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slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

You're about to hear a discussion that was part of our 2014 academic roundtable.

This discussion focuses on Bitcoin and how it can be extended beyond its use as a digital

currency.

Participating in the conversation are Princeton's Ed Felton, John Hopkins, Matthew Green, and our own Chris Dixon.

The conversation picks up with a question from the audience, and Ed Felton responds.

Question number one, I guess there are people who say Bitcoin is really blockchain 1.0.

With blockchain 2.0, you could do what are referred to as distributed autonomous companies. I want to get your thoughts on DAX.

All right. Let me talk about this. So distributed autonomous company, there's a lot of different jargon that people use to talk about these ideas of some kind of automated

actor that is a first class actor within a system like this. They're sometimes called smart

contracts or virtual corporations, etc. I really just...

First, first, these things are fundamentally equivalent to each other.

And second, I prefer just to use the term mechanism.

As an engineer, I understand what a mechanism is.

And I think if we think of these things as companies or contracts, we can, I think that tends to

make it a little bit more confusing.

Because at the end of the day, they don't have exactly the attributes that companies or contracts

or actors have their mechanisms.

Their agents. Their agents in a sense.

...