Muneeb Ali: Abuse of Power through Centralization

Anthony Pompliano
Sep 5, 2018 · 50 min read
Muneeb Ali.

The following is a transcript of a conversation between Anthony Pompliano and Muneeb Ali, Co-Founder of BlockStack, about internet freedom, distributed systems, decentralization, the value of an open social and info graph, commoditization of attention and how regulation can benefit open protocols.

You can find the recording here: Off The Chain Podcast: Anthony Pompliano and Muneeb Ali


Anthony Pompliano: For those who don’t know, why don’t you just go through some of your background and then we can kind of talk through how you got into the crypto space.

Muneeb Ali: Hey everyone. I’m Muneeb, co-founder of Blockstack. So I have a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton University. Before entering this space, I basically worked in distributed systems. For those who don’t know what that is, these are the people who have built a lot of the computer networks out there or the data centers that resulted in cloud computing. Even if you go back all the way to the 90s, people who built kind of like the first generation of internet protocols. So that was the research community that I was part off. And more specifically, like the distributed systems people, they like to actually build the real systems and then deploy them and study them. So it’s not like a very theoretical part of computer science.

Pomp: Got it. And so in that, at what point does the distributed systems work intersect with blockchain, kind of this decentralized crypto ecosystem?

Muneeb: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I think if you go back into the 90s, you would notice that there were a lot of efforts that we’re talking about, peer to peer systems or designing systems in a way that they are no single points of failure. And in the 2000s, we started seeing kind of like, if you remember the time of like the line wire or these different file sharing protocols, people were downloading a lot of like pirated songs from there. And interestingly at that time, the interest from the top research community was extremely high. There were lots of conferences, lots of people were publishing papers, building systems. By like 2005, 2006, most of that interest started drying down because there wasn’t a lot of industry adoption of the technology.

Muneeb: A lot of the same people, and these are people that are highly respect started moving into cloud computing and cloud computing was just starting. But companies like Google or Facebook could actually bankroll all the research and development there. You started noticing how the same kind of like bright minds were now going to the large companies and helping them build their cloud infrastructure and in a way, the centralization was a byproduct of that. So these companies kept becoming bigger and bigger, they started hiring better and better people. And most of the computing infrastructure kind of like got centralized under a few companies.

Pomp: Got it. That makes sense. And so, for you, you’re at Princeton, right? You go in and you get your PhD in distributed systems. At what point did you kind of discover crypto and kind of what drew you to what was going on there?

Muneeb: It’s funny, I actually did a search in my inbox to see when I got exposed to Bitcoin for the first time. This was 2011 I think. And then Arvind, he has a course on Bitcoin that a lot of people go through and he also wrote a book about it. So he’s a Princeton professor and he was just joining at that time.

Pomp: Amazing.

Muneeb: And he sent out an email to everyone that I’m interested in doing research on this technology. I marked it as interesting, read later. And then my advisor pinged me that it seems like something you should really look at. And I was like, yeah, I’ve already marked it, I’m going to take a look at that. And it took me like more than two years before I rediscovered some of the technology on a completely different path, right? So this is me about to finish my thesis but kind of like decided that I don’t want to go into academia.

Muneeb: And I started a company with Ryan Shea, my co-founder that a met at Princeton. It was basically the team came first and we knew that we generally want to work on like core problems with today’s internet but it wasn’t really clear what exactly, and the team came first. And we were starting to work on some of those issues that hey, what’s wrong with today’s internet, how can we make a meaningful impact and rediscovered Bitcoin and the blockchain and started like putting two and two together that maybe some of these technologies can be used in different ways. That eventually became what is Blockstack today.

Pomp: Got it. And so, this is like 13, 14. What were some of those early problems with the internet that you guys looked and said, you know, we might not know exactly what the solution is going to be but these are definitely problems that we can identify and want to go work on?

Muneeb: You’re entrepreneur or developer and you want to build something innovative on top of what’s available today. Compare that to Larry and Sergey back in the 90s. Like they could actually write a web crawler, download all the information they need from the internet and study the web graph, and then innovate on top of that and build the Google search engine. But if you want to do that today, you can’t even get access to the data that Facebook has or the data that LinkedIn has or Twitter has.

Muneeb: So we were trying to A, get that data and try to do something interesting with it. But we were getting hit by trade limitations by Twitter or like terms of service issues with LinkedIn and other stuff. And we started thinking that these companies are in a way like barrier to innovation because you need to be employed at one of these companies to be able to use the massive like social graph or information that Facebook is sitting on. So if you’re not a Facebook engineer, it’s almost like I don’t even have a right to innovate. I first need to join the company before I can do anything with it.

Muneeb: So we started thinking of like how can we make this information and these social graphs more decentralized, just like the internet originally was supposed to be fully decentralized and open to all the developers.

Pomp: Got it. So really, what you guys were doing was you were hitting a walled garden of I want access to that information, that information could be a resource to me, so that I can put it together with other information and resources. And if I can do that correctly, then I can, I don’t even know yet what I can create but that’s my goal and if I can’t get the information I should actually just start solving the problem that’s right in front of me.

Muneeb: Yup. I think some of the problems are more concrete. I know you’re a big Twitter user. So am I. So imagine that you love Twitter but you hate certain features in the Twitter app. For me, I get really distracted by notifications. I feel like if there could be something like a minimalist Twitter, I would love to pay for that app and use that client instead. But because Twitter is a company and the information that they’re sitting on only they can use it. It’s not a marketplace. It’s not like developers can go and build different clients that are compatible with the data that Twitter has.

Muneeb: It wasn’t like this in the beginning. Like in the early days of Twitter, there were like some other clients available, some of them were better than the actual Twitter app. And one by one either they got acquired by Twitter or got shut down. Same with the Meerkat versus Periscope thing, right? So Meerkat was this app that was going viral on Twitter and Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope and then shut down access to Meerkat. I think that’s kind of like speaks to the problem that we have today with a few big companies having a monopoly on innovation.

Pomp: Got it. So, let’s talk about this idea of decentralization, right? When you think of that, what does that mean to you in today’s world? So you’ve talked a little bit about these walled gardens that major internet companies have around their data and their social graphs, etc. But when somebody says to you why are you working on a decentralized world, what’s your answer to that and then kind of go from there?

Muneeb: So I think this this word decentralization, it’s not very clear to the broader audience like what it means, and more importantly, like why would they care. Like sometimes I try to have the conversation in terms of ownership rights, or freedom of choice. Like those are things that I think people understand better. So if you ask someone that would you like to own property and let’s say you own a house and you can put all of your belongings there, the answer would be yes, I would like to have like, people understand that property rights are a good thing, and countries where you don’t have property rights, they are usually struggling with some sort of a dictator doing generally bad things to the population. And I think similarly, people understand that freedom of choice is a good thing, right? So if there are 10 different competing products for the same thing, usually is better for the consumer, and they have the freedom of choice that they can stop using one product and start using something else.

Muneeb: Decentralization to me is a combination of both these things, right? When you have ownership of your information, your data or even software that you downloaded, it’s yours now, combined with freedom of choice in the sense that there aren’t like big monopolies who control access to information, developers are basically competing on the quality of their products when they want to convince you that you should download my product or buy my product. So the more competition there is and the more more freedom of choice there is for consumers, that’s generally a better thing.

Pomp: Do you think that there’s a diminishing set of returns in terms of if there’s one Twitter and we’re all using it, whether it’s the best product that we could possibly find or not, the value we get from the social network or the social graph and that lock in cannot be replicated if all of a sudden there’s 15 different Twitters and everyone’s using a different one and we’re not able to actually interact to get the same amount of content. What’s that trade off look like?

Muneeb: I think there are two things there. Let me comment on the first one. Chris Dixon actually wrote a really interesting post about how internet services generally which are free are net beneficial for everyone. So they’re providing a free service users are getting some utility out of it and the service is growing and it’s a net positive for everyone. But at some point, it kind of like tips over where now they’re in the business of knowing more and more about you. And usually most of these things are powered by ads.

Muneeb: So at some point it tips over where the service is actually becoming harmful for the user and the relationship between the user and the service kind of changes, right? So that’s one thing that I feel like most companies that are providing a free service and monetizing user data can like go through that curve. So keeping that context in mind, I’m going to switch over to the actual question and that seems to me that can a single company build a better product than a market? And I think I am of the view that if you open up something to a broader market, the market would generally deliver a better product.

Muneeb: So it’s not about having disconnected networks that there would be like 50 different Twitters. It’s about having some sort of a common decentralized graph that everyone can be a part of but they can publish their products on the same network and users, all of them can be part of the same network without being users of any single company.

Pomp: Got it. Very interesting. And so how does power in the traditional sense play into this? So when you describe these walled gardens, let’s say the large internet companies today, they’ve got a lot of power, right? They set the rules. You can choose to play by their rules or not and there’s not necessarily a great second option, right? And so if you want to connect with people over the world, with real identity, and be able to chat with them and post and interact with businesses, etc, Facebook is one of the best ways to do that, right? Because they have that mass buy in or the mass social graph.

Pomp: How does power change when you move to the decentralized world by the people who create these products, right? Are they still the ones that you think will set the rules really kind of drive the conversation or do you see some other power mechanism that plays out?

Muneeb: So I think first we like try to understand how much power these companies actually have. Like we started back in like 2013, 2014. And back then, this was not a common conversation that people would have. They would be like, hey, what’s wrong with Facebook or what’s wrong with Google. And at that time, like sometimes I’d say that, oh, Facebook has this campaign where anyone who’s using, they were giving out free internet service in India but you could only use Facebook and anything that your friends have shared on Facebook, you can access that but nothing else.

Muneeb: So a result was that people thought that Facebook is the internet. And people would find it interesting, but they wouldn’t be alarmed by it.

Pomp: And just to clarify, so I worked at Facebook in 14 and 15, and what I think you’re describing is this idea that they were trying to give access to the internet. If I remember correctly, they were subsidizing the data cost. So if you downloaded a specific app for this you could get on. And I think it was like you could access Facebook and get the feed, etc, and then I think that there’s maybe some partner websites that if, there was a Wikipedia link in the Facebook feed you would click and that you could see that, but you couldn’t go outside of their partner websites. Then I think their pitch to the data providers or the cell phone companies was, hey, actually, this is a great way to onboard people into using the internet. And if they want to leave this enclosed ecosystem, they’ll then buy a data package from you and then they’re off to the races.

Pomp: And so it was an interesting experiment that they did with kind of various outcomes depending on the geographic region and what perspective you have on what ultimately their goal should have been.

Muneeb: Yeah, I think there are arguments on both sides, that one argument is that they’re giving people a free service that they would never have access to otherwise and they are getting access to so much information. The other argument is that, hey, they’re seeing a walled garden and they’re actually not seeing the full picture. What kind of control Facebook would have down the road, I think they got into some trouble with the Indian government on the program and so on. But I think generally the concept of one company having that much control over access to information, people would find it interesting, but they wouldn’t think that this is something that they should be concerned about.

Pomp: Absolutely.

Muneeb: Until the US election happen, right? And where now there’s a serious concern that can Facebook actually manipulate people’s perceptions to the extent of impacting even results of an election, and that’s something that people are generally concerned about to the extent that now Mark Zuckerberg is sitting in the Congress testifying and it’s a very different world. There are certain things like I think Mark Zuckerberg sent a message to Facebook users and then retracted it, that people don’t really understand the gravity of what that kind of power means. Imagine if the US government was able to retract some emails from all the inbox is of the citizens. I think there would be an outcry that how can the government do this, like this email was in my inbox, how can they remove it without my permission. But Mark Zuckerberg basically did an equivalent of that on the Facebook netbook. And people aren’t really noticing it.

Muneeb: So I think my general point is that the amount of power that large tech companies have on users is largely underestimated right now.

Pomp: Would it be fair to say that, so I think that there’s enough academic studies now that show if you show certain types of information as somebody, not only can you affect their political leanings, their kind of thoughts on certain issues, but also you can affect their mental health. Would it be fair to compare that to let’s say, 20, 30, 50 years ago with traditional media and newspapers. So let’s say for example that if Facebook shows me a bunch of right or left leaning articles versus if I have a subscription to The New York Times and there’s a bunch of right or left leaning articles, what’s the difference there?

Muneeb: Yeah, I think it basically comes back to freedom of choice in my view. I grew up in Pakistan. When I was a teenager, we had a single TV channel that was state sponsored. It was a very interesting learning for me when I grew up and found out that the version of history taught to me was actually not correct. If you go back to Pakistan now, people have freedom of choice, like there are so many private channels and they can choose to subscribe to whatever they want to subscribe to. But in general, once you have freedom of choice, things become less manipulative or the power of any single entity reduces, and that’s the entire point of decentralization.

Muneeb: Decentralization doesn’t mean that no one is in control but there are a number of entities instead of just a single entity. And going back to your earlier question about what happens in this world, I think people need to think hard about basically structures or points of power in even decentralized networks and ecosystems, because it’s not that you just introduce a blockchain and magically we are now living in a fairy tale. There are very, very complicated issues which we don’t have answers to right now. A lot of projects either are already struggling or will struggle with these problems like before any of them actually takes off and has mass market adoption.

Pomp: Absolutely. So I’m going to push you on this idea of choice because I agree with you that without choice, there is a whole can of worms that I think a lot of people have a hard time arguing that no choice is good. I would argue that you choose to use Facebook and then once you create an account, you choose who you connect with both from individuals, media sites that you like their page, people that you follow, etc. You do not choose the rank of the algorithmic feed, right? And you do not choose the actions with which your friends take that could also put content into your feed. Muneeb liked this post, whatever, shows up in my feed.

Pomp: Where’s the line and can we draw a line at any point where we say choice matters up until this point and after this point you’re using a private company’s service and they have kind of free rein at post this point? That choice that you could draw a line in the sand in is blurred to me, and I don’t know how you think about it, you know, kind of it from this view.

Muneeb: So I think just the first point here is a choice between different companies that, hey, can there be Facebook or something else. I think a big problem with tech is that a lot of these large networks tend to be winner takes all the market.

Pomp: Absolutely agree.

Muneeb: So I think that’s the first issue where we get stuck that this is not a market where, this would be the case that AT&T, if AT&T is successful, it would just take out all of the competitors.

Pomp: It’s the monopolistic nature of a social network. If you get enough users, you reach mass adoption. The lock in is too strong that you don’t get value by joining a separate network because nobody’s there.

Muneeb: Same with Google, right? The more users are using the the search engine, the better data they have on the users and the better they can serve them. So I think there are these inherent winner take all kind of dynamics that are in tech that we need to acknowledge that this is a new world.

Muneeb: The next thing would be, I think that’s a great question that where do you draw the line. I would say that just like on the, when the internet was starting and there were certain things that were kind of like part of the core DNA, one of them is that ISPs cannot differentiate between different types of traffic, which is the net neutrality thing and now it’s not exactly they are in the same format anymore. But still people are aware of it and they feel that it’s a right that they should have, an ISP should not be able to differentiate between traffic.

Muneeb: I think similarly, that thing didn’t happen for the application layer of the internet. Like there was no concept of kind of like a universal login that you have or some sort of a social graph that you have that you can take anywhere to any application. So it’s not very easy for you to exit Facebook, whereas it’s very easy for you to exit an ISP and just get a different connection.

Pomp: Absolutely.

Muneeb: So I think defining some of those like core competence that belong to the user and actually don’t belong to the company is something that we never got around to doing.

Pomp: What you’re describing is the incentives for the company are not in alignment with the incentives for the individual, right? Because the incentives for the company is to get that flywheel started, get adoption of their network, start building that out, lock people in. What you’re essentially describing here is that works and that helps that company build. While they’re using that data to make the service better, more enjoyable, provide better quality and accuracy etc, it’s a good thing, but at some point you do hit that diminishing return.

Pomp: If you do not have aligned incentives from the beginning, there are some period of time where individuals are willing to sacrifice their incentives or their value for the value that they’re receiving from a network. But once you hit that diminishing return, it catches their attention. Wait, wait, wait, the incentives here are misaligned and therefore, I think that’s what we’re seeing at some of these large internet companies, people saying, I no longer want to be entered into this contract that I have with you as a service. But there isn’t another option because you locked us all in.

Muneeb: I feel like another big trend that I’m noticing is with internet companies or tech in general, people have this mentality of trust by default. So they would just like trust everything by default unless something goes wrong. That’s playing out in terms of people are not realizing how much power some of these companies have. Like I’m using an iPhone and it’s mind boggling if you think about it that this is such a powerful computer. I cannot just like write a new program and run it on this computer. It’s like fairly locked down.

Muneeb: Like Apple can even like remove apps from my device or just not allow them on the App Store. Even big companies like Uber, I think there was a famous incident where Apple threatened Uber that we’ll just kick you out of the App Store and Uber had to comply. It’s an $80 billion company and it can just disappear like this because another bigger fish says that I have so much control than I can decide that you can no longer be on the devices of people.

Pomp: It’s a platform risk, right? I mean, look, Facebook, Apple, that they all have this. So part of the business model is when people build these technology services or products on top of them, there is that risk that at some point, they can change the rules, they can require you to adhere to certain criteria that maybe wasn’t part of the initial agreement. And so it’s a risk.

Pomp: Let’s fast forward. I think that it’s fairly well understood now that look, there’s issues that companies are going through. Do you believe that the current iterations of these large internet companies are one, going to be able to identify, hey, these are real problems and then two, course correct and figure out how to change in order to not only one, solve the problems, but two, create a better value prop for users with better aligned incentives moving forward. Or do you think they have to get disrupted?

Muneeb: I think it’s very unlikely.

Pomp: Why?

Muneeb: It is likely that they start realizing that this is a problem. They might start addressing the problem in their own ways. Like, for example, I think there was some effort from Facebook and a couple of other companies to have some sort of a common format in which people can extract the data and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, this is a business decision.

Muneeb: I always try to imagine a Facebook board meeting where there’s a board approval to kill the Facebook business model. It’s a very unlikely event that Facebook just says that hey, we’re going to stop monetizing your data at all. It is possible given how Mark Zuckerberg has been really good at identifying potential threats to the company and then proactively going after them. It is possible that they try to do the same thing with these crypto based networks and try to establish themselves as a large player in the ecosystem. So that’s one possibility where they can come out ahead.

Pomp: Absolutely. I think that’s fair. And to your point, I think that a number of these executives that have faced these issues, obstacles, crisis before, they and their teams have done a pretty good job of navigating it, right? That’s how they get to these big powerful positions and this is a another obstacle. Has a little bit of nuance to it, but it would be very interesting to see how they deal with this moving forward.

Pomp: So let’s keep fast forwarding here. So whether those large internet companies are successful or not, what does the 30 to 50 year out view look like in terms of your view of the world of decentralizing a lot of this power, etc, has come to fruition, what changes in the everyday life of humans in terms of how they interact with technology?

Muneeb: That’s an interesting question. I feel like if you would have said what does it look like 10 years from now, you might have heard positive things. When I start thinking about like 40 to 50 years from now-

Pomp: Start with 10 first and then we’ll go to 40 or 50.

Muneeb: Okay, sure. So I think like 10 years from now, I think, at least I’m really hopeful that we are able to solve the problems that we created in the last 20 years. It’s like one of those things that technology creates problems and then there’s new technology that tries to solve those problems. The thing about the the 30 to 40 year timeline is that I’m very concerned about the problems that the new technology is going to create.

Pomp: So before we get to 30 to 40 years, in 10 years, what has changed in my or your life with the way that we, our relationship with technology. Is it that we’re using you know a Facebook, social network, able to call car from our phone, all this stuff but it’s just there’s no centralized company that’s behind it. What is different?

Muneeb: I’m going to put on my lens of kind of like an internet infrastructure researcher and answer the question that way, that I think that there are certain problems with the traditional internet. I think of that as like, take the analogy of a building that there were some structural flaws with it and we just decided to duct tape it around and decided to just work with those things for decades. And now, with the new capabilities that we have, we might be able to actually address those problems. And those problems are like, for example, there’s a company Verisign that everyone blindly trusts. Whenever you see that green lock sign, most of the time it’s a single company saying, trust me, you’re talking to the right party.

Muneeb: Or when I’m sending a message to my friend on Facebook, it’s not really a private communication. It’s not like I’m taking a walk with my friend and that’s a conversation between just me and my friend. Facebook engineers can take a look at it. Any government agencies can take a look at it. Any hackers that hack that information can take a look at it.

Muneeb: So some of those like very fundamental things that we don’t have a concept of like some sort of user credentials that are truly owned by users that can be reused online anywhere. This entire concept of like creating passwords everywhere, resetting them, things getting hacked all the time, these honey pots of data. So the companies are basically creating these honey pots of data because there’s no better way, right? If users can actually keep all that data in a reliable way with themselves and give access to some app on a need basis, that’s a much better security model in general than seeing all these hacks that happen all the time.

Muneeb: So basically, like these internet infrastructure problems, where we could have done things in a different way but we didn’t and now we’re kind of like trying to handle the consequences of that. I feel very hopeful that over a 10 year timeline and especially given the amount of capital that’s flowing into some of these crazy, decentralized projects, some of them would take off and actually end up upgrading the internet to something that we can like always deserve.

Muneeb: The thing I’m fearful of is in the process of doing that, like when cloud computing was starting, I remember I was an undergrad, I was really excited about that technology and that time. We did not think about all these byproducts, all these negative externalities that came with that technology. And the same might happen with blockchains and crypto. There are things that we’re just not afraid enough of.

Pomp: Absolutely. So in that 10 year time frame where I as a user, I own my data and if I want to use a service, I can basically permission them to access maybe all of my data or some subset of my data, one thing I’ve thought a lot about is rather than go the universal basic income way of if automation actually exists and human start to lose their job, the government would have to pay right to basically allow them to survive. If I own my data, just like at a job when I create value, I’m compensated for that value. If a service wants my data and they pay me for the ability to use my data, you one, have a more secure, more user centric data model. And two is you’re now solving some of the socio economic issues that could potentially occur with the adoption of these technologies, right? How likely do you think that scenario is versus that’s more of a utopia view of the world from a technology perspective.

Muneeb: I think it’s actually a very likely. There are two points here. The first point is if you look at the general perception of tech and Silicon Valley I think any anyone would agree that the images off ,like these companies have a lot of money. People who are early tech actually ended up doing really well for themselves. But if you look at all the users, they pretty much have a miserable life looking at all these ads that are being shown to them, all the data that is being tracked and monetized. And they don’t really have a stake in that economy.

Pomp: Absolutely.

Muneeb: So in a way, their data is in a way highly undervalued. And all they’re getting is free products in return for that. Whereas that data is actually a lot more useful. Plus the market that is being used for moving all that money around, like if you study ad networks, there are like nine or 10 different parties involved before a single ad is even shown to a user. It’s a fairly inefficient market. If you can make this a more efficient market where someone wants to show you a piece of information and is willing to pay you for your time, I think that kind of models would evolve in the next five to 10 years. It’s a model where these internet users now become a part of the economy. So they can actually earn some of the value as well.

Muneeb: I think a second point is as a little bit more high level that just like we are now realizing that attention is one of our most scarce resources, I think in general, with a more decentralized world and a world where people start valuing the value of their own data, they would start valuing their attention as well. That all these advertisers out there or all these companies maybe they want me to take certain actions or they want me to want something or whatever it would be that’s valuable to someone else in the economy. If I’m giving them my attention, I can actually monetize that. So I think we would end up broadening the economy as a whole and make the internet users a part of that economy.

Pomp: Got it. And so it’s very interesting. Fast forward more. We’re now in the 40, 50 year timeframe. What does that world look like and what scares you about it?

Muneeb: There are a lot of things that scare me about it. To start of, I think this is like one of those things where some people think that this is like too late in crypto, the ship has already sailed, and my view is that it is just too early in crypto right now. What I’m scared of is actually that the people, even the first million or two million, five million, 10 million, that’s a very small number compared to the rest of the population. If you look at some of these distributions that are happening with tokens, they favor early adopters a lot more than we have seen in other industries.

Muneeb: So if you imagine this world 50 years down the road, if you’re joking about Bitcoin becoming the reserve currency of the world, there’s some probability that that might actually end up happening. I’m just trying to imagine that some people being rewarded just because accidentally they happen to discover a technology before someone else. That’s a troubling thought.

Pomp: Hold on. Two questions here. So one, what do you think the probability 50 years out Bitcoin is let’s say major global currency or the global reserve currency? Where would you put that probability number at right now?

Muneeb: Just from the top my head, I would say five to six percent.

Pomp: That is the number that keeps coming up. So that makes sense. And then a lot of people use this notion that because somebody is early, they’re lucky, right? I think that many of the people who are early say they were lucky. It kind of gets, okay, put it on the shelf, We both agree and we move on to the conversation. But I would challenge that discovering the technology could be a moment of luck. You randomly came across a website, a friend in passing has told you about it. There’s a whole bunch of things that are just serendipitous about discovering the technology. Acting on that discovery is much more intentional. So whether you start mining, you purchase some tokens, etc, that is more of a self directed or self initiated action.

Pomp: Then also the ability to have the discipline whether by accident because you forgot that you own the tokens or whatever or intentionally to hold as that technology becomes more and more valuable over time is still somewhat self initiated, right? So, what percentage of people do you think that have either already benefited or stand to benefit in the future is truly luck versus their serendipitous discovery of the technology but then they actually take action and they should be rewarded in some way for that action?

Muneeb: No, I definitely think that people deserve a lot of credit. It’s not that you just like randomly showed up and got lucky. There are many people who were early and they ended up like selling their tokens or they didn’t believe in the technology enough. So I definitely want to give credit where credit is due. I think the reason why I feel uncomfortable is the dynamics of the distributions, in the sense that if there’s a new invention, sure the inventor get some credit and ends up making some fortune out of that. And then there are people who kind of like worked on taking that invention and commercializing it to the rest of the world. Let’s say that you’re a kid and you’re becoming an engineer, you’re learning about this new technology and you hope to get a job in that sector. All of that is a slightly different model from a purely token distribution mechanism. That here’s the initial distribution, we’re just locking it in for the rest of time and without much thought most times.

Muneeb: Like when we were doing our token distribution, we actually like spent months and months like agonizing over how this should look like and actually ended up taking the least amount of tokens for the project creators out of like most major projects out there. That was one of the reasons for it. But I feel like not, we don’t even have the models to actually able to study the long term implications of some of these distributions.

Pomp: Absolutely. I think that admitting that we don’t know yet is a big step for a lot of people. And then we’ve got to really focus on figuring out. There’s an intersection of what is right, what is fair and what is economically sustainable. It’s not a simple decision and I don’t think we’ve had enough experience watching some of the previous attempts at token distribution play out to really know what the impact even is of those attempts. You just got to go through the cycles over a couple of years to really figure that out.

Muneeb: I was going through my list of fears. The next one is interesting that I feel like because I work in crypto people sometimes assume that I am against governments. I might have my personal views on governments are inefficient or they shouldn’t be like too large or this and that, but I think people just assume that I’m an anarchist. I’m not. At the same time, personally I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle. We don’t realize the implications that what if governments cannot collect taxes anymore. Some people get really excited about that notion. But I’m a little bit scared by notions like these, that if governments are unable to collect taxes, that means that some sort of a new structure would have to evolve for people to self organize in the physical world. And usually when there is large disruptions like these, there are like periods even decades of basically chaos. We might end up seeing those periods in our lifetime if this actually happens. So this is like one of the fears as well.

Pomp: And it’s fear of the unknown, right? Less fear of this is what’s going to happen I don’t like that from happening. It’s more of if we do get to a situation where governments can’t collect taxes, what happens. I don’t know. Sounds like you don’t know either. That is scary. I think that’s completely fair. I want to go back to something you said earlier, talking about government growing up. So this idea of a single channel where you’re getting news, history, etc and you’re getting a very specific, a very politicalized view of the world, what was it from your memory the first time you realized that there was other narratives or other perspectives on whether it was news history, etc. Do you remember what that was and kind of walk us through like what that feeling is like because I don’t think most Americans ever get to experience that.

Muneeb: I can share a personal story. It’s basically I think one of the first times that I was out of the country, I think I got a paper published somewhere after my undergrad. I was out of the country. It was in Canada somewhere. There was a cab driver who was from Bangladesh and I was being very friendly with him. I even said something like Pakistan and Bangladesh are super close. And he just gave me a weird look. The story there is that they used to be the same country with India in the middle. There was a war after which Bangladesh was separated from the country. So my dad, he actually served in the army. So not only that I had that single state sponsored channel. But like my dad and all his friends also had this view of the war.

Pomp: The army sponsored stories.

Muneeb: Army sponsored story that Pakistan actually tried helping Bangladesh but India was trying to meddle around and they ended up like taking parts of our country and made it something else. I completely missed out on that entire story about how there was a movement by the local people who were being suppressed to actually gain freedom from Pakistan. The Pakistani army was actually blamed of genocide. This is a very tricky topic to bring up in my household. I’m not going to like break, like basically have a conversation with my dad that you are part of this war. Absolutely. No one ever told me that there are allegations of genocide.

Muneeb: So I think it’s stuff like that when you read material where you have the freedom of choice, like I can go and try and read an Indian author or a Bangladeshi author or a neutral party and then a Pakistani author as well. I think I’ll end up walking away with a better understanding of what might have happened. Worse is if you have very limited sources or limited options, but for me personally that was like, I was old enough, I was like early 20s or so that it suddenly made me start to question any belief that’ll help. That it’s like an eye opener that oh no, the world is not how you think it is. Always be on guard and always be looking out for things that you just missed out on and assume that there are a certain way.

Pomp: There’s a point in most people’s life where they realize there’s a separation between belief and fact. For the most part, some of it is just social control. Some of it is much easier to teach kids with stories than this is the fact. But you grow up believing the stories, so you have belief in things and this is everything from religious to Christmas, all kinds of stuff. And then when you get the facts, all of a sudden you start to question your beliefs and then it makes you almost want more facts, right? You almost become addicted to the facts and it’s, if you tell me every single fact and then I’ll make my own decision.

Pomp: I think that one thing that we tend to hear in the United States in a very Western centric world, it’s a very nationalistic view of the world. So, we’re presented with a set of facts but if you take those same facts and you present them to somebody somewhere else in the world, very different perspective, right? And I think that part of crypto and the beauty of this is this is a global phenomenon. This is technology now empowering, not just access to information and access to choice, but it is allowing people with very different perspectives in life to collaborate and build technology. And so, you who grew up with this state sponsored TV channel have a view on certain things that somebody who didn’t grow up with that don’t have.

Pomp: And so, the simple idea of a powerful government being able to dictate a message has an impact on your views, right? So, I think that there are probably things that you and I believe today that we don’t yet realize are actually inaccurate or we will evolve those thoughts as we get presented with more facts, more access to information, and a more globalist view, right?

Muneeb: Absolutely. I think it’s very hard to do that. Like it’s very hard to always be questioning your own beliefs because you also don’t want to cross over and cross the line of paranoia. But I think generally it’s a healthy thing for your brain if you’re just a little bit on your guard all the time.

Pomp: Absolutely. So speaking of that, what is one belief that you have in the crypto space that you think a high degree of other people or high number of other people would disagree with and so it would be a controversial belief.

Muneeb: I’m going to rephrase that. I’m going to rephrase that-

Pomp: You have to answer it though.

Muneeb: It’s the same question but I’m going to rephrase it to what’s the one belief that I had that if I tweet about it, people are going to start yelling at me.

Pomp: Okay, perfect.

Muneeb: I think that belief is that regulation might not be bad for the industry. I think again, all the anarchist and people who are on one end of the spectrum in the space might disagree that no, this is why we came to crypto to begin with and no good can come out of regulations. But, I just think that not all regulations exist. Some of the regulations exist for good reason. I completely understand that things become bureaucratic or a long time some of the things that needed to exist 50 years ago, 100 years ago, they might not make sense today.

Muneeb: But I think it’s a spectrum and I’m somewhere in the middle of the spectrum than on either end. I actually think that where we are today, crypto has such a bad reputation in the general press that it’s actually holding us back to reach the prod markets and just like a broader user base, because of this clash almost or this story that is being painted in the media that here are a bunch of anarchists who are fighting with governments, here are a bunch of people who want to have these crypto tokens that cannot be taxed or regulators can come down and scrutinize these projects because they don’t know where the creators are and so on and so forth. I don’t think that’s healthy for the ecosystem.

Pomp: Give me an example of a piece of regulation you think would be good for the industry that maybe other people would disagree with?

Muneeb: I think, again, there’s something on which I cannot get too specific, but let’s just say that there’s a lot of discussion about utility tokens, that these tokens are like arcade tokens and you need them to go play an arcade game, right? So there is no reasons for regulators who come in and try and regulate these tokens because that just doesn’t make sense. But I think if you look at the reality on the ground, usually these tokens are being developed by a team, usually under a corporation. Without that corporation, these tokens wouldn’t be worth anything or the protocol would never get developed.

Muneeb: So, if the regulators are coming in and asking questions, there are good reasons for doing that because there is actually so much bad behavior going on in the industry in general that it’s giving us a bad name.

Pomp: Absolutely.

Muneeb: So I think just because something has a utility and it looks more like a arcade token doesn’t mean that under certain circumstances, some regulations don’t apply.

Pomp: Yeah, the example I usually use and I think this is what you’re saying is, so imagine if somebody wanted to build an arcade, right? They said to potential investors give me money and I will give you arcade tokens. I then take your money and while you’re hoarding the arcade tokens, I go and I buy a piece of land, I start a business, I build a building, right? I build out the arcade and on day one, I open the doors and I say, hey, congratulations, I use your money and I built this business, come use your arcade tokens. The idea that those arcade tokens are securities when you’re using them probably doesn’t fly because they’re an arcade token. You’re using it, you’re getting value out of it, right? All this stuff.

Pomp: The idea that you gave me money and I went and I built all this stuff with it and you have no ownership or no claim to, I think is a bad investment opportunity. So I think teams have actually done a pretty job in terms of their documentation explicitly saying you have no ownership, this is not that. They really are putting the disclaimers in, but I think that where the question becomes is if I am selling you as a potential investor these arcade tokens, and I don’t deliver on what I said, again, where’s the line? What repercussions should you have even if it is not equity, right? If you do not have any recourse, that is a huge incentive for bad acting, right? Because you basically gave me the money and I just don’t feel like doing it anymore.

Pomp: Well, that’s not a good situation for you and I think that that’s where regulators are really worried about is there’s money transacting or changing hands, how do we protect the people who are giving up money in exchange for these arcade tokens etc.

Muneeb: Yeah, I think that’s a great example for the arcade token versus actually the act of building something that starts having a utility down the road.

Pomp: Yeah, for sure. What company do you think is one of or the most important company to this kind of sustainability of crypto over the next to 10, 15 years.

Muneeb: I feel like I’m a little bit biased in the sense that I always end up giving the answers Zcash and Filecoin and mostly because I’m pretty close with both Zooko and Juan. For me, the reason is a little bit like they understand what the challenges are and they’re pretty much grounded in both kind of like the technical limitations and they understand what an enormous challenge it is to get any of these things working or long run and get them in the hands of millions of people. Whereas I feel like without taking any names, usually if I’m at a crypto event, there’s a lot of excitement but it’s a little bit disconnected both from technical realities and market realities. So I think those two people, they have already done great work. I feel like that they will continue to do so.

Pomp: Got it. So this is an interesting point, what you’re really talking about here is there’s the technological success, right? So, you have to build something that works. When you do that, it really only matters if people actually use the working technology, right? If you build something that works and nobody uses, it doesn’t really matter if it works or not, right?

Muneeb: I think in 2016, I raised some red flags on like scalability of blockchains. I said that, without taking names, there are certain projects out there that if you look at the technology, it just simply does not scale to the extent that, it wouldn’t even get a million users on the platform. Two years down the road, now I think at least that challenge is well understood. If you’re in crypto, everyone is now, yeah, blockchains don’t scale and now they’re a bunch of projects we’re working on. Like some capital went in, people are now trying to solve that problem.

Muneeb: Like similarly, I think that’s just like one particular problem with one particular layer of what we’re trying to build. There are other challenges like that that are not getting enough attention. I usually have respect for people that are aware of those limitations and they’re actually very few.

Pomp: Absolutely. How do you think the user adoption is going to play out for the D apps, right? So these decentralized applications that are being built on top of blockchains, let’s say that the technology gets solved. So products work, there’s a scalable solution that’s in place that we can go from no users to billions of users. How do teams think about that today and what do you think is going to be the successful path to really get that adoption?

Muneeb: So I think on the technology/infrastructure side, I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we’re going to stay in that phase for a while. We at Blockstack have roughly done like four years of R&D work just on that problem.

Pomp: On the infrastructure …

Muneeb: Infrastructure scalability specifically. We have taken the work we’ve done and we’ve taken it to traditional distributors and researchers and have published that at peer reviews venues. So I feel like fairly confident that the work that we have done it got the approval of what I considered the experts in those particular problems, and our new new blockchain would actually scale out much better than some of the existing solutions that you would see out there. That’s not it.

Muneeb: I alluded to this earlier there’s not just the problem of the blockchain there. It’s also about discovery. Like how do you actually discover, if you’re not putting data inside the blockchain, you’re putting it somewhere else, how do you discover where that data is and is that reliable? Would it scale out if millions of people are actually trying to now discover these pointers to do different location, and then persistent storage. Like you get free services from Google and Facebook. What you don’t see as these massive factories and these massive armies of engineers that they have that are working day and night to keep that data reliable so that you can access it in a really fast way. You need to solve those problems in the decentralized world.

Muneeb: I feel confident that in the next year or two, we would start emerging from this infrastructure phase and the next two challenges in my mind, one is this idea of user education and the UX of these decentralized applications. People have no idea what private keys are. People, their tolerance for going through onboarding steps is not that high, right? So it needs to be like super easy for anyone to sign up. It needs to be super for people to understand like what my credentials are, how can I reuse them, what happens if I lose access. Everyone’s used to just saying like, hey, I forgot my password, send me a new one. Those are some like classic things that everyone talks about. But I feel like one thing that we don’t talk about that much is what’s the utility of the decentralized apps. Like is it just the fact that it’s decentralized? So what?

Pomp: I literally tell people all the time, I say, just because it’s decentralized doesn’t mean anyone cares, right? Would you agree that you have to, if you want to displace Facebook with a decentralized version, you have to build a better Facebook that also is decentralized or do you think that the decentralization with a comparable product is enough to get people to move?

Muneeb: I think it has to be equal or better.

Pomp: Equal or better, okay.

Muneeb: But some functionality that Facebook cannot give you today. That functionality actually gives utility to people.

Pomp: Interesting. That makes sense. In this decentralized world, how do you think about leadership? So I’ll give you an example. Ethereum is considered a decentralized network. There’s plenty of people who I’m sure will yell at us for even mentioning that and there’s probably people who will agree with us. But Vitalik is seen as a leader if not the leader of this network. And so, there is still some single points of centralization, even if it might not be in true governance, right? But he is the leader. How does that evolve over time, if we’re going to build truly decentralized networks? Do we always have to have a pseudonymous leader with Bitcoin and Satoshi or is there a world where kind of leadership as we know it today can interact with these decentralized networks and that’s okay?

Muneeb: So one thing I’ve seen in open source products in general, this is outside of crypto that generally the concept of benevolent dictator ends up working pretty well. Like someone that has authority, not because of anything legal or-

Pomp: Social capital.

Muneeb: Just because of their social capital or people believing in what that person is saying, it tends to work out pretty well. Plus like market pressure on the technology where you could fork it and something else can happen. Those are like checks and balances on the leadership team. I think like in general, the trade offs are that if you’re a startup, not a crypto startup, like straight up traditional company with a strong leadership, you can actually move fast, you can build things and there are a lots of benefits for that.

Muneeb: On one side, you have cases like Bitcoin. No one knows who Satoshi is or [inaudible 01:00:00] like who those people are. And then at the same time, they are so decentralized that it’s very hard for them to agree on any single thing. There are benefits of that approach and maybe for what Bitcoin is trying to do, that’s the right approach for that technology. But I think in general, my view is that you need certain organizations in an ecosystem that have strong leaders and that can actually move fast and build stuff. But because there are multiple organizations and multiple parties with different amounts of control and power, that keeps like a check and balance on any single entity in that ecosystem.

Pomp: I think that makes sense. You can almost have different types or you can have decentralized companies, the decentralized companies, and if you build the entire ecosystem correctly, they coexist and are both successful.

Muneeb: And speaking of ecosystem, I think that’s a change in mindset that a lot of people need to have. Like also, like entrepreneurs who are thinking of starting companies here, you really need to start thinking about how to build an ecosystem and not how to build a startup. You will actually find a lot of advice out there from Silicon Valley or VCs about how to build a company. I don’t think there’s any advice out there about how to build thriving ecosystems and that is something that we will start seeing more and more of.

Pomp: When you’re talking about ecosystem, you’re talking more about the community and the networks and all these things that tie in around a project that can help make it successful?

Muneeb: Yeah. Let’s take Ethereum for example. There are many companies. There’s Consensus here in New York, there’s the Ethereum foundation, there are the [inaudible 01:01:41] people and then there are other companies who started like either Ethereum events or started consulting with different governments. There are people actually poured a lot of capital into it. People who formed funds, and there are developers who started building smart contracts or applications on top of Ethereum. These are like different entities but they all kind of need each other, right?

Muneeb: So if someone is trying to design kind of like a crypto ecosystem, you would end up having similar needs that you need capital sources. You need developers, you need people to build on your platform and then your platform itself needs to be decentralized, so there might be multiple entities that are needed to actually contribute to the core platform.

Muneeb: Those are very different challenges from A, I want to start a company, I’m going to hire an executive team, I’m going to hire engineers. That’s something I feel like where we as an industry would evolve and best practices might emerge or people might start passing guidelines to younger entrepreneurs and so on, just like what happened in Silicon Valley in the late 90s and so on.

Pomp: The transfer of information experience, it’s super important. What do you do on a daily or a weekly basis that you think is important in terms of forming your opinions about the space?

Muneeb: I feel like, I’m actually, this is a personal thing that I’ve been actively trying to disconnect from everything. Like this is, it might sound stupid that when I tweet, I have to first install the Twitter app. I tweet and then I delete the app.

Pomp: Why that? Explain that?

Muneeb: I just can’t take the notifications, I can’t take the feed and there’s no other way of doing this. In general, what I’ve noticed is that we are just like hyper connected all the time and we are not even realizing it. So, even if I, it’s not like I’m going somewhere and having like sitting in a corner having deep thoughts about the industry. Just by disconnecting, actually sometimes give you a better perspective when you come back or when somebody tells you that, oh, this happened and that happened, if you were not like too deep in the day to day, like something might appear strange to me which might not appear strange to me if I was like very actively participating in and it’s like, oh, yeah, everyone’s doing it this way.

Muneeb: So I don’t know if it’s a good strategy, but it’s a strategy that I’ve been I’ve been trying to apply for the last six or eight months.

Pomp: Is it just Twitter or is it kind of technology in general?

Muneeb: No, I don’t read any news. I unsubscribed from every single thing. It’s also about like just generally, I try to minimize information flow coming to me and there are people at Blockstack, if there’s a lunch conversation going on, I would just pick up on something and just hear their version of what’s going on.

Pomp: Absolutely. Has that changed your perception of the accuracy of the news? So if you used to, let’s say, read the news every day and you’re kind of following a story or some sort of trend at detail versus, you’re at lunch and you hear just that one conversation and it’s coming from somebody that you know, what’s the difference there in terms of like how you perceive that information?

Muneeb: I think that made me realize that for that approach to work, you need to surround yourself with really, really good people. Jude Nelson, he did a PhD with me at Princeton as well, and he’s one of the core developers on Blockstack. And I feel like I get summaries of what other projects are doing from him, but because I trust him blindly, I know that this 10 minute 15 minute conversation would fill me in on like 60, 70 percent of what that project is up to. And if I’m interested I can like take a deeper dive myself. But absolutely, like if you’re relying on other people for information, then who those people are become extremely, extremely important.

Pomp: Absolutely. That makes sense. What’s been your biggest surprise over the last three, four years that you guys have been building in the space in terms of what’s already occurred? What happened that you didn’t expect?

Muneeb: I think a lot of people in crypto kind of take this recent uptick in price and the amount of capital that came in as like, oh, we always knew that was going to happen. But taking a long enough timeline, I think we should take a moment to appreciate that open source software never got any funding. Researching new protocols never got any funding. Like I remember writing 100 page grant application for the for NSF for something like I think 400k out of which 60% would have gone to Princeton as overhead for managing the grant. So you’re roughly talking about like 100k to go off and do research on new protocols.

Muneeb: Whereas if you look at the number of projects, we’re coming up with ambitious new ideas and people are just throwing money at it like real capital to the extent that some of the projects, I was having a discussion with Juan about potentially funding research centers. Like we are at a position where we can actually fund actual research at top universities. I think taking a moment to realize that just two years ago there was an event Decentralize Web Summit that recently happened In San Francisco and it’s by the Internet Archive guys. They did a great job of like inviting Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, like some of the actual internet fathers and putting them in the same room as some of these crypto projects and they did the same thing in 2016 as well.

Muneeb: I was just remembering that in 2016 Zcash didn’t launch. Zooko was still was still working on Least Authority and transitioning to Zcash. Juan with Filecoin and us, we were both graduates of YCombinator from 2014. We both had seed rounds of like roughly like a million dollars. Very small projects, just two years ago, and then something happened last year where there was this like crazy amounts of capital coming into the ecosystem. So many projects starting, so many people getting interested. I don’t think that the industry deserved it or that we earned it. It’s something that just happened and I think we need to take a moment to realize that we should be grateful and we should try to act responsibly for what we would do with this opportunity that we have now.

Pomp: Very interesting. So last question for you. What is nobody working on that you think needs to get built?

Muneeb: I think there’s a lot of talk of the decentralized web. Different projects kind of like have their own disconnected internets almost. I don’t see an effort where someone is trying to build either like a search engine that goes across all these different sources and gives a unified experience to the end user. Imagine like what the early search engines like AltaVista did for the early internet users, like they were the gateway to all the information. So a search engine that looks up information on let’s say if it’s on IPFS or Swarm or Blockstack or anywhere else and becomes kind of like a window for these new users. I don’t think I’ve seen a project.

Pomp: A true index where you can even actually get[inaudible 01:10:23]. That makes sense, man. You can ask me one question and then we’ll end this thing.

Muneeb: I have a very basic question. I feel like, you appeared on Twitter as like a storm and suddenly it’s very hard to actually avoid thoughts coming from you. How did you get into this ecosystem? But more importantly, what drives you because one thing I appreciate about you is that your tweets are always like full of energy. My question is always like what drives you and how did you get into this?

Pomp: So getting into it, we were early stage investing and we started to see more and more founders that wanted to start companies looking at the space, again the technology. And the aha for me, was a one or two of our companies had some of their top talent leave. And so, you fund a company and next thing you know, whatever top engineer leaves, you’re like, what’s going on that I don’t know. It was less about they were running from something and they were running to something.

Pomp: Somebody early on had told me, follow the talent, follow the money. So we started looking and this is 2016 or so, right? Kind of beginning of 2016, and we just kind of like I don’t get how an investor plays in this space. It really was coming down to a lot of the investment opportunities at the time that we we’re picking up where these ICOs. And so, going back to that arcade example I didn’t want to give people money for them to go buy the land, build the building, build the business, and then I just can go use the arcade tokens.

Pomp: And so, we started out mining. This idea that I’m very familiar with the data center business, and so that I could take a piece of hardware, stick it in a space, put power, and then have a subscription cash flow model and not deal with customers was super interesting. Because it’s basically better mining or a better data center business. And so, as we started to build that, it was in hindsight very valuable but we didn’t plan for it to be because it allows you to then discover the rest of the ecosystem. So the example I use is, well, if you’re mining, then you’ve got to ask yourself what do I do with the tokens? Well, I’ve got to get a wallet. So okay, where do I get a wallet? And then once you get the tokens in the wallet, should I sell them into Fiat? Should I hold them in what I’m mining? Should I diversify? What are my other options? So you start discovering other projects, and you kind of just slowly in a very serendipitous way discover a lot of this stuff.

Pomp: I don’t know if that’s possible if you start on kind of the opposite end of the spectrum, right? If you start from the liquid tokens etc, for us it was very natural to start at really the base layer of the infrastructure. I wish that we could say that we meant to do that but we didn’t. And so I think that that was an interesting way to do it. Through most of 16, I didn’t have enough confidence to talk intelligently about a lot of it, right? Because I think that it was one of these things where okay, I know that we’re mining and I get that business because we’re doing it but could I really describe in detail what that machine is doing? Probably not.

Pomp: I think that once I started to gain that confidence of talking about it, I’d tweet once, tweet twice and then I’d realize, oh wow, people care about this, right? You see the engagement etc. All of a sudden, I just said, look, I think that we’re going to spend a bunch of time here and let’s really double down.

Pomp: So the stuff on Twitter was really, a lot of people in the space are technologists. They speak at an incredibly intelligent level but a lot of jargon and it’s a lot of kind of deep thoughts etc. And I said, I’m not technical like that, but I have just enough intelligence where I think I can understand the high level concept. I can’t hang with the engineer and describe it in detail, but I get the concept. I can take that concept and I can share it, I bet you there’s a bunch of people like me out there who would love to understand these concepts at a high level and how they apply to their world. So when I started sharing that, I think that kind of drew a bigger audience and then the really kind of tipping point for me was understanding, sounds very similar to you that you don’t have to be an anarchist to believe that a lot of this will happen, right? And actually, there is a freedom to saying what everyone else is thinking.

Pomp: I really do credit a lot of, kind of on Twitter, so if you see the things that everyone engages with, these tweets that explode, it’s because I’m just saying what people think. The one that always cracks my partners up is when I say the currency of choice of money launderers, terrorists, criminals around the world is the US dollar. Well, that’s just an aggregate data based fact. You can make data say whatever you want and all this stuff. But a lot of people who actually believe that because it’s true, and so when you say it, they’re like wow, I can’t believe he said that, and then they engage with it and it takes off.

Pomp: The flip side or the negative side of that is there a lot of things I want to say and there are a lot of things you want to say. You do learn to say a lot of it but there’s some things that just not worth saying. But I do think that that aha around Twitter really drove a lot of the growth and the engagement. Frankly, Twitter’s probably been the best tool for when I put these ideas out. I’m sure just like you, I get people who absolutely love it and they agree and they think it’s this great idea. And I get people who literally think that I’m an idiot, and it’s the dumbest thing they’ve heard on Twitter. And then they tweet that at me. You’re an idiot. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today.

Pomp: So, what it does is it allows these ideas to go through like some attrition and really kind of get beat up and see where your beliefs are once you watch all these different people respond. And then it’s brought a lot of people. So, people will reach out and say, hey, I saw you said this. I disagree, I agree and all this stuff. It’s a very interesting way of engaging on a topic but I think that, my thoughts have evolved a little bit of like, Twitter and the internet and this decentralized world is a little bit like a coffee shop. Rather than in the 90s and early 2000s in Silicon Valley, everyone goes to the same coffee shop and they talk and there’s all these exchanges of ideas and collision of people in relationships etc. Well now everyone for the most part, if you’re a user of Twitter, you get the opportunity to participate in that to some degree, which I think is powerful but it allows people to go from completely off the map to well connected very quickly.

Muneeb: And just to go back full circle on how I’ve been consuming information these days, this actually came up in those lunch conversations where someone brought up something you said on Twitter and someone brought up on a different day. I’m like, wait a minute, who’s this guy. And then I actually went and looked you up, but it’s been a pleasure. It was great connecting with you on Twitter.

Pomp: Absolutely. Hopefully at least one of them said I was smart, the other said I was stupid. So you got both sides of the argument there. But thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate this. I think that hopefully this was helpful to a lot of people and you’ve got a very unique view of the world. So keep going because I think a lot of us are cheering for you.

Muneeb: Awesome. Thank you so much. This was fun.

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You can find the recording here: Off The Chain Podcast: Anthony Pompliano and Muneeb Ali

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