This episode is brought to you by:

Fidelity Investments. Fidelity is a company that is constantly researching and experimenting with emerging technologies, like crypto assets and blockchain, to improve the lives of their customers. Fidelity provides a comprehensive set of products and services to individual investors, employers, and financial advisory firms.

Show Notes:

[00:03:25] – CHAPTER 1 – Understanding the Concept of Blockchain

[00:04:30] – Jeremiah Lowin explains how blockchain is like a database

[00:05:46] – Owning a digital asset

[00:07:14] – Naval Ravikant, CEO of Angelist on how blockchains can help to create personal networks and organize humans

[00:11:01] – How blockchains represent a way to coordinate global activity through tokens

[00:13:33] – New coins popping up around data storage and utility needs like solar panels

[00:14:57] – Permission vs permissionless networks

[00:16:37] – Protocols and the introduction of scarcity

[00:18:13] – Keeping track of scarcity and the introduction of tokens

[00:18:49] – Societal structures and how blockchains will change them again

[00:21:55] – The role of blockchains in the informational age and the rise of more individual sovereignty

[00:23:29] – Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, on the increasing shift to digital worlds led by incentive structures

[00:27:48] – CHAPTER 2 – Blockchain Technology

[00:31:53] – Charlie Noyes, Pantera Capital, explains how SHA-256 was developed and what makes it so special

[00:35:48] – How miners create new blocks and the incentives to do so

[00:40:22] – The nonce field

[00:43:48] – The incentives that exist for miners and the arms race to build more powerful systems to mine

[00:45:20] – The development of mining pools

[00:46:54] – Ethereum, the “spiritual successor” to bitcoin

[00:48:36] – How the Ether network is an ecosystem in which other tokens can sit

[00:50:51] – Naval Ravikant on alternative coins or tokens

[00:51:37] – How the protocol creators are the ones getting wealthy

[00:52:43] – Blockchain as an experiment in distributed government

[00:54:10] – How cryptocurrency is more than just technology, it’s a movement

[01:00:07] – Peter Jubber, of Fidelity, on how huge institutions, like theirs, are getting into the cryptocurrency game

[01:03:34] – The notion of cooperation in an open-source project or protocol

[01:04:39] – Olaf Carlson-Wee, the first employee at Coinbase and the founder of Polychain, on the early excitement for cryptocurrency