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Hi, welcome to the A16Z podcast. This is Frank Chen. Today's episode is called Five Open Problems

for the blockchain computer. It originally aired as a YouTube video, and you can watch all

of our YouTube videos at YouTube.com slash A16Z videos. Well, welcome to the A16Z YouTube channel. Today I'm here with Ali Yahya, our deal partner in the A16Z crypto team, and we're going to have a fun conversation. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to pretend, Ali, to be a Google software engineer or an Apple software engineer, right?

So I'm somebody who knows how to write software, has been doing it for a while, and then

all of a sudden I saw my friends start to peel off and go to crypto startups.

And I'm looking around going, what's happening?

Right?

Google's a great place or Apple's a great place.

Why are people leaving to go to crypto startups? And maybe you can

help me understand what's causing all these smart, talented people to head into crypto land.

I love it. Fantastic. So maybe let's just start with the world in which we live today, which is,

you know, I use my iPhone or my Android phone. I happen to use a Google phone.

The Pixel.

I use Google Photos.

I use Gmail.

My carriers, T-Mobile.

It's sort of a centralized world, and it works pretty well, right?

Like, it's pretty reliable, and Google gets all my photos, and my mail arrives when I want it. And so that's not a bad world.

Is crypto really trying to overturn that world?

That world does work fine, but it's not the frontier.

So what I would say is the reason that crypto is so exciting

...