Brian Armstrong: recommendation

Transcript context

…What is it that you know about how the company, as a corporate form, will change over the next 20 years? Because you work with crypto, a lot of which is very decentralized, but you’re just a company run by people. In a sense, you’re a regular company, so you straddle the two worlds. What do you understand that the rest of us don’t? Well, I would hesitate to say that I know for sure anything’s going to happen in the next 20 years, but I’ll tell you where I think the corporation could go. It may not even be a corporation in the traditional sense, but it’s an organization on how people come together to get things done. One of the brilliant things that’s been created in crypto is this idea of a smart contract. Instead of using lawyers to write on a piece of paper a contract between people, you can essentially codify these principles in software in code and run it on a global, decentralized blockchain, which is something that Ethereum allowed us to do, this idea of a smart contract. That’s a nebulous idea, but what ended up happening in practice was people started creating these decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, and it allowed people all over the world to come participate in these groups. This is all very early-stage stuff, but they started, for instance, raising money and then having voting proposals about how to allocate that money, all happening in a decentralized way. None of the participants even knew who the other people were in certain instances. In some cases, they raised a billion dollars in 17 minutes from 20,000 people all over the world, and they’d never even met. These new kinds of things had come together. Some of them exploded, by the way, in spectacular fashion, but it is creating a really new governance model out there. One of the organizations that I like that has a good demo of this — it’s called Oregon, and they’ve allowed anybody to come in, create one of these smart contracts in a very simple interface, and you can set up the voting structure, the governance, how rewards might happen, how funds could be allocated. It’s almost like a new jurisdiction. A lot of companies or corporations in the US, at least, are incorporated in Delaware. That’s the jurisdiction that has a lot of case law around it. But you can almost think of these DAOs as operating in a new online jurisdiction that doesn’t have a direct link to somewhere in the physical world, but there are, of course, real people in the real world all over the place interacting with them. That’s interesting, exciting, and a lot of things can happen from that. But you don’t run Coinbase that way, right? So why aren’t you very skeptical of decentralized systems? You still have the Oracle problem — how to connect the smart contract to actual events in the world, and who verifies what has happened. And then decentralized systems can be very slow to improve because no one owns the thing who can just come in and fix it, just like the English language is a mess. Aren’t you actually just a lover of more or less centralized systems, and in your bones, you’re skeptical about decentralization?…

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