Hello and welcome to the A16Z podcast. This episode is based on a fireside chat between Katie Hahn,

Crypto General Partner, and Mark Andresen, co-founder of the firm, during our recent inaugural

crypto regulatory summit. Katie asked Mark to trace some of the possible parallels between the early

days of the internet and the current state of crypto, including how the browser

went mainstream and its initial usability gaps, the impact of regulators and policymakers in the early

days, the beginnings of commerce, and the story of the world's first online bookstore, hint,

it's not named Amazon, and the original sin, as Mark calls it, of the internet, and how

crypto could revisit that original sin

and help create new economic models

to drive the internet and the broader economy forward.

Mark, you had a front row seat when the internet was kind of being developed, right?

At least for consumers.

How did the internet go from being this kind of weird thing

that academics used,

and by the way, the government, to a mainstream growth engine for the economy?

Yeah, so to start with, I should say, to clarify, it wasn't actually a front row seat.

It was more, it was the little kid seat. It was the booster seat. You still use regular

shoulder shop in the back of the internet van at the time.

I was very young.

So the evolution of the internet over time has so many echoes and comparisons to what we're seeing,

what I'm seeing now with cryptocurrency and blockchain, it's really quite remarkable.

And so, you know, maybe the best way to think about that is kind of by actually telling the story

...