Exclusive Interview with BITCOIN EDUCATOR Dan Held | KBW2023

[Music] this is my first time in South Korea so I think uh you know for me I've been in the crypto space almost 11 years I've spent a bunch of time in Europe obviously I'm from North America you know in the US um for me I knew that the Korean market was huge especially in the 2017 2018 Boom the Korean market became one of the biggest markets in crypto and so for me I wanted to come out and see it for myself so so far it's as big as I thought it was going to be um but only been here for a couple days so I'm excited to explore [Music] more yeah so I mean bitcoin's always been a settlement Network even in the early days hfny looked at Bitcoin so hfny was the first person to ever received a Bitcoin transaction he hypothesized that people wouldn't transact on bitcoin layer one that they would use Bitcoin Banks as he called them or layer twos to be able to transact Bitcoin cheaply so you know Bitcoin you know the payments use case I think was a misguided narrative from the 2013 era and uh We've definitely seen I think people come to realize no Bitcoins a go 2.0 settlement mechanism for large value transactions that can also include for example ordinals on top of Bitcoin which could be very valuable nfts let's say the nft cost $1,000 Bitcoin L1 like any other blockchain L1 should not be used for super cheap everyday payments just because that means your block size has to be larger larger block size reduces the number of nodes and reduces decentralization so I mean you know Bitcoin L1 versus L2 are like what people should use is totally subjective relative to the market I'm not here to dictate what use cases people use Bitcoin for Bitcoin will be used by users of the network for reasons that will solve a problem for them Bitcoin L2 and which L2 might win out I'm not exactly sure you know whether that's like side chains like liquid root stock lightning which is State channels Stacks which is kind of like a gas token all of these things are different ways to approach Bitcoin scaling issue which all blockchains have scaling issues um so I'm not really set on one being the one siiz fitall I think there'll be a variety of different solutions yeah so hyperbitcoinization first has to be defined and it's hard to Define hyperbitcoinization because no one's really fully defined what that means does that mean 50% of the population owns Bitcoin does this mean 100% does it mean that 100% of the population owns Bitcoin and is spending it I think the narrative that makes most sense to me is that Bitcoin is a world Reserve currency akin to Gold that would be hyperbitcoinization where a very high percentage of the population I would say over 50% of Western developed countries and uh and may maybe Asia as well maybe over 50% of them of the population owns Bitcoin as a savings mechanism that's hyperbitcoinization to me a gold 2.0 esque status I think Bitcoin is wildly successful if it hits that now some proponents of Hy hyperbitcoinization say that Bitcoin becomes everything the the all-encompassing money I hope that happens but I think that's a little bit optimistic where you know Bitcoin becomes like everything's priced in SATs you know Bitcoin is used for everyday transactions for everything I think that that might be the era that we hit you know I think it'll take a very long time it take maybe like a generation but I do think hyper bitco Bitcoin isation to me is it hits a go 2.0 esque status and uh yeah yeah ZK rollups I think are going to be really big scaling uh scaling solution for both Bitcoin and etherum and other other chains I think we have you know decentralization going back to the core underpinning of why Bitcoin and blockchain Tech is important is that blockchain Tech was buil to build build Bitcoin and it was built in a way on the bitco coin Network to be the most robust and decentralized as possible so I think we see with government level attacks like the SEC attacking different protocols I think we'll see A Renewed emphasis on decentralization and how to remain decentralized and how to resist government level of tax as these protocols become more and more successful they're going to encounter more and more resistance from these the status quo the big governments and Banks so it is very it'll become I think an increasingly more topic whereas before when the industry was small and no one cared decentralization didn't matter as much not that many almost no governments were attacking it third biggest Trend I would be is more I would say is more around user experience I think in the 17 to 18 19 cycle we still had a relatively small pool of talent uxui designers VC capital and in the 2021 bull market we finally saw I think a big number of of you know really incredible product designers user experience designers come in and reshape and kind of create goys that are more usable for the late person I think those will only get better because right now private Key Management is still really tricky and so I think user experience is still kind of that it's always a persistent Frontier but I think that's the one that needs to be solved the most well I mean if AI is as successful as proponents think it will be which of course it will be someday I just don't know if chat gbg3 or some of the llms you know I don't know if that that will be the AI that really pushes it forward you know I could see that that helping out some things like code review you know for example these uh a more sophisticated artificial intelligence could parse through blockchain code and identify zero day exploits and identify those and that would help the developers patch it before it becomes an issue so that could be really interesting um but you know AI I think will impact a lot of different things I don't think it will have more or less of an impact on the crypto industry more so than in the other industry