technology standard. It's not really true.
You have in most cases you have multiple outcomes you multiple
surviving Technologies and like once and from that point on the
question becomes Comes if you have a network with a structure
that and the network is in some way too big.
How does it break into multiple Parts?
Like where does it does it fall apart?
And it's like, from an economic perspective is the year, like
the outcome of this network falling apart, is that it like
economically efficient. And once you see things from
that angle, you'll store it like seeing so many cases where we
have positive Network effects and we still have multiple
outcomes and yeah. It's most obvious ones are like
languages. We've seen over loss whatever a
couple thousand years that the number of languages in the world
has gone down but we will still have five thousand different
languages and then we all do do something much.
More reason is very similar is is programming languages, right?
So we all want to like learn the same language because that's
makes much easier. It would be much better if you
like every every single piece of software is written the same
language but of course we have a proliferation of program.
Languages. So like more like new languages
being did developed all the time.
So we're not going down to if we're not going down to like the
one final programming language on the wall.
So there's you have like the two effects going in in both
directions in like sort of concentrating into log one but
also you have going in multiple different directions.
Like basically give the two things you have normally within
a group you have gold conflict. You Different things people and
you basically have the network structure, we have interactions
that are more intense between people between peers and you
have interactions that are less intense or no interaction, all
and you also have like a positive and a negative
interactions. And so like, basically starting
to become known within the crypto Wars very much.
I think it's sort of like contradicted vitalik when he is
basically posting on network effects are Like create
monopolies Out friends but no, it's not the case.
And, of course, that's a message that resonates with the etherium
community because sort of they're defending themselves
against the like claims of Bitcoin maximalist that Bitcoin
will be the one that ultimately winning out.
It's an interesting proposition, one of the examples you used was
language and I think that's a really interesting and good
example because while like, Only know, I only know English and I
can understand a tiny bit of Spanish.
Meanwhile, I guess the most. I don't know if this is still
true or not, the most spoken language in the world at least
when I was a kid was Mandarin actually.
But the problem with mandarin was that one.
It is almost exclusively spoken on the Chinese Mainland, which
is a very singular entity. It's not like English, which is
spoken throughout the entire world.
And then also the second issue with that is that they actually
rely on the English language to type in their language, like
they pinion is how they're typing things and so therefore
they have to learn English to even be able to communicate in
Mandarin these days. And I that that feels like the
Monopoly for English for the English language.
Growing significantly stronger even in this short amount of
time, do you think that's incorrect or do you think that's
true? Do you like, do you expect that?
The English will become the the Like it cut like a language in
the world within I don't know like foreseeable time couple
hundred years is our we have like intense.
I mean we have intense Global Financial interaction will see
we see all the problems with Global Supply chains.
Now we have Global sourcing in any many, many Industries.
But like is it, are we expecting that?
We're going to go down to a single language because it's
like the most economically efficient thing.
Or are we going to go down to maybe a couple hundred
languages? What do you think would be the
outcome? So what I expect is is two
things that like more, like people will learn 20, maybe more
languages, it's becoming normal, it's like sort of like it's very
possible. I said of the English is
becoming the predominant second language, but I see I see no
reason why we should have within the next future English beating
out, Mandarin or English beating out Spanish because you can Even
without, like, with only one language she can do quite a lot
of, like most of your Social and financial interaction with like,
just speaking one language, the other thing is, of course, we're
going, we're going to get technology that helps us.
Translate it much, much quicker area, and I think that kind of
connects back to what you were saying in the opening.
That one of the things that prevents the monopolizing effect
of just the general positive Network effect is orientation
towards different goals. So it seems plausible that
something like English would become the go-to language for
most people who intend to conduct international business,
but that many other places may have a desire to preserve their
natural language for purposes of History, national identity or
other things like that. That's where I'm looking though
also. And I see that a strong sense of
globalization in general, and you can view that in a negative
way if you want to. But I generally see the idea of
like Global Communication as being a good thing.
But also, Something where like you're like you're talking about
everyone understands English like it's their second.
It's their second language, it does it isn't necessarily the
one they're using primarily but then if you are spending most of
your adult life communicating with people who only speak or
who rely on English in general to conduct business, it just
seems more and more to me like you are relying less and less on
every other language. Yeah, and that's that's very
true. I mean you you seen cases like
Like that like Bayesian in. Yeah.
It's also a lingua Franca you have like situations and in and
for instance in Ireland, which more or less like made this to
switch that most almost everyone in Ireland, speaking English
now. So you have this, not always not
always friendly influence that sort of gets part of the
population to vote to to switch. We have like if you actually go
back in history and look at like Countries like France, like
French the French we know today was like the the language of the
île-de-france like the area of Paris but like sort of in
Southern Southern France, they would speak along dock in in
Alsace they would speak German. Like in Brittany would speak
Britain also, you have like 15, whatever different languages and
dialects, of course, like part partly, instead of the unity of
the French government centralized again, French
government was pushing for like sort of everyone.
Seeking the same language. And so you have this process you
know like minimisation of communication standards which
language is and the more the more interaction you have the
more you had you have this pressure but this does not by
itself. Sort of like preordained that
the ultimate outcome will be a single language.
You still have at any point in time you have that enough people
within your your social network. Like people who don't even speak
English people, people who don't want to speak English, people
who speak English poorly, so you're much better off and
speaking in your native language and if your if your Mandarin
Chinese I don't know what the number is like 700 million or
something. That's quite a few people to
talk to, right? So even if you want to be go, a
single word of English. So and of course I could have
added that the mechanism. The more connections we have
within the network and the more homogeneous these connections
are the more likely We'll see Monopoly outcome.
But it once you have gold conflict, you have a network
structure that matches the goal conflict or the variety of the
various goals and you have sort of loosely connected Network and
you get multiple outcomes. This is sort of like, you know,
in a nutshell sort of the things I was interested in before I
started, like thinking thinking about like, crypto at all.
But I also like getting it sort of matched.
The discussion at the point and you're not you're not only
having sort of like the discussion Bitcoin III mod also
have like multiple protocols within Bitcoin and a computer
were competing for attention. So looking specifically at
cryptocurrencies, what factors, do you see that contribute to
it? Not being a monopolizing Network
effect, like what are the gold conflicts are?
Structural details that tend to prevent that from occurring in
Cook do currency, a lot of it is, is actually attitudinal and
things. I said about the e 3.
Mm Community is very different from from the Bitcoin Community
is also going to be different from Lizzie cash, communities
and others. But also they like started to
have from a little bit of a different purpose to realizing
that they're actually doing very, very different things,
right? Bitcoin tries to be a base layer
currency, Global Currency and I'm sorry, call it easier to him
instead of idea an sap system for the Enterprise will also
database connectivity, much more ambitious goals and at the point
we are now this is makes more sense like to keep them
separate. So like without, let's not use
language this time instead like you were talking about telecoms
for instance before I mean we pretty much saw a near-complete
monopolization of telecoms they were forced to To break up.
But now there's at least an oligopoly.
I think we can all agree on like it's AT&T and Verizon in
America. And so I just wonder if that
points to the idea that there's instead of it being even that
it's a goal-oriented thing because I think all the telecoms
had nearly the same goals which was just to have more customers,
right? I mean I don't know what Verizon
is doing different than AT&T. They're building the same
infrastructure out and fighting for the same exact customers.
So, is it? Sometimes just a matter of like
breaking things breaking up, only to come back together
again. Like, I guess I see it in
Industry often being a little bit different than something is
as fluid as language. We're like, you can actually
have physical barriers, right? Like the reason people in
England started speaking a different language as they were
on an island then. So I wonder if those different
goals and and these this Ability to create that separation is
getting lost as things speed up with tech.
So the Telecom is very pretty good example, because sort of
like, when the the Bell System was created and the original
battle, it was broken up. It was broken up into geography
and your upbringing geography into play now.
And then I think we had 74 memory.
That 77 local baby bells a network that was pretty stable
for quite some time larger because The point at the time,
most interaction by right off, phone was local, or at least
Regional. So it made a lot of sense.
There was no particular reason to like, do something about
that. Now you see?
See, I don't think when I was moved to, you're supporting a
mid 90s, early 2000. They started like to purge
Claudia but driven because that business became not only like
more like country white but it also became Global instead of
like Deeds. Sort of like the emergence of
global sourcing and and like stretched out Supply chains.
Really like played into that or not scoring and D.
It was also deregulated at that point as well.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
But uh, so I think they would do were from memory has been a
while ago, so we're able to merge before they actually merge
before they realize that it might make business sense to do
that. So long as you have said, like
the more the more interaction you have, the more Global
interaction, more like Flat interaction.
You have the more likely you see you see you like number of
networks going down and of course, there are out, there are
of course cases where we have a monopoly outcome here.
Basically, you cannot be kind of drill down.
We could have like at one point we could have one Global
cryptocurrency way possible. Of course if you'd rather cut
also have zero Go Global currencies is itself still and
an open question, but sort of Mike my hunch from - standing of
how sort of the market structure looks like, is its technology
structures. Look like, it's much more likely
that we have multiple. It's because it did are trying
to solve. They're trying to solve
different problems, and they will more and more go in the
direction of focusing on the problems are able to solve.
So related to that to you kind of expect there to be, basically
a Winner Takes nearly all in like, a specific goal Direction.
So, for example, perhaps Bitcoin becomes Is universal Global
Currency. Where's the theory of events?
She takes over the vast majority of all the smart contract
cryptocurrencies because it is able to combine the positive
Network effect with that specific goal or is there some
other dynamic in the way these cryptocurrency communities are
set up? That would make that unlikely.
Yeah, this just brings us back to like the original All
conversation cast. And I had about like, the role
of geography. Rights of cryptocurrency is by
Design is a global structure. Name is one of the that the key
original of advantages that have that is sort of unlike Payment
Systems back then, which would have completely like localized.
You had a Global Group globe, and a design of a global system.
So you basically had something that would be able to supersede.
You can political boundaries and sort of, if you take that away,
if you take geography away, what's left.
It's basically as that tribalism.
People believing in certain narratives, people, believing in
certain kind of factual's. And this is, would be the social
Dimension. And the economic Dimension is
that the target different use cases.
And this is, we see both, basically right now, in terms of
like, people have very, very strong beliefs about About where
the whole cryptocurrency and and blockchain world is going to go.
And of course, this is, this is typical in that very new
technologies but for now do you see the main tribalistic
Tendencies, as just being kind of, as opposed to dramatically
different goals or necessarily use cases.
And while that may be the case for, let's say, Bitcoin and
etherium, there are thousands and thousands of these
cryptocurrencies, right? Do you think it is just mostly
attitude and Is it, is it a more ethereal concept of the
differences between these communities in part?
I mean, it sort of you have on one hand, the tokens that are
competing to become more dominant cryptocurrencies.
And then you have like many, many tokens that are you, that
can be like, much more usefully compared to to equity in a
company that you use them in order to deal with the product
as company puts out. So, and I I have a problems, I
don't have a problem that is like I think hundred three
hundred different tokens, very much, like most of those tokens
or tie it to a particular value proposition.
I like to call us this, the, the problem of buying a Coke from
the Coke machine with co-chairs, which is sort of a strange
thing. But of course, like could be
technically possible and sort of deer, didn't D effect would be
that. Like, if the coke the shares and
Coca-Cola goes down, Cook gets cheaper, which is He pretty
weird idea about us and really bad for Coca-Cola to like it
seems like it would be a bad spiral down.
If like Coke, it's automatically cheaper, more people will buy
it. So hopefully then the price will
go. Up.this is the idea of course,
the question is that's actually if that's actually like stable
or that's a dynamic that will like Veer off in one of two
directions, go like going nowhere but of course I remember
like.com boom everybody. ADI, every heavy small
start-up.com startup was basically buying everything with
with Equity look like getting getting a haircut and and
offering Equity because it didn't have any cash.
Yeah, one of the reasons I've been skeptical over the last
several years of a winner-take-all, cryptocurrency
is in the nature of cryptocurrency governance.
We're often on certain foundational issues.
The final option for the group, who disagrees with Methods of
the other is to basically Fork the code base and start your own
cryptocurrency. And so you repeatedly see this
splintering into these separate pieces.
Do you have any thoughts on the Dynamics of like that type of
governance, that type of forking and its effect on the network
effects for these cryptocurrencies?
This is a I mean exactly and this is what makes sort of
basically consensus consensus mechanism.
Such an intriguing thing is you Have like these splintering of
networks, like via gold conflict built into the design, right?
So now we've seen racing as a couple times and think we've
seen a case where you have like a cryptocurrency being forked in
into fairly equal parts. Like most of them, like there
was like one that like predominated.
But this is good peripheral, you happen and so like the goal is
very much. Like, what you don't see is like
forking all the time, right? So, I don't like this particular
technical feature about this particular currency, so I'm
going to. I'm going to start a fork and
like I'll do it every day, right?
This is not happening. So you need some sort of, like,
coalition's to emerge. You need like very strong, very
strong gold conflict to emerge to, like, see, see a
cryptocurrency, split in two. And then what we've seen so far.
That the normal case is that there is one that's dominated in
the other one instead of becoming becoming a fringe.
Currency and this is very intriguing.
Design is also a processor. Make sure that we'll have
probably not going to go to the D single dominating
cryptocurrency anytime soon here.
Oliver. I know you have some thoughts on
the relationship between these type of mechanisms in the power
of the state. Exactly what I'm like sort of
been like looking at cryptocurrencies and like I
don't know 2011 but like Mitch mid-2010 sick 1516 I remember
like Wizard of Oz of working Employee at asked me to write a
little bit about like the economic perspective of
cryptocurrency. And I'm like, photo of, I think
back then was ideal any Economist with some sort of
academic economics, background. It was like actually mildly
intrigued by the whole thing, rather not repulse like many.
Many other prominent economists have very strong negative
opinions about cryptocurrency. But like sort of like one of the
questions I asked, is that occurred?
Like if he actually imagining that a cryptocurrency?
What Supersede the the nation state which is a common like
popular claim. So like it's just like play
around with this idea that will happen.
And this is like when cast cast and I had like a little bit.
What discussion couple couple weeks about this is sort of what
Scott would like. How could this work actually
play out? Yeah, yeah.
Well I would love to hear, I would love to hear your thoughts
on that. Like, how would, how would that
play out? I mean, again, the interesting
thing sort of there is a precedent that says a real
woman, robot Mandel's. Like work on optimal currency
areas which like if you're familiar with he's basically
like considered one of one of the fathers of the Euro
basically saying because a currency does not have to be
attached to a single country. It could also like whatever have
bigger bigger role multiple countries and the only thing is,
you know, like the biggest thing you have like yeah there's a
couple of couple of conditions, he heedless that and one of the
big things is that basically have to have the people within
that community be willing to share the the cost of mutual
protections, right? And sort of like basically
Public public goods we have like defense internal order
protection is getting unemployment because we're
protections and everybody is against infectious diseases.
What we've seen in fact you preaching again flawed and so on
this is all costly and we have to have a mechanism like
bureaucratic Some to pay for that and it's like, usually, but
taxations, and then a process that decides like which, which
things were willing to pay for those, right?
If you think this little bit through it, this is like where
do you see these situations? And it's typically like people
have shared geography. So like neighbors.
Very obviously people who have a shared language will have this
discussion and any people usually people who have a shared
religion. And this is like what word, a
nation-state comes from basically.
A nation-state is a geographic protection racket, right
bureaucratized protection. Rackets like feudal states were
not bureaucratized. So basically the whatever the
king or because guy would just take any money, he wanted to to
to whatever like pay for his military and play for his
Endeavors. But like now we have and I don't
see anything. Was Ian cryptocurrency That Base
here? Okay, it's that.
So but this is we still have to basically solve the problem of
coming up with a way to provide those public goods.
I suppose that the libertarian counter to that would be that
governance is unnecessary Sovereign.
Citizen kind of like the idea of Taxation, the idea of everyone
agreeing to all of this stuff is opposed to and I'm not Say, I'm
not saying this because I don't think this is necessarily true,
but is a is opposed to the idea of many of these currents.
These cryptocurrencies. Do you do think that there's
facts to that or I am in general, a big fan of coming up
with private ways to provide public goods.
I think if you can do this usually in it Improvement, most
public provision of public goods is very like inefficient, but a
lot of sort of, like, deed Does angle of okay.
We don't actually need like a governance structure.
That provides all this public goods.
All this protection comes from the assumption that any kind of
economic interaction is voluntary.
And if you look at, if you look at economic textbooks, you don't
really find. A lot of talk about violence.
That's not even like just libertarian.
This is just basically standard standard academic, text books,
there is pretty. Much the assumption that, like,
Dee Dee economic interactions. We have our voluntary where I
come from is Berkeley's, my field, advisors Oliver
Williamson was like, one of the big guys and in in institutional
economics, he basically asking all those questions is a like,
what is the a governance structure that makes sure that
we can have Financial interactions?
That are protected. And for right now, I mean,
probably not for much longer but for right now I would I would
That cash does a pretty damn fun.
Like physical cash bills do a pretty great job of ensuring
that privacy right? This is Spill we still have to
compete with us bro. You still by far the most the
most private way to pay for that.
Yep. It's also like the most de most
peer-to-peer way to pray for that because ways the only
relies on me looking at the the bill or the coin and like
deciding if that's if that's the real water kind of feed, right?
So you don't have we don't have a A like centralized mechanism
that sort of the overseas that a transaction.
If someone can actually replicate cash in an additional
on my inner would be a big step forward, even even be on
blockchain, I very as we can, as we can see, I'm blocked.
Your Block Chain is as a centralized structure can it
shows like the typical that the typical problems of a
centralized structure is congestion every time?
There's a lot of action in any kind of currency.
We have like congestion problems.
In congestion problems are problems.
You know, with a centralized Network structure, you, you
can't have congestion issues on a decentralized structure.
Is that? Well, do you centralize maze
means basically, you have multiple multiple alternative
routes towards you compute compared to the main road.
But it could also be that those, I mean, like, if I just think
about a street, right? Like, if there could be a
hundred different ways for Me to get to from my home, to my
studio. But like there's the freeway
which is always going to be the fastest or the shortest route.
But then exactly taking those other decentralized routes,
could still take me an hour and a half longer than it.
Normally would write dozens of one of one of the basic, the
basic laws and and transportation science.
Yeah, I mean, is if there is a congestion level to the main
road versus the alternative route which basically had one
You're even even if the main route is shorter, you're not
faster because it's more congested.
We getting Vicki going to into the weeds of network and a graph
Theory know like basically all spotting cut points.
What happens if the the main route gets cut off happened and
like some minor cryptocurrencies a couple times.
Like the situation we had until very recently is that most of
mining was was concentrated in In like Bitcoin, mining was
concentrated in China. What happens if B gets captured
by but a Chinese State, I mean, it went a different route but it
sort of like these. These are like fundamental graph
theoretic problems, right? So now this is where all the
decentralization comes from. We want to have alternative
routes and we also ideally, you want to have Alternatives
Alternatives when one major cryptocurrency gets congested.
So but so do you like There is no hole, encrypted, crypto
currency were like loves decentralization, but there is
no, like ideal decentralized structure.
We also always have to find a balance between centralized and
decentralized organization, which really further reinforces
the point. You open it.
Basically that the social structures and stuff inherent in
these things are going to make it difficult for the The network
effects to lead to a single winner, take all because exactly
a single ideal structure. It's a matter of degrees and
with maybe there is one, maybe it's going to take us on a
hundred years to find it, but it's sort of right now.
Right now, we like sort of a groping around and try and
trying to figure out how this how this thing's can work.
Sort of if you if you if you're willing to take on a lot of
conflict and a lot of drama, its really kind of going to exciting
thing to do. We how do you I mean, how do you
perceive how do you perceive and handle that?
Tribalism. Right.
I mean you it seems like I mean, I wouldn't say I wouldn't
suggest you're in the trenches on like cryptocurrency Twitter
getting in stupid arguments with people.
You have managed to avoid that pretty well.
It seems like, but as an outside Observer of of this which I'm
very guilty of it, and many of my friends are guilty of it as
well. How do you perceive that?
And what are your, what are your takeaways from that when you see
it? So intense?
Well, it's sort of a party like my data.
To job is to to like track a lot of technologies that take
another 10 to 20 years to the market.
I was like very early and things like autonomous driving as
mostly by happenstance or thoughts on you and left works.
And some other things I bait was basically able to follow along
for like 20, 30 years, how these things evolved, right?
And one of the things you have very early on is people like to
take sites and that's very Simple, right?
Because you have binary outcome. That's going to work is good.
Not going to loosen this not going to work, right?
This is the the simplest thing you can do with something that
unfolds over over a decade or more, right?
We still have like, we still still have discussions about
like if there's ever going to be autonomous vehicles and this
started lying in the mid-80s and I'm like, my goal is always to,
like, sort of realize that we cannot answer this question at
the point of, no because stuff will like, come along which we
cannot quite foresee and And like what I like to say is
always sort of like any sort of of those like sort of big new
technologies from like Inception to basically market dominance or
something to take like, three to five miracles to get there.
And a miracle is everything that is obvious in hindsight, like,
Amazon being like, we're gonna not just sell sell books.
Anymore, will sell other things too.
Ya know, like Amazon was a sort of like, yeah, we let others use
our platform to sell. Stuff they're making money off
like other selling on their platform at the end is they sort
of realized? OK, there's money to be made if
you actually giving others the opportunity and that's like one
of the Miracles, right? You got a miracle.
They had is, is easy, WS, of course, but all of these stuff
like you have these big ideas and you always have these don't
like hype disappointment cycles. And I like, usually, in this
stuff, you have multiple how participant, but disappointment,
sex. We had that in And it
cryptocurrency a couple times already.
And I like to call is like the drunk unicyclist, sort of year,
like, veering from side to side, rather than trying to like find
us like the perfect path. We'd like very, very subtle
movements. You basically moving from from
like one end to the other and I've honestly, what will come
out? And I also like my position is
very much that I expect the technology to play a much bigger
role than What the critics things and I assume that the
like whatever. If there's a financial
infrastructure evolving from this, it will look much more but
much closer than what we have now because sort of you can
solve some trust problems with a, with a cryptic, but he sort
of like the claim of the things we can solve with blockchain is
still like very very like you over the top and we'll figure
out what we can do within and in my opinion a like for me it's
intriguing. Because what I've observed is
that sort of value creation, which will happen like in like
in like 50s to 80s. If you want like happened within
companies is moving more and more towards in between
companies, right? So we had to two big
developments, that was like, the auction.
And the other thing was it was a matching markets and platforms
that really shifted value creation towards Between
Enterprises. All right, so price, finding
that much, much better. And and the other thing you had
Global sourcing yet Global multi-tiered supply chain and
like my problem is, I always like usually dealing with those
like trying to make connections between accounting entities
Enterprises, right? And so this is why I'm why I'm
kind of like overall quite optimistic about this whole
thing but of course like you have to deal with a lot of
bullets article to use that word you're looking at Blockchain as
like a financial accounting, salute, global global global
accounting solution. Is that how you in in between in
between accounting entities into accounting system?
Yes, this is what I'm interested in interesting.
Yeah, because one of our good friends is an accountant and I
can't think of someone who hates blockchain more.
Maybe you know what? That's not fair.
She doesn't hate blockchain. She she think some of it is very
cool but also I don't think she Thinks there's much value in a
in accounting, necessarily can you describe what you see that
value prop? As I possibly would, probably
disagree with her. Like I have a conversation.
Yeah, this is like, we're very far away and one of the things,
of course, like we're building an account.
An accounting system, I like sort of D, fundamental
transaction within, within any crypto currency and blockchain
system, is, of course, like defend America on accounting
transaction, undergrad, taking something.
Off here and I'm writing writing it, there's a debit and credit
system but very few people within the crypto sphere are
willing to actually like deal with and try to understand what
accounting does, which I think is a mate.
Is a major major impediment. Really new billing and
accounting system. Are you not willing to do
actually like DOD was like, yeah, like everybody hates
accounting but I think it's like, like if you want to, if
you want to deal with that wall, if you want to come up with a
Action all system. You have to understand what it
does. And so it might derail us
because eventually you have to understand like what accounting
does in terms of like basically protecting the value creation
with an Enterprise or not, of course, if you want to move that
beyond the Enterprise to between Enterprises, which is like a
couple of orders of magnitude more complicated.
Then you have to like, do the, the hearts lock on a actually
opening an accounting book. I'm sorry, Nan and I think a lot
of our probably most of our listeners are familiar with all
this stuff but there's been so many accounting frauds that were
I mean Enron was courtesy of some accounting fraud.
We had Worldcom it was like a Scourge but I think when I've
spoken to accountants generally like the big four to this day,
it was the big eight back. Then the big for now, they sound
like they all have the same issues as they did back then.
Like not a lot has changed. Of course, I mean, biggest
purpose of accounting, is to reduce the opportunities for
fraud who will not solve fraud. It will basically make it a
little bit more transparent for an outside investor darkness and
what's going on within the firm, like, how is my money being
spent on by the company Executives?
But of course, like accounting is, is it discipline that has
rules? But it also has a lot of
discretion sort of list. This is a fundamental thing.
With an accounting that you have human discretion, and human
discretion is, is being controlled by, or should be
controlled by certain rules and obligations, and also like
penalty. If you, if you getting caught is
by far, not a perfect system, but it's probably better than a
world where we don't have it. And this is sort of like my goal
of actually moving this idea of accountability within the
Enterprise Eyes to accountability within within a
an economy and like biggest problem.
I dealt with a professionally as we're definitely in a silo
problem. That basically you have siloed
accounting and transactional and supply chain databases that do
not speak with each other. For me blockchain might be like
one of the one of the pieces of the puzzle that can solve our
problem. Yeah.
But of course you're going to have to you have to deal with
the many many Potential fraud scenarios, you have when the
blockchain will too. Yeah.
Which are numerous exactly. Yeah.
All right. Well, it has been a pleasure.
Oliver, thank you for Jamie. Thank you for joining us.
It's been Illuminating for me, so I really appreciate it.