“It’s just such a shame that they all got rich.”

Hi frens,

What’s your impression of web3/crypto people or OG (Original Gangster, early investor of crypto)?

The title is a quote from geohot, a famous hacker for Sony PlayStation 3 and iPhone jailbreaking, and currently running AI companies.

This interview is from Lex Fridman, which I admire a lot. He always asks hard questions, philosophical conversations, with engineer’s point of view.

Here’s the transcription, starting from 1:47:19 in the interview:

Lex: I think crypto is just carrying the flame of that spirit, of stuff should be decentralized.

Geohot: It’s just such a shame that they all got rich. If you took all the money out of crypto, it would have been a beautiful place. But no, I mean these people, they sucked all the values out of it and took it.

Lex: Yeah, money kind of corrupts the mind, somehow. And because it’s…

Geohot: It corrupts all of the crypto, you had coins worth of billions of dollars that had zero use.

(A long pause.)

Lex: You still have a hope for crypto?

Geohot: Sure. I have a hope for the ideas. I really do. I want the US dollar to collapse.

First of all, it’s a long interview about AI. They did not go deep into crypto topics.

But it resonated me a lot. Currency is a mysterious thing that carries values, while cryptocurrency is a revolution for fiat currency. Early adopters earn a lot, in the same capitalism.

It’s really hard to reasonably compare value creation. I don’t know how to do that. But as an iOS app developer, heading for web3 world, I was really impressed how little the web3 industry has done, and how much Apple Vision Pro has done for a bet, while still not knowing whether it’ll succeed.

There’s still a lot of work to be done. Let’s BUIDL, and stay tuned.

Your friend,

Denken