Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…As long as you can port in and out just like when I pay my taxes, I pay them out of my bank account. But when I buy something at the store, I go (hopefully, someday again) out to eat in a restaurant, or I order on DoorDash, I pay with a credit card. That's totally fine. I'll do stuff with Ethereum-based DeFi projects for rapid transactions, and I’ll move money in and out of that as needed from a Bitcoin wallet. One thing that I've been increasingly thinking about as we've done these episodes is trying to factor in more of my why now to our playbook. Why did this happen when it is happening? For Bitcoin, I want to talk about this idea that Nick Szabo brought up. He and Naval were on an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast that we’ll include in the sources here. I haven’t been able to shake this idea out of my head. We've been obsessed with making computing more efficient over the last several decades. Frankly, we've needed to because we could clearly come up with reasons why we needed more compute than we had. The use cases definitely outpaced what the hardware was capable of. Bitcoin is one of the first times that we deliberately want to and have done something that is computationally extremely inefficient. When you think about it, Bitcoin requires tons of computers to do the same slow actions, to check each other's work, to propagate this Blockchain all over the globe over and over again. Many computers are doing the same work because they're voting by doing the work, which will have environmental consequences that we’re going to talk about just before grading. It's expensive from a computing resources perspective, but if it really does unlock new value for humanity, you can think of it as a clever way to take advantage of the orders of magnitude, more compute power that we have now to do something that is potentially a fundamental breakthrough for humanity. It's interesting to try and apply this lens and think what else could you accomplish that was previously thought to be impossible—from a system perspective—by leveraging this incredible scale of computing in a very inefficient way? I think the way that Naval put it was, our brains haven't become any better computers, but we've developed way better computers. How can we take things that our brain currently hasn't been able to do for all these millennia and figure out a different way for the computers to take on the work? Not in a superficial way, but in a system-wide new use case way. It's a little out there. I think that’s a lot of Ethereum. We'll talk about that when we do Ethereum someday.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.