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Transcript80 lines
- [00:00]
Bill Laboon
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Bryce
All you good, wonderful citizens of Crypt nation, it is your co host Bryce here, unfortunately not joined by my good buddy Brendan today whose schedule he's got pulled in a million different directions and so he was unable to join us today. So all of you, you folks who are listening, maybe on the way to work or, you know, chilling, chilling at home, you're stuck with just me today, but luckily I've got a great guest who's going to be doing much of the talking. I'm going to sit back, I'm going to be learning all about the polka dot ecosystem from Bill Laboon, who's joining us today, who's the director of education and governance initiatives at the Web3 Foundation. Bill, thanks for joining me today. And how are you doing?
- [00:53]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, thanks for having me, Bryce. I'm doing great. It's a wonderful evening here in Switzerland.
- [00:58]
Bryce
Oh, Switzerland, very nice. I've never been to Switzerland. I heard it's like the most gorgeous country in Europe though. Is that, is that hyperbole?
- [01:08]
Bill Laboon
Not, not at all. It is, it is amazing. Like, you know, you can see the mountains from the roof of our building. You know, there's wonderful like pristine lake in front of it. It looks like a postcard. So you should come. It's the crypto valley here in Zug.
- [01:21]
Bryce
Yeah, I've heard the crypto valley kind of like the play on silicon and. Yes, Switzerland. Right. I mean it's famous for its banking laws, so it, it makes sense that crypto is going to have a big presence in Switzerland or vice versa, that Switzerland has a big presence with crypto. And maybe we'll get into that in a little bit. But, but let's kind of backtrack here. Let's touch on your background just to get our audience acquainted with who they're listening to right now. They might not be understanding that they're going to be getting schooled by a former professor. So get your guys's pens out, turn your phones on silent Bill, take the floor.
- [01:58]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, make sure those pencils are number two pencils for filling in little circles. My name is Bill Laboon. I was originally a software engineer for 15 years before teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, the computer science department. I was a lecturer. So I really, I focused on teaching. I taught what I think is, as far as I know, the first class, like university level class on blockchain in Pittsburgh. You know, edited articles for Ledger, which is journal, academic journal of cryptocurrency. And, but I got, as I was getting more and more into it, I decided I needed to join the industry. So in 2019 I joined Web3 foundation and have been helping, you know, helping polka dot evolve ever since then.
- [02:42]
Bryce
That's awesome. So as a computer science professor, was the class really focused on like hashing and all, you know, concatenation and all these, you know, sort of software engineering terms that make the actual block, blockchain, like the cryptography and the networking all possible, or were you kind of teaching about like trading?
- [03:02]
Bill Laboon
No, no, I'm definitely very much a technical person. So, you know, what you just said probably could have been the syllabus for the class. A lot of, you know, understanding hashing algorithms and how distributed system works. Excuse me? Distributed systems work. What are like sort of the failure modes? What problems is bitcoin? Was bitcoin originally solving as a very bitcoin heavy class when I taught? Since that really was, you know, the 800 pound gorilla especially then. So again, I'm very much a nerd.
- [03:30]
Bryce
No, hey, this is good. We like nerds here. I fancy myself as kind of a nerd. And hey, you got to be a nerd. The nerds are the ones who end up ruling the world, I think. But no, I actually do have a question on the decentralization stuff and you're probably the guy to speak to it like, you know, what is the benefit? Like, if we start from a first principles standpoint of like, why are we all here focusing on building distributed systems for money and for value, what's the big benefit of being distributed or decentralized that we don't really have in the current sort of framework of centralization?
- [04:06]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of benefits and it really, you know, the specific benefits are going to depend upon the, you know, what vertical you're working on, what you're, what you're trying to build. But in general, I think the two big things are neutrality and resilience. And when I say neutrality, I really mean this in a much broader sense. Both neutrality in the sense of the protocol just does what it says. There is no subjective aspect to it. Right now if you try to withdraw your money from a bank, and I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, but someone is probably going to check and see some human is going to make a decision on whether or not you can have your money. If you are using that bank software or any software, Facebook software, Twitter software, you don't know what algorithm is being used to serve you or. So I guess it's X now. Serve you information on X or on Facebook or when you withdraw money, how is it actually being handled? With blockchain, you have that truth, right? So one of our slogans we run the web3summit is less trust, more truth. And I think that's a good one. You don't have to have trust in Facebook, in Meta and Mark Zuckerberg if you want to individualize these things or Elon Musk, you just look at the blockchain, you know what's all right, do X, Y will happen. And I can prove that it did happen. So the other reason for decentralization is resilience is that if you think about again, I'm old school, I've been in Bitcoin, so that's my go to example. Often if you look at bitcoin, you've got thousands of nodes across the world that can run thousands of miners as well. Tens of thousands of nodes likely. And if one of these goes down or a whole system goes down, some data center goes down, it doesn't matter, you connect to another one. Right. Same with, you know, with Polkadot, Ethereum, like any major, these decentralized systems, you don't have these single points of failure that you have. You see, we see quite often with, for instance, you know, all right, Facebook is down today, GitHub is down today, or Twitter is down today. I'm an old school Twitter user. I remember the fail whale. If anyone remembers that would like it would just show a whale when it couldn't access. And this is something you don't hear about Bitcoin being down, about Ethereum being down.
- [06:33]
Bryce
Like, you know, Solana sometimes.
- [06:35]
Bill Laboon
Solana sometimes. Now that's a very different architecture and I'm not saying this, this is a panacea, but you don't hear about blockchains being down nearly as much.
- [06:46]
Bryce
Right.
- [06:47]
Bill Laboon
Like again, there are some exceptions, but if you look at Polkadot, it's been up since 2020 running with zero, you know, zero minutes of downtime. Right. Same with like, you know, Bitcoin or Ethereum. Right. There's been, yes, there are times when blocks are slower, but you have this resilience which I think is really important. So even if you don't care about the privacy or the neutrality, you say, I trust whatever, blockchains are still useful in terms of just ensuring that a system can continue to operate. It's an incredible amount of resilience.
- [07:22]
Thibaut
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- [09:03]
Bryce
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- [09:03]
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- [09:07]
Bryce
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- [09:09]
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- [09:15]
Bill Laboon
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- [09:15]
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- [09:17]
Bryce
I like that. Neutrality and resilience. And I loved your. Your marketing slogan. Less trust, more truth. Less trust, more truth. I think that makes sense that that's what blockchains are really good at. Don't you know the classic don't trust but verify sort of saying a nice little spin on it. So. So okay, you were a professor at Pittsburgh. How did you kind of find blockchain and crypto in the first place? Were you working on some kind of computer Science problem, and you stumbled into it. Did one of your students come to pitch it to you? How did this all come to be. And now you're, you know, kind of heading up some from some very large initiatives at the Web3 Foundation.
- [09:59]
Bill Laboon
Yes. So, actually, again, I have the nerdiest intro to crypto story anyone. So, way, way back in 2010, I was doing a hash algorithm analysis. So I was working on basically how to properly and efficiently distribute data amongst a variety of computers. And one way to do that is take a hash of that data, you know, which should be essentially random. And then, all right, if it's the hashes, this number go here, if this number go here, etc. And someone told me, like, you know, there's this, like, Internet money that uses hashes to make more money. Like, what are you talking about? Like, how does that even make sense? Like, the words, you know, word salad.
- [10:41]
Bryce
You're like, I don't get it.
- [10:42]
Bill Laboon
Exactly. And so. So I actually ended up looking into Bitcoin, like, extremely early, and I said, okay, that's interesting, and then forgot about it for a year or two. And, you know, a friend of mine who's an extreme libertarian then told me, like, hey, I'm using this bitcoin. Like, oh, I remember hearing about that. That's. That took off. And so then I really dug into it and started. Started getting involved, and I really. I just got fascinated with it. Then when Ethereum came out, when smart contracts came out, I mean, you know, smart contracts were technically possible on Bitcoin, but, like, Ethereum made it so much easier.
- [11:19]
Bryce
Yeah.
- [11:20]
Bill Laboon
That's when I really started diving in. So in 2015, you know, I gave it. Gave a. You know, looking into Ethereum again. Gave, I think the first talk on Ethereum at Pittsburgh. It was actually in the early days when, you know, Vitalik liked my tweet about it.
- [11:35]
Bryce
Oh, wow. There you go.
- [11:37]
Bill Laboon
Yeah.
- [11:37]
Bryce
So memory, core memory right there.
- [11:40]
Bill Laboon
That, like, really. That is in my heart. So that's how I got into it. And I said, I just. It's really. It's just such a fascinating world. And it was so new. There were so many things being tried. So like, even things like different hashing algorithms, like, you know, like litecoins. I remember looking into litecoins like, you know, scrypt versus, you know, versus sha256 and. And ketchup and all just so much was being tried. Different smart contracts, different. Different languages. Even back then, people were talking about, you know, replacements for solidity like. Like Viper or People use like low level lists but just for, you know, that also compiled down to evm. Like I just saw it as just this like this broad new world of, you know, trustless computation, essentially decentralized trustless computation that it was brand new. It was like being around like when computers were invented in the 40s, you know, who knows what's going to happen. People are trying all sorts of stuff out and so I just, I wanted to be more and more a part of it.
- [12:41]
Bryce
Yeah, it was, it was really like you kind of like looking over the edge and you know, you're on the cliff, a bunch of blue sky. Right. You're just like, wow, this is. And then you had a parachute, you were ready to jump off and kind of, you know, see the, see the world and you know, start, you know, start at the frontier of a new industry. And that's really what it was. And so you jumped and you landed at the Web3 foundation which has been around for a really long time. And they're focused on building the Polka Dot ecosystem. So I want us to get up to speed with the Polkadot ecosystem. What is it? And give us the context of how things maybe have changed over the course of since it began to where it is today.
- [13:21]
Bill Laboon
Sure. So that's a really broad question. If I have to describe Polkadot in one sentence, it is not a blockchain, it's a set of blockchains. And so it's actually 51 blockchains. I may have the number slightly wrong because parachain can join and go away that are all secured by one central chain. So the idea actually is sort of similar to the scaling model that Ethereum is using now with you have Ethereum and then you have all these L2s that you could do extra work. But this is built into the protocol so it's actually much more efficient. All of these different we call parachains, what you might call like L2s or roll ups have two big benefits to an L2 on Ethereum is one, that they're immediately compatible with each other. We have the Polkadot SDK for people that are interested in building their own blockchains and having them secured by Polkadot. Those chains can interact with each other. A smart contract on this chain can call a smart contract on this chain. An asset on this chain, an NFT or a token can move over to this chain. You don't have this long process of it goes down to the main layer which isn't really built for L2s. Right. They're just an afterthought. Whereas our equivalent of the beacon chain, what we call the relay chain, that secures all of these, essentially all it does is secure these other chains. You can't really do it. You can't run smart contracts on the relay chain. It's not what it's meant for. The idea of Polkadot was always let's have as many different blockchains running as possible and allow them all to interact with each other. So this was the initial idea of Polkadot and again, this is one of the reasons why I ended up at Web3 Foundation. Again, I was very interested in all of these different kinds of blockchains, the different trade offs they made. And Gavin Wood, one of the founders of Polkadot, gave this amazing speech at Web3Summit 2018 where he pulled a brand new MacBook out of the box.
- [15:26]
Bryce
Took the cellophane off.
- [15:27]
Bill Laboon
It took the cellophane off. And then by the end of the talk he had his, his own chain running. You know, he said, I want this option, this option, this option. We waited for everything to compile and wow. So I was like, all right, I am, I want to be a part.
- [15:42]
Bryce
Wow. It's a cool visual too and like a cool statement sort of speech.
- [15:46]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, exactly. So this was the original vision, right? That, so, you know, all these people could create blockchains and we could have all these blockchains interact with each other. And this I would call Polkadot 1.0, Polkadot 1.5. We sort of like, we made this addition to it. We made governance entirely decentralized. So we did have a council which was not exactly a multisig, but you could think of as sort of like a multi sig in the early days of people that were elected to have certain powers over the network that is now entirely gone. Every runtime upgrade, every change to parameter, every call. We have treasury proposals for our treasury, which has over $200 million worth of various tokens. All of these are controlled 1.1 vote in a system called OpenGov.
- [16:41]
Bryce
Very cool.
- [16:42]
Bill Laboon
Yeah. So this was, I'd say, the second big step of Polkadot. We now have Polkadot 2.0, which essentially when you wanted to connect a parachain to the blockchain to Polkadot to Relay Chain earlier you would have to say, I'm going to lock up some dot for a very long period of time. We had auctions for it. People may remember crowd loans where others could donate dot. This was removed. We now have something called core time where parachains can join at any time. They want as long and run as many blocks as they want. If they want to have a blockchain that just runs for one block, they can pay for that, just one block or you know, for longer periods of time. But they can join at any time. There's no auctions. They are in the, in the old style of the word. They can just join, run and leave whenever they're ready or stop producing blocks. So this, the second aspect of this, of Polkadot 2.0 is the ability to use multiple cores. So a core is basically the, an aspect of the set of the relay chain that allows you to run a parachain. But just like your computer here, it's doing multiple things at once. You know, we're talking, there's probably, you know, I don't know, maybe if you're not paying attention, you're playing a video game in the background or you're watching a movie and it's, you know, you may have Telegram open or something in the background, you know, and all of these can run at exactly the same time. Because your computer has multiple cores. Like it has one chip that has basically several minicomputers in it. So the idea of 2.0 first was that anyone can join at any time and create this chain and do what they're going to do. And then the second aspect of it is that you can use multiple of these cores so that you can do more or reduce the amount of time in between blocks. So with this called elastic scaling, so that you can go down to around normal using one core, you can have six second blocks using up to three cores, you can have two second blocks, blocks on your, on your parachain. And that sort of brings us to where we are today. So I'll just, I'll stop for a minute before I discuss the future. But that, that's, that's the path we've taken.
- [18:53]
Bryce
No, that's awesome. It sounds like there's been leaps and strides in terms of both governance and sort of scaling, which is exactly what you would expect from a, a blockchain network, right? I mean you, you start, it's V1, you get the idea and then you iterate, you reiterate, you reiterate, and then it's just a test of time. You know, who stands the test of time? Whose networks sort of continue to get a lot of developer mind share and users and all that stuff. And so I'd love to kind of get some insight into those kinds of success KPIs or metrics that you guys look at and saying, you know, where are we at today with, with how many people are using it and developing it and kind of what, what key points are you proud of? Of, of Polkadot?
- [19:37]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, so, so actually I want to just very, very quickly, you had mentioned something about like your networks evolve and change and this was something that's like built in to Polkadot. Another thing I thought was very interesting is that the rules for the blockchain are actually stored on the blockchain itself. So that if you want to update your blockchain, you don't need a hard fork. Like you don't have to have everyone coordinate. You just vote on having these new rules on the blockchain. They end up in a new block, it's just some additional code and then every node is going to follow those new rules, which makes it really easy to Update.
- [20:10]
Bryce
We've had 60 on chain governance.
- [20:13]
Bill Laboon
Yeah. Onchain governance, and automatically enacted governance and all the way down to, you know, changing the rules of the blockchain. And you know, across the ecosystem we've had, you know, well over a thousand of these upgrades. Like, so it shows how fast you can, you can move, which also has some drawbacks. Right. You have to, you know, understand clients all the time. Yeah, well usually clients actually can usually automatically update. They can understand the metadata.
- [20:41]
Bryce
Oh, nice.
- [20:42]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, it's actually a pretty, pretty cool system.
- [20:46]
Bryce
Yeah. But to the contrary, with Ethereum, right, you have one big hard fork every year or one big upgrade. It's all packed in there. Maybe a little bit more risk that way too if you think about it.
- [20:57]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, I mean there's more risk. I mean this is like anytime you do software engineering, right, making some massive change is going to be much more risky than making 100 small changes up to that point generally. Now that said, the Ethereum engineers are amazing and they've done some really great work, but I think they're operating in an old fashioned, to my mind, being used to Polkadot model where they have to really coordinate all of these things ahead of time. So Gavin Wood, one of the founders, was the CTO of Ethereum previously. And so, you know, he really saw these problems and that's one of the reasons why he left to start. You know, Polkadot is, he saw like, well, that's going to be an issue. We need to make sure it's easy to upgrade instead of continuously coordinating these hard forks.
- [21:44]
Bryce
Awesome. Love it. Well, and then, yeah, like kind of on the, the sort of metrics that you're seeing right now that have got you excited Sort of as the director of, you know, governance initiatives and grants, you know, where are you guys sending the money out to and what's really.
- [21:58]
Bill Laboon
Sticking in terms of grants, we've given out over 600 grants for a variety of things. And especially last year we had, excuse me, end of 2023, going into 2024, we had the Decentralized Futures program which really decentralized everything. We gave out almost $20 million and 5 million dot to different teams that were building. And here's where I think the important thing is self sustainable projects. So I think a problem with a lot of grants programs is that, and I will say, you know, we've, we've fallen victim to this before in the past. Also with some projects is you, you give someone a small amount of money to do a project, they do the project, they take the money and then that project just sits on a GitHub repository somewhere forever. And so we have really focused on, on trying to give money and support via grants. That's part of our mandate is via grants to projects that we think will be, have a plan for sustainability that they're not just going to say, hey, I'm going to build something for Polkadot and get my $10,000. Then I'm going to go over to Solana and build something and then I'm going to go to Ethereum to melt to and build something and keep hopping around. We want to encourage teams who are building something that will last because I think this is sort of a very common problem. It's really easy to get people to do a weekend hackathon project or spend a few weeks to learn rust and substrate. The Polkadot SDK, it's more difficult to find projects that can last, but I think we've done a good job of that. So. Several of the parachains originally started as grants from Web3 Foundation. Acala is a famous example. Moonbeam has gotten some of its early work was done via grants from Web3 Foundation. Polkagate, which is a wallet, was originally a hackathon project. But he came to us and said, I have these ideas on how I can make this something that will last. We've really tried to focus our grants program on getting things that will give us essentially like, you know, a good, you know, bang for the buck, that it's not just, hey, we're gonna pay $10,000 for someone to learn rust and then go do, go do something else, but rather we're going to give someone maybe you know, 20 or 30,000 and then they can actually develop A business from that.
- [24:38]
Bryce
Yeah, that's really smart. And it's, it's really going to drive sort of that long term sort of Lindy effect of the protocol. You have developers that are going to be, you know, sticking with the protocol and not just going to wherever there's you know, money being handed out and oper, you know, just opportunistic sort of behavior but rather folks who are long term minded building out the network. And I think that's awesome. You're going to get a lot of momentum there. And there's a new protocol, I believe a new protocol that you're working on or a new system. It's called jam. J A M. Can you, can you walk us through what's going on here?
- [25:13]
Bill Laboon
Sure. So, so jam. So just to you know, make sure every, we're on the same page, this is still, you know, being, being worked on but it was formalized by Gavin Wood, he wrote the gray paper. So Gavin Wood wrote the yellow paper for Ethereum and the Polkadot paper for Polkadot. So it's the gray paper, it's a formal specification of this jam, which is essentially an evolution of Polkadot. So remember I mentioned on the relay chain we have what are cores, which are essentially mini computers, mini decentralized computers that can run parachains. They can run these rollups and they do it in a very efficient way. What JAM does is essentially two things. So the first is it abstracts that more so that you don't. So while polkadot relay chain is meant for running parachains, meant for running rollups, this allows you to run any sort of code. So not just things that require a blockchain, but any kind of code that you want to run in a decentralized way you can run, you know, just very easily and have it run in a decentralized manner. So, so this is kind of cool. You can still run, you know, these parachains, these roll ups that, you know, this is what it's made for. So this is not going to impact the current system but it's going to allow people, if you want to run something that doesn't lend itself, you know, directly to a blockchain, you know, gaming or large scale storage or you know, computation, verification, you know, it's going to be very easy for you to run this code. The second thing that JAM does is it makes what's called a semi coherent system. So this is, I realize that I'm getting into very nerdy talk, but right now if you think about it, there's two approaches to blockchains, right? So one is everything on it, like everything is a monolith, like Solana or think of Ethereum without L2s. Everything is on the same chain. It can interact with each other in the. In the same way. And then there's the sharded model. So this is Polkadot or Cosmos. There's some others like this where essentially interacting with something on your chain is relatively easy, but interacting with something on a different chain is relatively difficult. And you're never sure if you're going to get a response back from that chain. That's called asynchronous programming. So there's benefits to this model though, right? This monolithic model like Solana or Ethereum is very easy to understand. The programming is simple, simpler, it tends to be quicker in terms of response, but it's not very scalable and you have to do some tricks to try to get it to scale. Whereas the sharded model that Cosmos and Polkadot have, the problem is it's more difficult to program. It gets very complicated very quickly whenever you start interacting chain A with chain B and chain C and you don't know if you're going to get a response back or not. The idea of JAM is like, well, what can we do to fix this problem? Where we get the benefits of both worlds essentially. I'm simplifying a bit here, but the idea of JAM is essentially that we can essentially pretend to have both of chain A is going to interact with chain B. We have them run in the same core, we can figure out which core do they both belong to and then they can, while they need to interact with each other, act like they're on a single computer, right? Like their own sort of mini, pseudo monolithic chain. And what this means from a developer perspective. So from a chain perspective, again, that's pretty complicated. But from a developer perspective, from the end user perspective, you can have essentially like lots of different chains, lots of different things that are sharded, but from a programming perspective it's just as easy. So you get the benefits of the sharding, but from a programming perspective it's just as easy as working on a monolithic chain. So we're very excited about jam. There's actually, I don't know the exact number, sorry, I should have looked this up, but over 50 teams working on implementations of this, we'll have lots of different implementations and we're giving out actually the Jam Prize, so 10 million.in total to teams building implementations of this JAM protocol.
- [29:29]
Bryce
Holy smokes. That's that's a good chunk of change there. And yeah, I mean anybody who's listening out there who's a developer, definitely check that out. Yeah, that's incredible. And it sounds like, yeah, I like that idea of being able to have sort of the benefits of a sharded, you know, protocol with being able to have the incentives of the ease of development so that we get the scale of applications and usability and stuff on Polkadot like we've seen elsewhere. Now I'm also interested in understanding a little bit of the quantum resistant capabilities or characteristics of that new JAM protocol. I believe when I was reading a high level overview it stated that that might be on the road map. Could you give us a little intel on that?
- [30:14]
Bill Laboon
Sure. Although I, I will note that I am not a cryptographer and so, you know, so I will say that we have known about. It has not been a surprise. Right. Quantum computing has been advancing. So I can say that our researchers, we have some amazing cryptographic researchers like Jeff Burgess at Web3 foundation who have already been looking at ensuring that jam that Polkadot 2.0 that the cryptography were using is, is quantum resistant and that we can use that appropriately when necessary. But again, I'm probably, I don't want to dive too deeply into it simply because I'm not a cryptographer and I feel like I would just say something silly.
- [30:58]
Bryce
No, no, hey, I appreciate it. The thing is you probably know more about cryptography than me and most of the people who are listening so you could have gotten away with a quick one. But I appreciate you're on it for sure.
- [31:10]
Bill Laboon
Next time I'll just, I'll just throw some buzzwords out there. Yeah.
- [31:14]
Bryce
Well, cool. What kind of applications are you really, really excited about seeing in 2025 come to Polkadot?
- [31:21]
Bill Laboon
So specifically for, for Polka Dot? I am really excited about Accurast going live. Accurast so that I'm never a C U R A S T Accurast.
- [31:36]
Bryce
I haven't heard of that one yet. Decentralized serverless cloud.
- [31:39]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, so it's actually a really cool idea and I think also very green. So the idea is that you can use any phone, including old ones and it turns out and then essentially add those that computing power and get tokens in reward for it. So some people have already set up for their test net here for their test net they've set up little mining rigs of these phones. It turns out that for certain computations, you know, phones are extremely efficient. You know, if you think about it, it makes Sense. Right. You know, your phone, one of the big things is how long does the battery last. Right. So it has to be very efficient and be in terms of power. And so this allows you then. Excuse me, this allows you then as a programmer, right. To use the accuracy cloud and get this very efficient computation. Very, very cheap, you know, much cheaper than using it at a data center. And from a user perspective, I have some old phone, I can spend two or three minutes to set up the accuracy software and either just leave it running and essentially mine or my phone at night if I'm not using it and I don't mind it being used for computation, I can just let it run overnight. So I think this is a project.
- [32:57]
Bryce
That I turned into a charger anyway. So it's not going to die, right?
- [33:00]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, exactly. So I think this is really exciting. I'm someone I used to mine actually. This might date me a bit, but I mined Litecoin and before that SETI at home. I've always found it amazing these decentralized computation and accuracy lets you do that just using a phone instead of actually having to set up whatever, buying a big asic, you know, mining rig, learning.
- [33:30]
Bryce
How to do command line programming and yeah, none of that. It sounds like it's pretty Plug and play.
- [33:36]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, it's very plug and play. So the, the Acuras team is actually based here also in Zug. I've, I've seen the software. It's, yeah, it's very, you know, phone app. Very app like or it is an app, right? You just, you know, click, click, click, boom, you're done.
- [33:51]
Bryce
So I love that, that sounds, that sounds super awesome and I'm definitely going to check it out. I pulled up a tab. So yeah, everybody at home should go check that out. And so yeah, Bill, my, my last question. As somebody who's kind of what I would say, an OG in the space, we've got a lot of, you know, this, it's in the name Crypto101. So we've got a lot of folks who are just starting to get their feet wet in crypto and folks who are maybe, you know, just journeying that next step on their, their crypto trading career and all that kind of stuff. But from, from your perspective, what is just one word of wisdom that you want to leave with a viewer who's kind of entering into this space. And again, nothing like trading or investing related, but just a word of wisdom from kind of an OG in the space.
- [34:34]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, I just say curiosity, you know, just be curious There's. There's so much out there, you know, about crypto and like, still, you know, it's only 15 years old, you know, that there's. We have not discovered the best way to do things yet. And so I just say be curious, know what's happening, look at what's happened in the past. There's lots of really interesting books and you're like, understanding, you know, just. I just read a Hijacking Bitcoin by Roger Ver, which was really, really very interesting. You know, the Infinite Machine. Extremely interesting book. The Age of Cryptocurrency. Reading these just like, it gets me curious, it gets me excited. It gives me a lot of energy just seeing what's already happened. To also think about, you know, what could be, you know, happening in the future or. My book, actually, I should. Yeah, what is it? Strength in Numbers, which is a. I wrote in 2017.
- [35:34]
Bryce
It's a book, Virus and Numerous. Right.
- [35:37]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, exactly. That actually is on the COVID So it is a book, a science fiction novel that, as you read it also explains how bitcoin works. So.
- [35:47]
Bryce
Wow. Okay, well, we're definitely going to link to that in the show notes, so. Show notes. Check out Bill's book, Strength in Numbers. We're going to also link to the Web3 foundation website. And then also. Do you guys have a X or a Twitter or anywhere that you kind of maybe. What is it? Discord or where are you guys kind of really in touch with the community?
- [36:10]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, so at Polka Dot is. Is. Is quite active. We have a Discord as well, which I kind can send you to. Nice. Yeah, we have, you know, any of. Any of the major social media channels, like even. Even. Even LinkedIn, we post on.
- [36:26]
Bryce
Even LinkedIn, we'll throw them in there. Don't tell Elon, though. No, no, we. Hey, Bill, we appreciate not only you joining us today and giving us some time out of your evening, but for. For really, you know, stewarding a really awesome piece of the ecosystem in. In Polka Dot. It's driving things forward from a. From a sort of community usage standpoint as well as like, really driving what's possible in terms of like, technical sort of capabilities of these blockchain networks. So keep on doing the good work and you're welcome back anytime. When there's a big update, where there's a big announcement, you want to, you know, come on and. And talk shop. We'd love to have you back. This was a lot of fun.
- [37:03]
Bill Laboon
Yeah, for me too. Thanks for having me on, Bryce.
- [37:05]
Bryce
You bet. All right. Everybody at home. Thanks for listening and come on back. Same time, same place next week. We'll have some more great guests for you. Take care.
- [37:24]
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- [38:24]
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- [38:39]
Bill Laboon
Perfect.
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- [38:43]
Bryce
Hey, can I get your number? Oh.
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