LEIGH: BitTorrent Creator Bram Cohen on 'a System That Doesn't Suck'
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen sits down with Bram Cohen, author of the BitTorrent protocol and CEO of Chia. In this wide ranging interview they talk Bram’s early interest in “hard problems”, his unexpected ascent from sketchy to celebrity and much more.
Leigh and Bram discuss:
- The real promise and strengths of cryptocurrency
- Really interesting problems in cryptocurrency
- Getting started in crypto 20 years ago with MojoNation and glorious failure.
- The origin of BitTorrent
- Speculative investment, the dot com boom and where real wealth comes from
- The Bitcoin Wizards IRC channel and Bram’s arrival in crypto
- How the Bitcoin Wizards stance on ASIC resistance led to Bram’s creation of ‘Proofs of Time’ and ‘Proofs of Space’
- Getting rich as a side effect of making the world a better place
- Scaling, sharding and unsophisticated engineering
- Why ‘Proof of Stake’ is a step backwards from ‘Proof of Work’
- A system that doesn’t suck: how engineers try and fail to improve the finance industry
- Unregulated banking crisis, shadow banking and hiring the smartest minds to obfuscate leverage
- Why trusted third parties are the problem
- Satoshi’s wonderful, horrible idea and the obviousness of proof of work.
- What Satoshi did surprisingly well
- Why improving proof of work wouldn’t really improve bitcoin.
- Coherent goals: more decentralized and less wasteful
- Both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake have a scary degree of centralization
- Ethereum’s terrifying improvements to the on-chain programming environment
- New functionality within Chia that helps cryptocurrency feel less like “carrying around hundred dollar bills”
- Limiting opportunities for theft with user controlled rate and recipient limiting
- Thinking about ecosystems and adoption
- What is your favorite use case for cars? Is it Tires?
- Open source software, politics and adoption
- What is the role of advocacy in making something useful?
- Why bitcoin gets a bad reputation for things it doesn’t have strong associations with.
- Why “governance” is such a touchy topic
- Why Chia is funded by Venture Capital rather than token offerings
- How Bitcoin is different from what’s come after it
- “Our technological capacity exceeds our political will to negotiate the terms of that capacity”
- Why Bram hates the “Fake it til’ you make it” ethos
- Engineering sticker shock
- The “everyone uses cryptocurrency for everything” narrative vs. the “How do we get anyone using Cryptocurrency for anything good?” reality
- Better metrics for success than “Getting rich”
- Great leaders and bullshit artists
- Bitcoin’s trajectory and the meritocratic history of technology
- Colored coins, distributed identity, timestamps and censorship resistant value
- Minimal functionality, subtle cleanups and simplified transaction formats in the Chia programming environment
- And more...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How do we make it so that people have tools they can actually use? |
| 0:05.0 | How do we make it so that increasingly payments are being done with it? |
| 0:08.0 | How do we make liquidity in those markets? |
| 0:10.0 | Those are the kinds of things one. |
| 0:12.0 | Should be thinking about and viewing as the actual success measures. |
| 0:16.0 | In some sense, when people adopt my software, that's kind of like a very hopeful thing. That makes |
| 0:22.0 | me feel good about the worlds, right? I don't think a simple, oh, look, we got rich is a |
| 0:28.1 | terribly good measure of success. I mean, Bernie Madoff got rich. |
| 0:33.8 | Hello, I'm Coin desk reporter Lee Quinn here with Bram Cohen, CEO of the Chia Crypto |
| 0:39.1 | startup and author of the peer-to-peer BitToint Protocol. We're here to talk today about that |
| 0:44.0 | wild terminology crypto adoption and whatever does that mean. Thanks for joining us today, Bram. |
| 0:49.8 | Good to be here. Can you start us off by telling us a little bit more about how you first started |
| 0:53.7 | working on open source software? When I was in high school, I was for fun working on algorithms to solve |
| 1:04.5 | randomly generated three coloring problems just because I thought this was an interesting problem |
| 1:08.6 | to work on. And this was my idea of fun. |
| 1:12.5 | And there was a professor at NYU named Martin Davis, who I'd just go talk to him during his office hours because, you know, nobody else does. |
| 1:21.8 | So I would just go talk to professors during their office hours. |
| 1:24.4 | And he introduced me to Bart Selman of Bell Labs, who was working on very |
| 1:29.5 | similar stuff. Bart actually offered me a summer internship at Bell Labs to work on what he was |
| 1:37.9 | working on, which was very, very similar to that stuff I was doing. And I figured out a way of |
| 1:43.6 | improving what it was that he had come up with. |
| 1:47.5 | So he had come up with this thing called G-Sat. I made this tweet called WOCSat. And to this day, |
... |
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