David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…What does a legitimate Silk Road even mean? We're going to accept crypto payments. It's going to exist as an online marketplace, but we're not going to mail drugs through the USPS. Basically, it's eBay. It's like, we could do a decentralized eBay, maybe. I don't know if that's a good idea or not, but clearly, the killer use case was drugs. Needless to say, that project didn't get very far at least at that point in time. They end up having this wild summer. They move around Europe. Mihai and Roxana are also pretty young. I think they had graduated from college, maybe a year or two before. They move around Europe, they spend most of their time hanging out in an anarchist commune in Catalonia. For Vitalik, he's always been a super, super serious kid. This is mind expanding for him. He's having a great time. By the end of the summer, he emails Waterloo and he's like, hey, I think crypto and Bitcoin is a really big thing. I want to take a year off and just focus on working on these crypto projects and being in the community. I'll be back in a year. Much like actually the sentiment of a lot of super ambitious, young technical people right now who are doing that on everything that Vitalik would go on to create. He was the first to say, yeah, maybe it's time for me to take some time off to focus on crypto.…

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