Welcome!
Hi! Thank you so much for having me.
No worries, I’m Natassja from Diversity in Blockchain, and this is our ChainChat series. We ask each guest to leave a question for the next question. It doesn’t have to be remotely related to blockchain, most have been, but the one for you is not. It’s this: What would be your go-to karaoke song?
Nothing Else Matters by Metallica, maybe.
Good choice! Would you call yourself a singer?
Kind of! I studied music for maybe 12 years. Certainly, I know something! But I’m not a singer at all.
So we won’t ask for a sample…
Sings* And nothing else matters…
A for effort! Tell us a bit more about yourself. What is your interest in blockchain and Web3?
Thank you for asking that. I was born in Venezuela, and as you may know, Venezuela is a very interesting case from an economical standpoint. Also, many people use it as a reference in catastrophic events regarding economics. A lot of things are not right in my country. I was born in 1994, and I was born in a breakthrough in history regarding government. So I lived through the transition from a capitalistic model to a more communistic model. I remember my freedom being constrained. Growing up, it was very obvious that a technology that enables freedom or that at least can be a counter-proposal for the system is something important. I remember having the possibility to go to the US and change the local currency freely for US dollars and traveling around. Then the US started losing all of those freedoms. So people started using blockchain technology. South America became some of the top users of blockchain technology, not because of early adopter geeks, but out of necessity. Blockchain technology has been a game changer because I know its value in enabling non-censored systems or alternatives to the status quo or more regulated fiat systems. For me, blockchain makes sense because it enables freedom, and there is a relationship between true blockchain, core values, and freedom. Blockchain is important because freedom is important. That’s kind of the surface-level summary.
I’m interested in this as I studied some different Spanish modules at University, one of which was politics in Latin America. And just recently, reading the news as well about Venezuela — correct me if I’m wrong on any of this — but due to corruption and people not being able to access basic things, including their own money in bank accounts, it makes sense that they would opt for using cryptocurrencies for example that are decentralized. It seems like a massive benefit if you can’t solve the problem of corruption at source. Like a way around it until the problems are sorted out at a political level. A challenging situation for Venezuela at the moment, right?
Absolutely. When you’re in the scenario of hyper-devaluation in a local currency, the fluctuation in the price of Bitcoin, for example, is a much better scenario. Rather than having the local currency in your bank. We are talking about a case that few people have lived through history, and that’s something good. In the morning, something has a price, and in the afternoon, you have another price.
Are you saying that the fluctuations in the value of cryptocurrency are less stark or noticeable than the local currency fluctuations?
Absolutely. Yes. Cryptocurrency fluctuates in such a way that it can go up or down. You don’t have a stable point. But with the local currency in hyper-devaluation, the trend is always downward. It’s better to have something that fluctuates than something that just goes down. So cryptocurrency has solved different issues in South America. First of all, depending on the protocol — you can argue that Bitcoin is not centralized or this protocol is more centralized than another. That’s a more technical conversation. But just talking overall, taking into account the core values of the Bitcoin whitepaper, the first paragraph. “A peer-to-peer network without the need for a central party or an issuer….” That solved very key and critical issues. When you live in a country like Venezuela or many other countries in the region, you have the issue of being unable to access your money for whatever reason. It is common. You have to explain to the bank why you want to withdraw your money, and they put limits on that. You can’t change it or buy dollars freely. If you want to protect yourself from devaluation, you must overcome many imposed hurdles and limitations. When you have a broken country, many people or relatives live elsewhere, and they can’t easily send you money. So crypto allows you to have an option against devaluation, instead of this devaluation that is just a clear trend down when we talk about fiat. You can change your money. You can sell it. Ten years ago, we used LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer platform where you can sell your Bitcoin and receive cash or other options to trade crypto for fiat. It was convenient. And also sending money from country to country. Crypto solved multiple issues.
Would you say from the point of view of diversity that crypto has enabled more people to have access to financial services, at least in Venezuela?
I try to always think of and analyze the world from a programmer's point of view. An engineer. I like to be precise. For example, if we try to define diversity, it’s impossible to be objective, and we’re entering a subjective realm. What I believe, and I’m not saying I have the truth, I have my version and perception of the world. However, we can say that many blockchain protocols are permissionless, so whoever has access to the internet can download a wallet and interact with protocols that are impossible to censor and are equal in front of every wallet. For example, if you interact with a DApp, every single wallet interacts with the same contract. There is no way to make a preference for one or another. If it does, we know it because the code is open. It is deployed in the blockchain, and everyone can read the code. If, for some reason, it’s not fair, people will stop using it. Or someone else will fork it and create a better version. In that sense, we have 100% diversity. The antithesis of diversity is censorship. When you discriminate against people, you define who can access certain sets of benefits. But blockchain technology is designed in such a way that every single person can interact with open-code protocols in the same way. By default, it’s diverse.
You’ve explained it really well.
In Lagos, 70% of people use blockchain technology.
Crypto specifically?
Nigeria is a very interesting case in point. I have had the opportunity to work with many people from Nigeria in the agency. The government tried to ban crypto, but the adoption rate is so high there they are unable to. It’s too late. They made it illegal, but people don’t care. So we are living in a very interesting period of time. At the end of the day, the status quo is a common illusion. It’s a meta-reality we choose to create. Currencies have value because the person who is receiving the note believes it has value. But it’s paper. We understand the underlying value because we believe someone else will accept that value and the other person the same, and so on. But if you have an example like in Nigeria where every single person agrees that cryptocurrency has value, I don’t care if the government says otherwise because I know my friend will accept it. Once the government loses that power of coercion, I think we are in a transition. And that’s something beautiful about studying history. We have been traveling around different power models based on eras. Once we were nomads, we tried to organize ourselves as feudal societies, and then kingdoms, now countries, multiple alliances like the European Union, and different configurations. But they’ve all been power configurations to adapt to certain periods and needs. I truly believe that now we are moving toward a different configuration. In every single stage in history, the transition happened in such a way that the previous version of power always opposed the new one. We will eventually see peer-attacked crypto. Right now, the structure is designed so that the people who issue the currency have immense leverage. Big institutions set the rules. But if people don’t want to play that game and start using another system or migrating it, they will try to stop it at some point. I believe the adoption is not high enough that it is an existential threat. When there is a kingdom, and you have a tiny feudal system, then the kingdom tries to absorb the tiny town with a feudal structure, like:
-Now you have a king!
-What? This is my territory, and I don’t have a king.
-Yes, you do, and you will pay taxes.
It’s always been like that. Or, for example, the native Americans who had been living here forever, and the other guys came around like: Now, this is not your land! So obviously, friction and differences in power have always been there. And I truly believe that crypto has not yet posed an existential threat to the system, so much so that the system tried to destroy it. I think that will happen, though. In the right timeframe, crypto is an existential threat to the system's status quo.
You’ve explained the concept super eloquently, it sounds exactly how I interpret it, but I wouldn’t be able to explain it so well. What is your current profession, and what’s your current involvement in blockchain?
Those are different questions with different answers. I studied at college. First music, but my parents met at college studying economical sciences, and both are economists. I started reading economics literature at age four. My mother was working for the national bank, they had kid literature, and I remember being four years old and talking about money. I’ve been very intense. I had this — how do you say it — like a worm inside of your head.
¿El gusanillo, no?
Exactly. Who creates money? I had an itch or an urge to find that out. We design our life around money. We live where we live, have the friends we have, experience the experiences we have, the food we eat, the education we access, everything is because of money. With more money, your whole ecosystem changes. With less money, it changes. Your reality is calibrated based on how much money you can access and deploy. So money is important. And since I was a kid, I’ve been asking, Who creates money? And What is money? Money is not a number. It’s not the paper. It’s a deeper concept. Once you start studying it, you discover things like the Medici family — the first ones to print notes and decide how it was distributed. How the fractional banking system was run. How you use it to incentivize people to move in certain ways. How you use it to shape society. Long story short, I studied economics not for the degree but for the interest, then realized that what I wanted was not at college. I quit and tried to pursue a business. In the blockchain, I help different projects to get user acquisition. But for me, it’s not about marketing. It’s about helping change the world with my knowledge and expertise. For a while, I tried to pursue a specific business model, kind of a startup, it failed, but I learned a lot, and then I started my venture as an entrepreneur. I didn’t have very clear ideas, but I knew I wanted to change the world. You know, when you are naive and idealistic and have a feeling, you shape that feeling into concrete steps and figure it out along the way. Koettum is the name of my agency, and it’s based on the Latin word coetus, the craft of artists that create statues. Content creation services for different niches, and then I thought, What if I use this knowledge to help projects that actually have resonance in values? Because when you help a brand to sell more soaps or t-shirts, it’s nice, but what if we use the same tools and expertise to help projects that are changing the world and enabling freedom? We changed our agency to serve the crypto space.
There are a lot of protocols and projects that are making a difference. Can you think of any that stick out for you?
If you read the whitepapers, you have amazing ideas. Many of the cool ones are a copy/paste of a previous one, they make a tiny change, and right now, we are in a very immature industry. When I said I have a very eclectic journey, I am also a web developer, not a top one, but a decent one. It’s more of a hobby. I went through a couple of boot camps. So I understand the status of the industry. I’m a fanatic and love it, but I also understand where we are. So when you study the systems, you understand you have the database where you store the data. Then you have the different protocols that enable you to create a user interface. Right now, the blockchain industry is in the very early stages, and the database layer, the fundamental layer of this new stack… All this new blockchain, Metaverse stuff, no. It’s 95% of the Web2 stack, the same technology, HTTP protocols, and the same structure, just with a database connection. In most scenarios, the data is in Web2-style formats, and then a tiny section is deployed in the blockchain. The reality is most blockchains don’t have the capability to be used at a mass scale.
Are they not capable of supporting heavy loads of data, are we saying?
Exactly. How fast you can make individual transactions, and much more about the data itself, like how big the files are. We are in the very early stages. Many people have huge ideas, but we don’t have the technical capability to match those ideas with blockchain technology. We have interesting people, Vitalik Buterin, for example, and obviously, Charles Hoskinson, all of them have an ideal, rather than something concrete at hand.
If I understand correctly, I think I agree that the bottom layer, if you like, this data layer is still in its early stages. Then on top of that, we have the whole user interface thing, which is quite tech-focused, so for somebody coming in new, even as a user, they don’t understand the concept and much less the technology behind it, so I feel there’s a gap to bridge there. There’s a lot to do still.
Everything. Someone saying I’m learning crypto… I don’t know if it’s a baby. It’s like a fetus. Because a baby can breathe by itself, and it’s a whole being. If we establish that Web3 is a being, it has a head, lungs, a heart… a whole being. OK, we don’t have a whole new being. We just have maybe the heart.
The soul is there!
From an ideological standpoint, I feel some level of resonance with Charles Hoskinson. If you read the first paragraph of the Bitcoin whitepaper, it establishes very wisely… I don’t know who Satoshi is, but he’s a genius. I’m not just talking about the technical standpoint. Obviously, the system is genius, but also the clarity when it comes to philosophical ideas. A peer-to-peer system with an issuer. It’s so simple, but so simple, that people don’t understand how powerful it is. Most new and fast, and better blockchain protocols compromise those fundamentals. If you have a more effective, faster protocol that is not decentralized, it’s the whole point of having a commodity versus security. In most cases, you have a team of developers that have the protocol's future in their hands and are the only ones who can deploy the new code. They’re the ones that can fork the new system and create a new version… I love Ethereum, but they could not create a robust enough system. And they have been forking it. If there is a centralization of power, that is something different. You are not doing it in the way it was described in that first paragraph. It is not decentralized. It is centralized, and it’s OK because we’re building it in such a way that in the future, in the future, it will be decentralized, and we will have DAOs. Right now, at this point in history, we don’t have any truly Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. DAOs are a shared box of recommendations.
Because of the distribution of power and the influence of certain power? Because maybe you can say everybody in a DAO has an equal say, but there will always be people who have something of value and can therefore influence and leverage more power, maybe? I don’t know, I’ve not thought about it too much yet, but you’re making me think.
From a technical standpoint, it’s extremely complex. I truly believe we have good actors, and they want to create and develop these protocols. But it’s an ongoing process. At the end of the day, we don’t have the A to B. We are trying to put the pieces together. I had this personal experience. I trusted Do Kwon and Terra Protocol. For me, it was very interesting. Obviously, the 20% in this anchor protocol was not sustainable. I thought they would make it more sustainable, but everything disappeared. The Terra Luna project basically collapsed. I mean, we have very interesting people in the space. I believe most of them want to do things the right way, but we are trying to restructure the world’s entire technological ecosystem, which is challenging. Going back, do I believe we have good actors? Yes. Will I recommend any project? It’s very hard.
What about where do you go for your information? I’m assuming we’re all learning new things every day. Where do you go for new information?
Here is the issue. People are fans of dopamine. People love dopamine and easy answers. But the reality is the world is quite complex, and you can’t dumb down the world to your understanding. So the reality is complex. To understand how blockchain disrupts society, you have to understand society in the first place. We have to go to the very fundamentals. It’s like, we have to understand history. And if we want to understand the philosophical implications, we must have a baseline understanding of philosophy. Go to basics. Go to Plato and read Republic. Go to Thomas Hobbes and read Leviatán. Go to George Orwell and read 1984.
Nobody has ever given me that answer to that question. But I’m totally on your wavelength with the whole philosophical point of view!
It’s hard to understand where we are now if you don’t understand the before. Like Google Maps. If you zoom in and out, you can see where a city is in the bigger picture. If you zoom out, you can picture it. OK, here we are, in this city, it’s in this continent. Now with this new technology, why is this different from the previous technology? It’s hard to understand Web3 if you don’t understand Web2. How Web2 is created, which are the ports. The database, the user interface, and these protocols. What is money? How is it created? Why is Blockchain disruptive? Oh, because it doesn't have an issuer or central party. Do we have any point in history as a reference for this? No, we don’t. And why is this important? If we go back to Plato and Socrates talking about the ideal society, they were talking about a virtuous man called a citizen, which is not the same definition we have now. If you go back to 2,400 years ago and read the definition of a citizen, it’s very different. Back then, it was somebody who understood his role with virtue. He was responsible for understanding society and using his power in the wisest way possible. So we have these historic people trying to solve complex issues in the polis, and they were the ones who were able to deploy their power in the best way possible. These are the citizens. They were saying the ideal society is one where all the citizens are able to come to a consensus to define the protocols of the polis. They had a technical constraint, so they had to create a structure where people had to delegate their power. But that is a degradation of the ideology for the right structure. So they create the idea of a republic. It’s like the degradation that is viable due to technical constraints. But the interesting thing is taking the same conclusions Plato and Socrates had then and realizing now we have different technical capabilities. In the right timeframe, with the blockchain technology philosophy, we can build the system on the same ideas Plato and Socrates had, and we can create a system where we can all be equal in front of the code.
Nicely explained again.
We can all be equal in front of the code for the first time. We are not equal in front of the law because the law is subjective. We know the law is not applied equally. Applied. It’s written equally but not applied equally. But the code is executed equally by the nodes. We can now say the code is executed equally. We can go back and reframe the same ideals and render them into a very different reality because we now have the technical capabilities. Once you have this bigger picture, you can understand new things with the perspective of old wisdom. That’s powerful.
I’m going to ask you to leave a question for our next guest because of time constraints, even though I’m loving the philosophical standpoint.
Absolutely. I want to know: What is the relationship between Blockchain technology and freedom?
OK! Let’s see how they tackle that one. It’s been really, really, really interesting for me. I will keep up with you on socials. Thank you so much!
My pleasure. Chat soon.