Finn 0:10 Welcome back to The Ether. This is part two of a two part Cephii Space recorded on Friday, December 17th 2021. The first part was discussing Nexus with Tundra, second part is more of an AMA style, just discussing other degen shit. Let's take a listen. Cephii 0:29 Anyone want to hop on? We're just sort of talking bullshit right now. Anyone want to talk about Terra? Questions about whatever, just hop on and throw them out there. See if anybody's out there that has any questions about... Yeah, any of the protocols, arb opportunities. I don't know. Anything you guys been working on or have seen opportunities just hop on and... I don't have anything particularly set to talk about at this moment. [chuckle] We just sort of trailed off of the discussion with Tundra of Nexus. And we're just chit chatting here. Ghost 1:07 Yeah. Cephii 1:08 Hey, Ghost, what's up? Ghost 1:09 So have you looked at this proposal that just passed yesterday on Spectrum? On the tokenomics? Cephii 1:18 I knew there's something out there. I think you posted about it, what are they trying to do? Mike 1:23 First off, I... My bad, go ahead. Cephii 1:23 Oh, go ahead, go ahead. Ghost 1:28 Alright, so. What they're gonna do, I'll just read this from the Medium, is that rather than using the UST from the protocol fees to buy back SPEC, they're gonna distribute the rewards as UST directly, and then they're going to deposit that into Anchor. So while those rewards are waiting to be claimed, they're also generating that interest. Cephii 1:53 Interesting. So along the theme of autocompounding then. Ghost 1:56 Yeah, exactly. But the problem with SPEC before was, the token, it was a farm token, it was just kind of, claim the rewards and dump them. But now, so instead of getting paid in SPEC, for the stakers, you'll be getting UST. And it also says you could withdraw as aUST as well, which I thought was really interesting. Cephii 2:16 Yeah, and this all gets back to this question of, how does the protocol keep owning more of its liquidity, instead of just simply pumping out inflationary tokens forever? But yeah, Mike, what's up? Mike 2:30 So yeah, first off, I appreciate the whole content creation thing. I create content, it was a very cool perspective. I was actually just dabbling around in Unreal Engine 5 while you were talking about that, so that's kind of weird. Cephii 2:43 Oh, yeah. What's your take on this space? Like, where it's gonna go? Mike 2:48 I mean, honestly, exactly what you were saying is exactly what I was thinking, that I think it's going to be heavily integrated into numerous aspects. And then, like you said, where you can cross over into other worlds and carry things with you. I think that's definitely gonna play a huge aspect of it. And, you see the open world games, like Ghost Recon, for example, where they have these massive maps and you think of that, and then you multiply it, and then you add real world use cases into those, and interaction with other people. I think it'll be huge. But the reason I got on here, you kind of left the floor open, do you know anything, or have any information in regards to the whole soft fork security update things that were going on? I had read about it on that Binance article, but there hasn't really been much information around what exactly that was and what the security patch was, exactly. Do you know anything about that? Cephii 4:00 I saw that, and I'm not totally sure myself. Probably. We could message SJ Park, and he might have a comment regarding what that is. But yeah, I saw the Binance message, and I wasn't sure what they were alluding to, exactly, and what the soft patches... Or maybe one of our validators here... I think PFC was here a minute ago, but he's gone right now, but our validators would know. Mike 4:27 Yeah, I know that they pushed the patch early too. They had it slotted for a certain time, and then ended up pushing it immediately and caused quite a handful of validators to go down for a period of time. So yeah, I was just curious if anybody had heard anything about what that was all about? Cephii 4:46 No, not 100% sure. Not at all. But yeah, I'll inquire about it a little bit. See if I can find out more. Speaker 1 4:55 Hey, Cephii, can you lay out what is involved with becoming validator on Luna? What's required of that? Cephii 5:02 Oh, man. I'm not totally sure, I wish one of the guys were here. Yeah, like Orbital and some of the guys were listening a little while ago, yeah. And periodically, there's like validator AMAs that those guys do. I think some of these more technical questions, some of those guys, especially... Speaker 1 5:21 Is there a minimum amount of tokens you have to have to start? Cephii 5:24 Yeah, for bonding and such. Yeah, I don't know what... I really don't even have the slightest clue off the top of my head what those answers are. [chuckle] Yeah, much, much better answered by the validator people, honestly. But hey, His Dudeness, what's up? His Dudeness 5:43 Hey, Cephii, what's good? I just wanted to see, anyone that was sitting in on the White Whale spaces, or has been just reading some of the updates with that, I just wanted to see how you felt about the progress, what role it's gonna play within the Terra ecosystem, and just how you're feeling about the project as a whole. Some of this stuff comes off as a different language to me. So I figured I'd see what some smarter individuals than myself feel. Cephii 6:04 So I think the... My take on this and just my straightforward, honest feel about it is, one, by the way, I did get some of their token at... I think I bought a little bit at 17 cents, and I bought like, maybe more at like, 14 cents or something. So I got a pretty good... Close to whatever bottom that was. So I did get some of the coin. And what am I expecting out of the coin? Well, I didn't go buy a bunch, number one. So I have a little bit and it's just sitting there, and I'm keeping an eye on what... Because it's a IDO price, and it's had it's price discovery, I think there's not a lot of reason for it to go dramatically lower than where it is. Although technically it could, because there could be people that bought high, and they're not sure when it's going to go back up to their level, and then they're going to sell. So there could be still some selling pressure there, by the way. So from the token price standpoint, you might find some deals along the way. Now, a separate issue is how does the token eventually get valued. And I think you can look at White Whale, as an example, from the perspective of two different things. One, is this a useful protocol for me to use, where I'm going to earn something by using the protocol? Two, is this something I want to own the coin of? And I think those are two very different things. You could have a system that does what you need, but you don't necessarily need to own a lot of the coin, necessarily. Cephii 7:29 So if you're looking at it from a user perspective, first, my take on White Whale, and what they've described so far is, what's not really clear is how much on-chain arb opportunity there is for making money off of peg related issues with UST. Because there are other people that are arb-ing that as well already on-chain. Pretty sizable actors that are buying and selling, and using the LUNA burn, create mechanism to their advantage for this and they're using it already... Some of those folks are already doing it at scale with their own arb bots, as it is. So you're sort of competing with people that are doing this in the background, to some extent or the other. We don't hear about them, obviously, because they're not going to divulge all their techniques and whatnot. They're basically just benefiting the peg, but they're basically making money in the background and didn't want to give away their information. To me, long run, if you're just talking about UST peg arbitrage, it would almost be like, in my mind, if you want... Let's say we put 10s of millions of dollars into that UST deposit box, they're going to deposit an Anchor to get you 20% yield, and then they're going to use these arb bots to try to improve your yield. I could see a bigger, like revenue stream if they have off-chain bot activity. And they're generating money like on arbs between, let's say, Coinbase and KuCoin and this and that, which again, you're competing with large scale market makers, which tend to provide these services and preserve peg. There are massive, industrial grade people that do this kind of shit, right? Cephii 9:21 If you did off-chain activity, it's not really clear to me how White Whale would bring that back to... Why would they give us that money if they're doing it off-chain? Because... And not only that, but how could you audit how much they did or didn't make. So that is an interest... That's like a questionable enterprise one way or the other for us as users of the platform. On-chain, there's all sorts of peg and opportunities with maybe the mirrored coins, if it's possible to play when mirrored tokens, like mirrored Apple or something, when they go off peg is there a way to arbitrage that, because there is a general problem where assets on Mirror tend to float above the normal peg rate. So these pegging/depegging kinds of things, I don't know how much on-chain money there is to be made on this, I just don't know. And I think they made that clear. Cephii 10:18 And even if there was exactly how this then finalizes and generates value for the WHALE token holders is not fully fleshed out to me either, it's just not obvious how many projects have to be built on White Whale to really make it worthwhile. Because, let's say there's only 10 people depositing on White Whale and you're depositing, let's say, $10,000 amongst the 10 people. At those scales, five figure and maybe six figure, I think maybe the yields might be pretty good on this project. If you start getting into seven figure numbers, is there enough yield being generated to where it's not just diluted to the point where it's not that dissimilar to your Anchor yield? Now, if I had the two options of where to put my UST, I have my option to put it on White Whale, or I had the option to put on Anchor, it does make sense on White Whale if they have the possibility of offering me slightly more than the 19.5%, right. So if my two choices, were those two things for my UST, I'd rather be making more than what Anchor is giving me if it's possible. How much value that's going to bring in addition, I don't know yet. But here's the thing, scalability, the more popular white whale is, the less yield you get, right? Because you're distributing that same... Assuming all else being equal, there's only so many arb opportunities in the universe, right, so far. My thinking is that you're going to dilute that quite a bit. The token, at least we're getting a token at a fair value price, relatively speaking, I think. So I don't think you have to worry about too much dumpage at this point, so not a bad thing to maybe hold a little bit of it. On the other hand, until they make it clear, long run, how the vault activity on White Whale benefits the WHALE token somehow, like does it promote buybacks of the token or something to make the token value supply go down, and ultimately, the value of the coin go up, it doesn't make sense, necessarily, to hold it hoping it'll go up without a definitive value accrual mechanism. Does that all make sense so far? His Dudeness 12:29 100%. Cephii 12:30 So, that's why when I was discussing this with Howard... I think his name is... What's his handle's name? Something Howard. Crypto Howard, or something like that. Cyber Howard, I think, who is one of the devs on there. This is the reason why I was pitching the idea of like things like on-chain grid bots, on-chain dollar cost averaging systems, other systems that would ultimately somehow provide utility for you and me, but also provide some sort of revenue stream for the WHALE token. I mean, really, if you think about it, how many things can you make money from anyway? Basically, transactional activity, and maybe you paying for bots, is the only... Like, some fees, that's the only good way to generate revenue, actually, for the system. So if you go to any centralized exchange, like KuCoin, or Binance, or whatever, they have really spent a lot of time figuring out how to make money off of your trading activity. So you don't need... All we need to do to some extent is copy what centralized exchanges are already doing, and bring that to the decentralized exchanges for revenue generation, right. But, eventually, just us exchanging a bunch of coins and shit with each other is not going to be good enough. Ultimately, longer term, you've got to actually create real world value. And that's where the final, true revenue for Web 3.0 is gonna come from. And, these types of protocols, the more they can exploit the inefficiencies in those systems through game theory, they can divert some of that extra yield to you, the holder, right. Cephii 14:18 That's the reason why I've talked so much about these bot phenomena, in the sense that, decentralized exchanges have been bringing more and more of that to be easier to use for consumers, where you just push a few buttons and you're on your way, whereas that kind of infrastructure used to be something that only traditional finance people had, with specialized control rooms, with nerds sitting there trying... Just basically coveting those technologies, because why the hell would they want to give those to you, right? So, ultimately, those ways to sort of dredge yield up out of existing systems is to some extent what we've been watching DeFi do so far. What DeFi needs to do next, whether it's White Whale or otherwise, is generate more than just that. And so I don't know. I'm not totally sure. I love the idea of White Whale. To me, their product information and their YouTube video everything, all that shits really, really amazing, really professionally done in that respect, and they thought through some of this, but it's it's really not... It's pretty opaque to me what this means to the WHALE token holder long run. So I basically allocated my buy of the token accordingly to my question mark, so to speak. [chuckle] So hopefully that answers your question, sort of. His Dudeness 15:46 No, it totally does. I appreciate you. Cephii 15:48 Cool. Cool. Let me get Nick on real quick here. Nick 15:55 Hi, guys. Cephii 15:56 Hey, what's up? Nick 15:57 First, thank you for the opportunities and for the great stuff that you're doing for the community. My question is, any of you familiar with Neptune Finance? Cephii 16:11 Neptune? The... Yeah, well, you mean the one on Terra, right? Nick 16:15 Yep. Yep. Cephii 16:17 Not too familiar. You want to fill us in on some of that? What does it do and what's your what's your thinking? Nick 16:26 Because it's a... Currently their plan is to build a protocol that will do some... Play with the Mirror, and trying to delta neutral strategies to apply them so that you deposit into their vaults, and using Mirror Protocol to generate some UST for you. So something like this. Saying it very basically. But, they have a validator open, and you can donate... You can stake your LUNA there so that you can receive some genesis airdrop when they're up and running, but it's hard for me to find any valuable information about them. So I was asking if you're familiar with it, or someone else here know something. Cephii 17:32 Yeah, I knew that some of their goal was to do things with the Mirror system. And what I'd like to see happen is, is some sort of, again, even with mirrored assets, like some sort of maybe automated trading paradigm. Just simply leeching off of the long and short positions with delta neutral, which is, to some extent, what Nexus is offering too, is really just sort of a way to simplify, and a way to systematically exploit the system to make it easier to earn that yield. But I don't know that it offers anything more dramatic than that. So to me long term, that won't be sustainable as a singular product only because the MIR token rewards eventually run out. And then they have to come up with some other incentive scheme to incentivize shorting on Mirror Finance more effectively. So what's what's interesting about synthetic assets is there is issues regarding peg maintenance. They tend to float upwards because in DeFi people might buy the long position but may insufficiently participate in the short positions on that, because there's not a comprehensive options market within DeFi for a lot of these, the use is not so high that people have built all of the traditional finance mechanisms in. So I don't know, we'll see what they have to offer, and what Mirror can ultimately do. In general, it's not clear to me, long term, how Mirror works exactly. So anything built on top of Mirror, I'm still not fully... Just as an example, right now, I want one of two things. I want either the stablecoin yield of UST or maybe I want the volatility/yield of LUNA. But if I already have high volatility, high growth in the form of LUNA and I already have extraordinary stability in the form of UST, I guess I could participate in owning some mApple stock. But if I can go to traditional finance and actually own the real mApple stock that earns the normal dividend, I might do that. And in Mirror, if I could do the LP position and earn MIR tokens and sell those, you could do that. But the yields have been dropping over time with high participation. So that was really fun earlier this year when there was 120% APY on Mirror positions on LPs, but those have dropped considerably. And as has the cost of Mirror because the only purpose of the MIR token is to sell it. Cephii 18:36 So any delta neutral strategies that are produced by Neptune or by Nexus are going to further cause the MIR token to draw down in value, I guess, is the way to look at that. And at some point, your yield is nominal compared to just being on Anchor. And then you start asking yourself, "Well, okay, do I need to do this," at that point, right. That's the problem, in my view. So I don't know, we'll see what Neptune creates and whatnot. But I think you don't want to have them being only doing a delta neutral strategy, you wanna have... You wanna to make sure that they're doing more than that, I would say. Machina, go ahead. Machina 20:27 Hi Cephii, what's up, man. Yeah, I was just wondering if you have any thoughts on the market currently, specifically, well, you know, Bitcoin is really running the show. I'm starting to think that there's not enough people left to invest in Bitcoin, because people are realizing, "Yeah, Bitcoin is gonna do a 2x, but everything else is gonna do a 20x." So what are your thoughts on that? Cephii 21:31 Yeah, I mean, the amount of... Well, first off the BTC Glassnode data, which essentially shows how much Bitcoin is off exchanges, has been at record highs, in terms of BTC leaving exchanges. That traditionally is a good sign, and the general public bearishness, to some extent, is a good sign that some of the selling has been completed. If you look at Bitcoin reversals, they take, oftentimes, a matter of weeks, if not months, right. So it can really be tough to tell which direction that market is headed. But the scarcity data, which is essentially the amount of BTC available on exchanges, the number of coins going into hodlers' wallets and wallets that tend to move less, is pretty high. So theoretically, the idea is, is that you create this kind of supply shock style situation. There is a fair amount of... And then BTC has, in general a lot of derivative action going on, futures and whatnot, a lot of which is not necessarily settled in Bitcoin, and this is part of why BTC is not maybe rising as much as it could because it's almost like some of those things could represent more or less naked positions, like naked longs, naked shorts. You're sort of playing in the futures market, but there's no actual Bitcoin behind it. So your derivatives market could be way bigger at some point than the BTC itself. And instead of attracting more people to buy the coin, hold it, and stick it in their wallet, there are a lot of players that buy BTC where they don't have to do any kind of custodial shit, right, with their BTC. Or maybe they own Bitcoin, but they go to the futures market to short it. If they think that we're at a local top and they want to make money on the way down, you have people that might play both because they may not want to sell their Bitcoin for tax reasons, but they might take out various shorting products to avoid having to take a tax hit on the Bitcoin they already have. Cephii 21:56 And there's a lot of things that go on. It's very hard to tell but the scarcity data looks pretty good in my view. But you won't know until six months down the line, how this plays out, that's the problem. So is this bullish or bearish for the system at large? I don't know. It's really tough to tell. This is why I'm focusing more on... If you look at Terra and what it's doing, are the protocols that are coming important? Are they building cool stuff like a forex market and other things that are just huge? All the gaming, the metaverse stuff, these are all the narratives that will drive people into one crypto or the other. So a lot of coins outside of Bitcoin tend to be very narrative driven. So you might see the price of Solana pop if Michael Jordan decides to do like a sports thing on Solana, or you might see more social interaction if more stuff is being built on a particular platform. So I think, if there's a lot of good narratives coming out for the coming year, I feel like there's less reason to be bearish on say, for example, Terra, whereas if you look at BTC, it's really just relying on mass influx of hodlers over the next year. And like you said, it's not really clear if... What kind of institutional saturation and appetite there is still for the next coming year. It's really tough to tell. I still think that BTC is underperforming compared to a lot of prediction models from a couple years ago. I would have expected BTC to be maybe double what it is now, but it's not and I think a lot of that has to do with the flow into the altcoin space. I think the Bitcoin dominance concept is becoming almost useless as a paradigm in all seriousness. Because if you look at Terra as an example, we've been outperforming Bitcoin practically all year and it has little to do with Bitcoin dominance, it has more to do with fundamentals. So anyway, yeah, what's up? Sorry? Machina 26:25 Yeah, I agree. Terra hit an all time high, while Bitcoin was dumping, that was epic. So maybe, eventually, some coins will disconnect from the Bitcoin movement, but for example, Kadena, I think is... Well, I mean, first of all, I don't really understand why it even happens. How come could Kadena is... For example, right, how come Kadena is influenced by Bitcoin? When Bitcoin goes up, why does Kadena also go up? Cephii 26:53 Market correlation has a lot to do with leverage taking. So if you have a lot of... You're ETH rich or you're Bitcoin rich, and you can borrow off of it and buy some shit, people will sort of throw money at things. So small cap stuff will get pumped up pretty easily by even modest amounts of money flowing in through these other means. And some of that has to do with social media related excitement suddenly, which suddenly drives up the price of something. So like, Kadena wasn't necessarily doing well, for the last... Necessarily great for the last year, right? It was just printing higher lows, but was retracing very aggressively. And there is a tendency to do that, because there's no utility for the token yet, right, or the coin. So there's no holding pressure, there's nominal reason... There's not a staking pressure. And miners, if they want to buy more mining equipment, have to sell some coins to buy some equipment, right. So all of those reasons why... But I think the price is maintained because mining equipments got so expensive in that particular example, that that may play a role in the dynamics here a little bit. But, yeah, it's really tough to tell. And for that coin, particularly, there's like a half dozen major developments coming over the next six months, right. Or more than that, maybe like a DEX, there's a bunch of wallets, there's all sorts of things coming. So I think those kinds of things for me are more long term. I put in what I think I can hold, ride out the volatility, maybe buy some dips, and then ride it out, but that's kind of how I look at that. One thing we could actually talk a little bit about is... Let me get Jay the Intern on and then... I was going to talk a little bit about maybe that LunarCrush app that I like to play on. Yeah, Jay, what's up? Jay 28:49 Hey Cephii, how's everything? Cephii 28:50 Good, good. Jay 28:52 That's good. Thanks, as always, for hosting these rooms. So just a quick question for you, concerning Astroport. Do you have any concerns about the lowering of the rewards due to the vast majority of money that's flowing into the LPs? Cephii 29:15 Yeah, I mean, well, this was always gonna be the case, right? The whole point of having a sort of fixed period is, people have to make some decisions, they gotta throw some money at this and see what happens. I think the bigger you are as a liquidity provider, not only do you get more ASTRO tokens, of course, but those are the same people that are going to keep holding the token later after they receive it because they're gonna want to use that token for the ASTRO primitives that you use to sort of vote, and govern, and whatever, on the system right. And effectively, help your particular pools do better over the long run. There will also be, in the future, a lot more pools. But not only that, but there's gonna be a lot of extra ASTRO token distribution over a very protracted period of time, so there's still a lot of inflation to go in ASTRO. I wouldn't look at it... I think the way I look at these intro tokens or IDOs is, you're getting at least some token at the lowest price you possibly can get it at, right. And even if you didn't pick the perfect pool, or the perfect whatever, that's fine, but at least you're getting these at a fairly low price. And if they go up, and they do well, which I think they probably will over the longer term, then great. On the other hand, it doesn't mean just because you don't do it right now that you've missed out on every opportunity you could ever find in ASTRO. You may still have decent opportunities being a liquidity provider later, you may have decent opportunities owning the ASTRO token later. If you're going to wait the longer term I'd say put an alarm on your calendar for maybe, I don't know, whatever a year or so from now, or maybe even like 14 months from now, put an alarm on your calendar of when after whatever the ASTRO initial token holders lockup period finishes too. So when people's lockup periods finish, not just the public lockups, but also the team lockups, the original investors, there'll be some selling at that point with almost near certainty, right. So you could basically buy that dip later if you wanted to. So there's a lot of different ways to play the Astroport deal. But I would say, only if it benefits you right now to hold one of those LPs, that this is something you would do anyway, maybe. Cephii 31:45 Your relative amount of ASTRO token farming, is it going to be negligibe or important? I don't know the answer to that. In terms of how much ASTRO tokens do you have to get to have made it if the ASTRO token goes up? It's so it's such a moving target to determine which one to do. But what I... The question, you're basically asking, though, indirectly is, "Okay, wait a minute. If there's one of these pools that not a lot of people are in, I don't know, the Valkyrie/UST pool or something, or whatever, and maybe you're fairly... If you're fairly neutral on the price of that token, and you think it doesn't have a lot of downside left to go, or reasonably so, and you think that's a good way to earn ASTRO, maybe you can get some. On the other hand, if it's the token itself that doesn't have a tremendous amount of price appreciation, or for that matter, a lot of trading activity, maybe it doesn't generate that much long term LP rewards, right? Even when Astroport opens, it may not generate that much. So there's the emission rewards for just being in the Lockdrop, and then there's a wholly different thing, which is leaving your coins in there for 52 weeks, hoping that there's some transactional value that might come from that. It's tough to say. Astroport's in a unique situation where they're opening at a time when there's not a tremendous amount of different protocols yet on Terra. We have a relatively small number of protocols, and only some of them are sort of blue chip, right. And that makes it a little bit weird to be holding some of the smaller LP tokens for a really long time. So I just stuck stuff that I already had in there, and then maybe threw a little extra UST that I might have borrowed to finish out the position. I did it fully knowing my primary goal is to get ASTRO token, not necessarily worried too much about the value of the underlying LP. Cephii 33:41 So what I did was I just sort of parked it in there with the intention that I would leave those LPs in there maybe like forever, like just leave them for four or five years, fuck it and just see what happens. And get the ASTRO token now and then maybe stake the ASTRO token later, or whatever, and then... So I don't have a definitive strategy. Now, there are people that are hardcore LP providers that probably have an extreme strategy that they have that they're putting in millions of millions of dollars in the LPs, then they may have deeper strategies that they use for that. But it depends on the size that you are, I think. The other thing too, is keep in mind, this isn't the only opportunity left on Terra. Maybe the Prism situation speaks to you more or something like that. Astroport's really for LP-ers and the long term use of the ASTRO token is going to be way more valuable to you if you're going to use that token for something as opposed to farming and thinking, "Okay, price go up and I'm going to sell it at some point," right. So that's, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind with ASTRO. Jay 34:49 Gotcha, thanks. Cephii 34:51 Sure thing. Anybody else want to hop on about any other particular shenanigans? going on. But yeah, the market conditions, I think... These months tend to be the time you buy altcoins by the way, I noticed someone else pointed out the same thing. There tends to be sort of a low at these time periods, and some people might just be selling just to claim some losses, sort of like semi-wash trade these things, and then ultimately, buy them back and then create a big rally. You'll see, sometimes through the middle of the next year, you might see altcoins rally and such, this sometimes happens. So you'll sometimes have these altcoin rally sessions, irrespective of where exactly BTC is doing, especially for specific coins. Like, last summer Chainlink had a big run up and that kind of thing. Cephii 35:57 But a lot of coins have performed really, really interestingly this year. Chainlink's a really interesting example, it went up all the way to I think $55 at the peak maybe, or $50, something like that. And right now... What is it trading at now, something like under $20 or something like that. So it has really dragged if you think about it. It didn't maintain a lot of its bull market gains, it didn't print really appreciable, higher lows above the prior tops. Chainlink has dropped below $20, even though $20 was like its peak back in last summer. So a lot of general weakness in some coins, maybe because their tokenomics are not as good or maybe their narrative is being diluted. I think what's happening is there's a lot of chasers in crypto jumping from one coin to the other. And when there's a lot of social media buzz about one thing, they're jumping out of other things that just has limited narrative. They had that whole Chainlink Marines narrative thing going, with memes posted everywhere, and people went nuts with Chainlink for a while. And it did pretty decent at the top of the market. It maybe hit, like I said about $50 or so. But I just didn't expect Chainlink to pull back as much as it did, it was actually quite surprising to me that it's dropped so much. It went down to like $11 recently, and then it came back up again, now it's at $18. So I think there's a lot of half decent opportunities if you believe in those projects on these mega pullbacks, if you're gonna bother getting some of them. I think small amounts of these things might make sense. I would steer clear of the ship that has zero narrative like... I don't know, not trying to tell you what to do, but I'm not buying the XRP, BSV, I have no idea why at this point I'd want to have Bitcoin Cash. I have no idea why I would want to hold EOS. The narrative used to be that, "Oh, yeah, you know what, when the bull market comes, all these things are just gonna moon." Litecoin's gonna go to $5000 and you see all these memes. And what ended up happening is, is so many entrants came into the market, and DeFi, and gaming, and God knows what else, and what end up happening is the market got so diluted among so many altcoins that you wound up with a lot of coins that sort of became the true zombie chains that they are with relatively low real-world adoption that ultimately played out in the price action, I think, is the only way to describe it. Machina, go ahead. Machina 38:42 I was wondering do you think that some coins are like... Well, do you think that we could have an extremely massive drop? Because I was just scrolling through coin market cap today and in my opinion, some coins are like extremely overvalued and on some of these... Cephii 39:00 Yeah, I posted about it today, I'm like, "The most delusional morons are still holding BSV." It's done a triple tap on its support at $120-something and that shits gonna crater probably with near certainty once it starts to fall. Whoever's left in that delusion is gonna be like, "Uh... Whoops." Not to mention it's price is lower than it was last year. So that can't be good. The XRP folks are probably gonna run out of steam at some point. All of these kinds of social media buzz narrative kind of bullshit, it dies down over time and, it seems like there's literally a meme coin every five seconds these days too, that... Machina 39:46 Yeah, it's a joke. Cephii 39:48 Yeah, there's a new cat and dog coin every five minutes. So the thing is the same way... How married are you to your SHIB or Dogecoin? The reality is, you thought it was just fun to begin with, so you might think other shit's fun and moved your money to that stuff. So when you're talking about real world, mega projects, the type of things that Terra's trying to build, these things tend to wash away all the other bullshit at some point. It's just what happens over time, quality usually... It's just survival of the fittest, and it's like Darwinian type of behavior. People will jump in and out of little things to speculate and gamble and whatever, because you have those people, but the people that are going to hold and stay strong forever are going to be the projects that really have some badass stuff going on. Jason, go ahead. Jason 40:39 Hey, Cephii, what's going on? Hey, I missed the Nexus talk. So I was curious if you could give like a 30 second recap on that, 'cause I'm still holding some nLuna/Psi, and I'm feeling pretty bad about it right now, but I don't want to jump ship at the total bottom. And I feel like there's a high probability if I jump right now... I mean, sometimes it just feels that way, as soon as you sell, it just goes up. What do you think? Hold or... Cephii 41:10 It's hard to know whether to just hold on tight or whatever, yeah. Well, the way Tundra described it, there's a delta neutral mirror strategy project coming out, there is another component to this, and then there's a version three coming, I forget what he said exactly what the the final utility there is. But what they're trying to do is they're creating more automations for you, essentially, to plug in money and have it come out as something else. There's some discussion about instead of just completely diluting the Psi token to ultimately provide a lot of those rewards back as UST to prevent the bleed of excess Psi emissions. And we discussed, brainstormed, a little bit about ideas about how to bring back value to the Psi token, and maybe future projects that go towards bringing value back. There was some discussion about how they're working with Olympus DAO to build a new liquidity pool for themselves, which might help us not have as much Psi emissions, and maybe drive up the base token price. So there's definitely a lot of things happening. And one of the things that was interesting, he said, is that one of their developers on their platform is, what he describes a more world class Rust developer, which is a good sign. Clearly, their system that they built, so far, it works correctly, and it's execution's good, whether you like the tokenomics or not is a different story. But from a programming perspective, they got the job done, audited, and everything works the way it should. So my hope is that some of the stuff that they can build with our ideas and otherwise can really build that up in the future. So I just keep holding on to my tokens and just... I provided a chunk of them on Astroport, for example. And then I kept a bunch for governance with the hope that they will execute better long term. Jason 43:16 Oh, cool. Thanks for that. And I have one other question. So, not to get too speculating, but I heard one of the Spaces recently where people were asking about the burn post-Ozone, and it's definitely been high. I think if you've watched Smart Stake for the last couple months, I mean, we're definitely elevated. And I think someone kind of speculated that it could be a Coinbase listing, maybe there's UST liquidity being built up in the future. But I've noticed, also, just in the last 24 hours, SJ and Do have been really bullish, kind of cryptic messages, and I was curious if you had any thoughts or any inkling of what the guys could be referring to. Cephii 44:00 The guys have been referring, I think, to the... In the background building of like a forex market system is one of those things, for currency exchanges, which can be really exciting. But yeah, I don't know what all SJ has up his sleeve, but he's not one to really exaggerate. So if he's sort of posting bullish, we probably should be paying attention. So the next one... Jason 44:29 And also saying end of year, I mean, that puts a two week timer on it too. Rarely do you have that short of a... Or I guess that much of a definitive timeframe around something good happening. Cephii 44:41 Yeah, the UST burn and all that, I think a lot of what Do described is largely accounted for from some pre-existing plans, through MIM-UST and things of that sort. And then how much natural exchange acquisitions there are of either LUNA, or UST, or whatever with Biance and such. I'm not fully sure how long ago, for example, Binance has acquired their LUNA, what it's worth, how much UST they can print. But the people at Binance, for example, aren't idiots. If they were going to be using more of this, they probably have acquired their LUNA low, and if I was an exchange and I felt reasonably bullish on the future of Terra, I would buy my LUNA now and then burn it much later, so that I can just get double the UST or whatever out of it, right. You could buy LUNA now and burn it immediately too, I suppose, but it might make sense to burn it in some technique that involves almost like a grid bot acquisition process, and then burn it along the way. There's a lot of techniques to where... Yeah, I mean, Binance is not in the business of losing a whole lot of money, I promise you that. [chuckle] Whatever they're doing, they're coming out ahead pretty much every time. Jason 46:11 Yeah, I was even thinking of that recently. I mean, if they just buy the coins if they're gonna list, I mean, they're just printing money. Coinbase too, really. Cephii 46:19 Right, right. Hey, Sha is listening with Orbital Command, I think. There was a question for validators earlier, if you have the ability to speak or whatnot. I'm going to add him... As in invite to speak here in case he has the ability to jump on. I don't know that he can. But Oxnoob, go ahead. Oxnoob 46:21 Hi, Cephii. Thanks for letting me speak. I have one short question, I don't know if you... I mean, I've been... I think I've seen this in one of the threads from Anchor team that they are planning to add bANC as one of their steps in the next couple of months, maybe even Q1, I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure that I've seen it. And I asked danku to ask them this on the recent AMA, but they haven't heard anything regarding this topic. I don't know if you have anything on this, because it sounds like they would add it is another bAsset. And I just wanted to ask like what would be mechanics behind it? And how would that actually work on on the proof of stake network since Anchr is, I mean, is not... Cephii 47:38 Yeah, I'm not fully sure. I guess if they had bANC on there, and they rerouted those Anchor rewards back to other people earning Anchor awards for borrowing or something. I'm not fully sure how the mechanics will work. The complaint... When I asked for this, like, I don't know, six months ago, the comment I got was, "We don't want to create recursive loops in the system to create a cascade problem." And I think ANC may not be sufficiently strong enough as a collateral asset in its own right to make sense for that, but I don't really... Yeah, I'm not fully sure. I would like to see ANC token have some more actual utility as opposed to an emissions token. I just don't know how that's achieved exactly, at this point. So yeah, I'm not fully sure. But let me ask Sha. Sha, is that you? Sha 48:16 Yeah. Hey, what's up? Cephii 48:35 Hey, question for you. There was a question earlier regarding the recent... So Binance made a post about a Terra soft fork regarding either security or something. Is that something that you would know about from a validator angle? Did some security release get put out or something? Sha 48:57 Yeah, there was... I mean, they might have been referring to that there was like a sudden security upgrade patch that was released like two days ago that like TFL wanted all of us to update the software to, but there wasn't a lot of details released around it. So most validators just kind of quietly updated, and that was pretty much it. Cephii 49:24 When it comes to security patches, is that something that is sort of just pushed out? Where you don't really want to reveal the flaws, so you don't exactly vote on it? Or how does that work, exactly, as far as the validators and how those patches work? Sha 49:41 Yeah, this was probably the first, I think, of its kind where they were just, all of a sudden, like, "Hey, new version of the software's available for update right away. It's a security thing." But I think that's kind of how it would work in the future, is if they find something that they don't necessarily want to announce publicly, then they just kind of quietly tell the validators on the validator Discord channel, like, "Hey, there's a new release, please update ASAP." Cephii 50:13 But as far as you know, this has nothing to do with the Anchor oracle debacle? Sha 50:19 I mean, if you put a gun to my head, I'd say maybe it was related because of the timing. But I have zero information, that's totally speculation, it could be something entirely different to be honest, and just happen to like time out in a similar thing. I mean, the Anchor thing was probably, I would say, a good 72 hours plus earlier than this security patch came out. So that's a pretty big window as far as security goes. So I doubt that it was. Cephii 50:50 Got it. 'Cause Uniracer, he's on here, he was asking questions before about the possibility that oracle issues were affecting even the TerraSwap mechanism, and therefore the arbitrage folks were making an outlandish amount of money for what they were potentially... There's the normal arbitrage and then there's like a total fuck up with the oracle arbitrage which makes them a lot more money. Sha 51:20 Yeah, I mean, it could be I'd be surprised if that was it the way that Do was like... On Twitter, and he's like, "Whatever. An arbitrage is an arbitrage. Go get it and have fun and screw over the people that are trying to do this, if you want to make money yourselves." Cephii 51:35 It's a weird problem with security. Because if you post it to everyone, then you create a situation where you don't know what kind of actors are going to act on that negative data. On the other hand, if you don't say anything, you sound like you're not addressing it. So it's it's such a tough road to... Sha 51:51 To so many, he was just kind of handling that from the only PR way that he could think of. Cephii 51:57 Yeah, it's always a minefield. You have this problem too, where... You know, how you have white hat hackers that find a problem with the code, for example. And their incentive to exploit the system themselves is high, but also if you hand over that information to, let's say, a protocol, someone in the protocol themselves could do a rugpull using that data, and then claim it was someone else that did it, right. So like, this is a weird chaos of DeFi and of these types of systems. Sha 52:35 Yeah, my favorite of these whitehat things was, I don't know, a few months ago, there was like a THORChain issue. And the white hacker, he took $8 million of the $60 million that he could have hacked, and then he's like, "Fix yo shit." Cephii 52:49 Exactly. Then he gave it back. Sha 52:52 Then in the end he give it back anyway. But, it was so funny. It was great. Cephii 52:55 [chuckle] Yeah, this is the kind of shenanigans in DeFi that definitely can happen. But yeah, any other interesting theoretical things from the validator side? I guess, the questions that come up on validators is, what's your sense of the... One is, what is your feeling about the validators that provide, essentially, bribes to go onto their system? Like for example, the Neptune or Orion airdrop of a coin? Orbital, for example, doesn't have a coin, so you don't have anyone to bribe anyone with, which maybe you should. Sha 53:37 Yeah, it's a tricky, and it's a tough thing. Because you want to keep everything open, and you don't want to make restrictions or punish anybody. It's all about blockchain, which is incentivizing people to do the right thing, right. But I've seen other networks degrade, basically, to like a race to the bottom, because what happens is, exchanges can get in this validator game. There's no reason why Binance couldn't just all of a sudden say that they're going to do an exchange, and then Coinbase, and Kraken and you know, these huge companies, they can make the commission 0%. And they can even offer some other kind of incentive, like a token, or even just take the example of Orion, right, where they're just... And Neptune where they're basically gonna give people an airdrop and people gravitate to that. People want free money and they don't necessarily think about the consequences of security to the network. I mean, we saw that with Orion, right. How many million LUNA was going to Orion, despite Do and everybody being like, "Hey, you should spread this out. It's not the best security for the network if everybody's concentrating in the top 10." So I've seen networks that kind of degrade when it's a race to the bottom. But it's a tough thing because, again, I don't think you should put restrictions on what validators can do. I think with Orion, to me that was hopefully educational for the whole community because I feel like they dangle this big fucking carrot in front of everybody for like six months, and then they bait and switch. They gave you like a crumb at the end, and they're like, "Thanks." Cephii 55:08 Right, right, right. [chuckle] Yeah, the yield is not necessarily all that high, right, what you're getting from that. And not only that, but let's say it was high, and you decided you were going to be an Orion investor in the coin, then you have another set of problems where you gave all this Orion to this gajillion people, and now they're selling it, and then driving your original coin owner down. Sha 55:35 Right. So it could be like a double-edged sword kind of thing. And the problem with that race to the bottom is if there's companies or protocols that can afford to basically pay people to vote for them, or buy votes, then you do that for long enough, a year or two years, and then the Mom and Pop validators who can't afford to do that, they basically leave because they get starved out. And then you have a network, who has very few... Power is concentrated in few, right. And so I think that's why Terra has their Terra delegation program to try to promote more little guys, and make sure that we have 130 people, at least, that are committed and not going anywhere, not going to starve to death and will continue to validate. I think there's a lot of progress. Just the last two days, there was two meetings. TFL hosted a Twitter Spaces two days ago that was just about validators and how to improve the situation there. And then today, actually, this afternoon, Flipside Crypto did an AMA on their Discord channel with a lot of validators came to participate. And it was basically, they want to make... Similar to the score they made, the LUNAtic scoring thing that they made, to see how active a LUNAtic and how into TeFi you are, you get a score out of 30. They're trying to come up with some kind of score for validators. And say, okay, if you're voting in governance then you get a score, if you have done X, Y, or Z, then you get a score. And then at least have some kind of objective criteria that says, "Okay, this validator has actually been doing stuff for a while versus this one hasn't done as much," kind of thing. And hopefully, that'll be somewhat educational to the community and will bring these issues a little bit more to the light. Cephii 57:21 Yeah, cool. On a totally different subject, I kind of switched the name of the heading here for a little bit. There's this app I've been using, which is really interesting, that people might be interested in learning something about it. But LunarCrush was initially a web application only, and then they created phone applications for it. And what they're doing is, is they're essentially tracking Twitter and other social media metrics, and then bringing that to the masses, essentially, for free at this point, where you basically can get access to these kind of social media metrics. You guys are aware of the Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index, as an example, that people have used. And the idea is that when it's at Extreme Fear, you start buying some Bitcoin, because probably most of the sellers have been exhausted at that point. And I have my pluses and minuses about how that particular index is designed. It actually utilizes more traditional technical analysis also, like RSI, and whatnot. But the funny thing about the Fear & Greed Index is it's sort of like the... When that thing is in Extreme Fear, the funny thing is, if you go to other indicators, like on TradingView, and stuff, they'll be in the Strong Sell section. Never use those damn things, by the way, those things are so wrong. They're like, do the opposite of whatever those things say, usually. Because the trend is not really your friend in the sense that the trend at the bottom is usually when sentiment and everything else is at its worst. And that's when I typically start sort of getting things, not the other way around. Cephii 59:14 But LunarCrush is an interesting app. What they did was they have a token that goes with their... And this, by the way, has nothing to do with LUNA, as in LunarCrush, it's just its own thing. They created this token where some of their metrics on their system, you acquire more of their little token, which then unlocks more of the features within the system. So it's meant to... The social platform itself analyzes social media, but it's also trying to gather social information from you, in a sense, because the more things you put on your little portfolio on there, the more things you check, the more feedback you give in terms of your... Sort of like the CoinGecko happy face. It's sort of aggregating information about various coins and then it has some scoring systems. It doesn't allow you access to scoring systems until you get a certain number of LunarCrush tokens or whatever, in there which is interesting. You could technically buy them, I think they're listed now. And you could buy the token, and then you can go and stick them in your wallet, I suppose, to get faster access. But I think even without all that, the basic app is really pretty slick, and worth playing with and checking out. I've stuck it in my... There's like a little referral link type thing that I'd stuck in my Twitter feed periodically, but it's pretty cool. So if you look at what it shows, it'll show you how much social media activity is going on with a particular number of mentions of specific tickers like $LUNA, or, $UST or what have you. It'll tell you who is talking about those coins a lot, like in terms of social media folks. I don't know, it's a neat little app that to me, what you're looking for is a combination of the price being down, and the social media activity being down also, meaning everyone's in depression mode. And that often times is the time to grab some things. I'm not telling you to go get the app and buy shit. I'm just saying, it's one of those things that you can kind of look at and sort of see what it what it shows. And then another thing I tend to use is Google Trends, which if you just type your coin in, like Terra Luna, or something like that, you type it in Google Trends, it'll give you some idea of how many people are searching for that worldwide or locally. And I like the fact that LunarCrush is sort of pulling from traditional social media avenues. I don't know that it necessarily connects to the Google Trends API or not. But it's a neat little app and might be worth playing with. And they're sort of a crypto native crowd too, so it's all crypto related. And they've got some news aggregators in there, and some of the things. I guess, wherever they can find API's related to social consensus, you'll see that in there. Cephii 1:02:15 There's a couple of scoring systems, one's called a Galaxy score, and one's called an Altcoin score. And what you're sort of looking for in those things is you're looking for when the social media attention is really high, like people are talking about something, but the price of the coin hasn't gone up, in theory. That can also be a point where you're like, "Oh look, there's an uptick in the activity of people talking about some new coin that you're interested in." And then now, maybe it reflects people thinking about it, talking about telling their friends about it. And then you know, week or so later, things move up. Anyway, it's a neat little app, probably check it out, play with it. There's nothing... It's not really like a paid thing where you're obligated to do anything. But they also have their own little community. They've had some AMA's on here. I was listening from time to time, it looks like an interesting project. And they're actually designing like a coin around it somehow to provide utility for their little social consensus coin or something. [chuckle] But yeah, maybe see what you think about that. Any questions related to that or anything else? We should probably bug out. I think my kids bought Spider-Man tickets or some shit for today. [chuckle] So we're gonna go and do that probably. Any other... Machina 1:03:35 That's cool, we wanted to go to watch but all cinemas are locked down here. So that kinda suck. Cephii 1:03:40 Oh, really? Which country are you in? Machina 1:03:43 I'm from Slovakia. Cephii 1:03:45 Oh, really? Okay. Machina 1:03:46 Yes. So, yeah, I wanted to go see that. Cephii 1:03:51 Yeah, the, the, you know, yeah, coming from a science background, I find the the media attention to be hilarious. If you go on... In the US, it's so ridiculous. If you go to one news outlet, the commentary is going to be, the sky is falling because the government wants you to know about a virus. And if you go to another news channel, the sky is falling because of the virus. And it's just the most hilarious, just obnoxious, silly news coverage. Just a non-science based nonsense you can possibly imagine. Machina 1:04:26 I think it's really unfortunate that this has become like a political thing instead of health thing, no? Cephii 1:04:32 I think it's just human nature. An invisible agent essentially plays on everybody's spheres, which is fascinating. And whatever psychology you tend to have, this type of thing will play on it to the max, right. So in other words, the idea that somehow that it won't become "political" when it affects everybody's lives in some way or the other, it's impossible. It's like by definition, what is politics? It is the like recognition that the future is unknowable, and somehow we're all going to come together and argue about whatever the future is going to be, what we think it might be, and then prescribe our solutions for it. So it's like... It's automatic politics. Don't even think about it that it's unfortunate that it's political, it's a given that it becomes political, and it becomes political banter. If you think about how... If you think about someone with a science background and how they look at the media coverage, think about you guys, you know a reasonable amount about crypto, and watch the crypto coverage on CNBC and on the congressional floor, and you watch the shenanigans and the clusterfuck that represents, and then you can imagine what a science based individual who's in medicine or related fields would think about the banter going around on the media. It's just constant nonsense. And then the political interpretation of that nonsense is even worse, because these are people that have no science background. So people always say like, "Well, you just have to vote for someone, and they'll have "advisors", right, and those advisors will inform them what to do." But the fact of the matter is, most politicians don't even have the nominal knowledge to understand which advisor knows what they're talking about, and which that doesn't, nor do the people that are in the media. So what ends up happening is is you wind up with this situation, where the media doesn't even know what questions to ask, they don't even know when the person that they brought on is bullshitting them, or creating their own narrative or spin. They have no idea how to recognize any of that, then they try to claim this faux objectivity. But the reality is, they just don't have the scientific knowledge to be objective one way or the other, right. They just don't understand how science is done, or any of this. So it's just a bunch of shenanigans that go on, but yeah. Machina 1:06:56 Yeah I was just gonna say, I was watching the Congress, and personally, the discussions that we have in my country and the government is really ridiculous. It's stupid, and so I was actually... Cephii 1:07:09 Pretty much every country. [chuckle] Machina 1:07:11 But I was actually pleasantly surprised. At least from what I've seen, it seemed to me like these Congress guys, they were at least interested to understand what's going on. It wasn't that bad, I guess, from what I was seeing. Cephii 1:07:25 Yeah, but it's difficult because what I find is, in this industry, in this space, what's fascinating is, is the number of people who actually have a fundamental understanding of this, even within the medicine space. Let's say, you're a doctor or you are... The type of situation that develops from a science perspective is you're not actually well enough informed as an actual medical doctor to understand all of the nuances. Think about tokenomics, right, very, very similar situation. You may understand, why you hold certain cryptos, but you may not know the pitfalls and problems that a José Macedo might know about fucking whatever coin, right. In other words, he could probably spot bullshit a mile away, and probably bullshit you if he wanted to, because he knows enough about the system to make one that's advantageous to, let's say, Delphi Digital or something, I'm just making this up. But the point is, your politician/average medical professional is actually not well enough equipped with some mixture of biostatistics capabilities, and honestly, just basic virology knowledge, to be quite honest with you. [chuckle] That it's actually pretty embarrassing from a professional standpoint, much less your particular bias. Cephii 1:09:01 I'll give you a great example. You can watch, say for example, Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan's a smart guy in a lot of things, but when he pulls on a guy regarding virology, he'll tend to pull someone on that already believes in his underlying presuppositions about how the world should be run. So it's not really... You're not just bringing a panel of scientists on, nor are you bringing on a panel of tokenomics experts when you have a crypto discussion, to sort of objectively decide what to buy, right, similarly what policy to create in science. So this whole concept that people say, like the words "do your own research", it is the most... Doing your own research is not that easy. It's not so in crypto, it's not so in science, there's a reason why you have literally entire organizations built to figure out what the fuck to do with a virus, or like Delphi Digital on what to do with a crypto, or whatever. It's because this stuff is a lot harder than it looks. And individuals tend to project their wishes and their dreams of society on to everything from a virus to vaccines to money to crypto to whatever. And it really is quite fundamentally hilarious. Cephii 1:10:22 Well, not hilarious, it's actually really tragic, because a tremendous amount of human waste goes into this. I'm sure Sha probably can attest to how many people have been buried because they've just been stupid. [chuckle] It really is remarkable that how many people literally just threw their lives away and just don't believe a thing about what's going on. I have seen cities turn to salt, guys. I'm in a lot of different things, and the number of deaths I've seen would basically... If you had to go through that, you would have an opinion, I promise you, political or otherwise. But the reality is that these things have a tremendous amount of... The social media drama around this has been so weird, but then again, I see it in crypto too. So the way that these tribes form, and the way all these narratives get printed, it doesn't shock me at... In retrospect, it should not have shocked me at all that Dogecoin did as well as it did. I was the one that probably told the most people don't fucking buy Dogecoin, it's nonsense, right? But guess what, it performed one of the best of the of the season. And that just reflects my core intuition that smart minds would prevail, but Elon was right, to some extent, the narrative and the meme is all that matters. And you'll notice that Elon spends a tremendous amount of time controlling the memes and controlling the narratives, and tweeting funny shit periodically, right. [chuckle] Cephii 1:11:55 And he's controlled the hearts and minds of folks, which most definitely has affected things like how many developers come into Tesla, how many developers come into SpaceX, how many engineers and whatnot show up there. Everyone wants to be a part of something like that, where the leader projects that, right. And he's done a tremendous job, just playing the system like a fiddle in a sense. And Steve Jobs used to do this, and quite a few different examples of that. But what we don't have in virology circles, or whatever, in the CDC is you don't have the Steve Jobs standing up there, and telling them like it is. You don't have the Elan Musk out there in those circles, and that's what was missing, in my view. A huge amount of people that either didn't need to lose their businesses or lose their lives, or both, could have been done much better if someone with half a brain was up there actually talking. I'm not talking about any particular political figure, I'm just talking about the entire establishment was funny. And I meet people, that are involved with CDC and all sorts of folks, and the entire thing was just a total clusterfuck. I joke about it, you know,how you have zombie movies? I don't know if you guys saw the Brad Pitt movie, what is it called? The... Machina 1:13:24 World War Z? Cephii 1:13:25 World War Z. Yeah, where what ends up happening is, is like, there's this zombie apocalypse. And a bunch of little doctors from the UN are gonna somehow escape the zombie apocalypse, develop a cure, and fix all this shit and turn all the zombies back to normal or whatever would happen at the end of that. If that apocalypse happened, guess what, we're fucked. There's no way that would turn out in some positive way. It's funny how the apocalypse movies have a nice ending at the end, like a little bow. But the reality is, human beings don't have any evidence that we behave in this way. In reality, where we sort of come together and fix all that shit the last minute. And I think both crypto and what you learn from the memes and features of it, as well as what happened with this pandemic should be a lesson to everybody in terms of how the world works, how people think, and, the herd mentality that goes into everything for financial markets, to medical to whatever, like business. The the lesson is really pretty loud and clear. I don't think we've had an experiment like this in the modern time, quite like this for sure. Machina 1:14:38 Yeah. It's crazy. The COVID really does say a lot about even the people around you, like maybe you didn't know something about them, and you learned a lot through COVID. Like, it just shows what's behind this person. Cephii 1:14:49 Right, right. Sure. It's weird because in some areas that... They'll look at you funny like, "Hey, why are you wearing a mask," or something. I'm like, "'Cause my dad has leukemia." Why the fuck do I want to take this home, even if I do fine. I don't want my dad to be dead next week, right. So there are all sorts of people that do all sorts of things for different reasons, but they'll almost look at you like you're in the wrong tribe or some shit if you're doing something. I'm not ultra hardcore or anything, one way or the other. I'm just saying it's fascinating how symbols matter to people. And the mask thing was like a symbol. It's more about the symbol than it was about anything that it does or doesn't actually perform, which is really fascinating stuff. And yeah, the entire debacle was fascinating. Maybe some of you guys live in Australia and whatnot, where the lockdowns are more extraordinary, at least that's how they make it out on TV, like, oh my god, they're pointing guns at everyone and making you wear shit. The media here is interesting in how... Probably 99% of Australia is probably functioning just fine. But they'll make it sound like there's this totalitarian regime and Hitler's running Australia now or whatever. So it's... The parabolic nature of how these things are described is remarkable. The memefication of the news has been amazing to me to watch, not being in media and whatnot. Sha, did you see a lot of that, going on with your travels? Sha 1:16:18 Oh, yeah, it's insane. And it happens everywhere. Cephii 1:16:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the incentives to do this sort of thing are remarkable. Nero, what's up? Nero 1:16:28 Hey, I'm in Australia, and it's nowhere near as bad as they make out. Cephii 1:16:33 Oh, really? What's your take on the whole thing? Nero 1:16:37 I mean, it's a big fabrication of the truth to a certain degree, right. We back up to 2,500 cases in Sydney area. And it's just a completely different kettle of fish now. They're just so much more relaxed with everything because people are double vaccinated. Cephii 1:16:55 Right? Nero 1:16:56 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Everything that people were seeing on the news, all my friends around the world would just hit me up saying, "Wow, it looks horrendous," with the military everywhere, with helicopters going over and everything, and watching what you do. It was nothing like that, for me anyway, my view is... Cephii 1:17:12 Yeah, of course. Yeah. They'll show the one dude with a gun walking in some neighborhood making it sound like Hitler's just taking over the streets of Sydney or whatever. Nero 1:17:21 Exactly, exactly. But we were restricted in regards to how far we could travel for a long time, which was quite frustrating. But in my experience, I'm quite fortunate, I live on the beach. So just hot laps at the beach all day, every day. Cephii 1:17:36 Right, right. [chuckle] That's funny. Yeah, it's been pretty interesting, though, like in the US situation. It's another weird thing too, is if you have an... This was shown in France, which is actually fascinating. The whole thing affected France, right, when the very beginning of this began. There was an article that actually showed that most people didn't believe anything was actually going on until someone they knew died. And then all of a sudden, it was like people sort of believed it. So I'm sure there's millions of people every day dying in Africa, or somewhere that I'm not. And I don't pay attention to that, because I don't see them die. It doesn't affect me on a daily basis. It doesn't necessarily even, I don't want to say I'm being mean, or whatever. But not every death on this planet affects me directly, and nor should I be worried about it too much, because what are you gonna do about it? So there is that normal behavior that a non psychopath behaves like. You have to ignore those things to some extent. So it's our nature to ignore certain things. But it's just weird how... Because nobody actually walked through American hospitals to see actual people die, everyone thought it was just nothing. But if you go through US hospitals, and just look at how many people have destroyed lungs, compared to the average year, it's like 100x from normal, which is obnoxious. But the average person never sees those people, so what ends up happening is, is it translates through story, essentially, but they don't actually physically see it, which is really remarkable. But it's very similar what happens with crypto. You might hear things like, "Oh, developers are building something on Terra." And maybe there are these projects happening, you're not really sure, it all seems so nebulous, so far away, and you don't have any direct influence over it. And people tell you the price of something is going to go up and you're like, "Alright, well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't." And it's totally story driven in terms of how you make decisions. It's very weird. Nero 1:19:43 It's fascinating stuff. I work in cardiothoracic surgery. And the minds that I deal with are just incredible. And you've raised a really valid point. You get people like Joe Rogan with his narrative, saying what he has to stay but then I work with these people who are just so intelligent. And they're all for the vaccine, they see firsthand what's going on. And yeah, it's really interesting. That's such a valid point you raised. Cephii 1:20:10 Yeah, I mean, whatever fear you have, you're gonna be militant about it at some level, or some people will be. And they'll be really, really heard more than the other people. So it's fascinating. How many people have... They're on high blood pressure medicine, but they haven't researched on the internet, every little thing that it does and doesn't do? You're assuming experts gonna tell you what to do. And you're like, "Fuck it, I'm taking this blood pressure medicine," you're not necessarily going in there and checking every single side effect and hoping you don't get one of them. Because every... I mean, there's a normal behavior that comes from trusting a professional to tell you what to do. And it's weird how that breaks down in these weird situations. Nero 1:20:54 Also, I've noticed some people tend to find it very easy to find a narrative once they're on a tangent. Cephii 1:21:02 Yeah, that's true. [chuckle] But we all do, I'm sure I do it. Nero 1:21:06 It's so true. It's so true. And I don't if you saw it, there was this video, which came out about a situation in Northern Australia, the indigenous folk who are being persecuted. And that video, actually, was filmed months and months ago, maybe a year ago. It was very interesting that it got leaked maybe about six weeks ago, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And it's exactly the same situation. That's the narrative they're trying to push. The media got onto it. And yeah... Cephii 1:21:37 I don't even know, if it's something that is necessarily pushed. Sometimes it's just like, is floated out there. And next thing you know, it just takes a life of its own on. It's like it starts out as nothing and then becomes a behemoth, just because that's just what the internet does. It's like this big amplifier. It's pretty interesting. And some of the folks that are in marketing and whatnot, talk about that, for example, for Terra, they're like, "Hey, maybe we should be marketing more," and maybe we should, essentially, figure out more ways to pump shit, right, make it go up. And it's weird, though, it's hard to make that happen artificially. It's almost like these movements sort of happen randomly, to some extent, and the memefication of something is... It's exponential, and it's sort of viral in its nature, but it's hard to necessarily replicate that manually, on purpose. And that's another interesting thing I find. It's awesome when it happens, and it's your coin or whatever, but it's really hard to force it to happen, I think. Nero 1:22:45 Fascinating stuff. And I'll tell you what else is really interesting as well. So I don't know if you can tell my chest is quite bad at the moment. Girlfriend's got the same issue. And obviously, first thing you think is, "Shit, I've got COVID." And in the health arena that I'm working in, obviously, I've got to be very, very stringent with what I'm doing. So I've had like, three legit COVID tests, as has she, I think she's done four now as well. All negative, but you get the fear of God instilled into you, just thinking this is the only thing I can come down with now. Cephii 1:23:17 [chuckle] Well, no, it's not so much that but if you're working around places where you can infect someone to kill them, it's sort of your duty not to kill them, I suppose. Nero 1:23:28 Yeah, true. Well, it's everyone's duty, right? Cephii 1:23:30 You care about it more in that respect. Nero 1:23:32 Yeah, well, it's everyone's duty, right? So let's say, your father's situation for example, if people potentially could pass it on, it's a horrible thing. You don't know other people's situations. And that's why I think the vaccine is important to get. An altruistic move. Cephii 1:23:48 I do find it interesting that when people show up in hospitals, they expect the medical community to function like saints, right, to do everything perfectly, but they themselves can do whatever the fuck they want because they're anti establishment, which is really funny. They expect all of those things to be done perfectly for them when they arrive, like, "Oh, wait, did you wash your hands? Did you put your gloves on? Did you put your this on or that on?" Right, but then they don't necessarily expect to treat their fellow man that way as if the people within that building are special sorts of saint professionals, and everybody else can be just a fuckup you know, and do whatever they want. [chuckle] That's what's been going on pretty heavy. It's kind of funny. Well it's funny in the sense of dark humor, not like I'm laughing at it, but it's just kind of... Just watch how people behave, it's weird. Cephii 1:23:50 I think also, the same thing can be said with the extreme decentralization fetish. I don't know what to call it. When someone kidnapped your daughter, the first thing you do is like, "Where's the police? And where's the government trying to fix that," right. Cephii 1:24:55 Yeah, totally. You're looking for your lawyer, you're looking for the instigator. Yeah, something bad happens, and suddenly you want your centralized systems back. Totally. Yeah, there's a there's a reason why... By the way, if you look at biology and evolution, there are structures in place that are centralized, like for example, a beehive, and then there's structures in place that are highly decentralized, like for example, the spreading of the pollen of a tree or some shit, right. So there's examples of both, and there are benefits to centralization in a crypto, and there's benefits to decentralization. And not everything has the same application, which is why if you look at how DNA works, essentially, even within your own like body, or within a singular organism, you'll have a mixture of things that benefit both, conceptually. For example, your brain... Every one of us has the structural features in our brain, theoretically, to be schizophrenic, where you can hear voices in your head. In fact, all of you have a voice in your head right now, your inner voice. You feel like it's you, it's sort of the thing that's talking, it's a thing that's carrying out actions. But when that voice gets disconnected, you could either hear your own voice out of control in your head, in theory, talking at you, which is what schizophrenia sort of can do, or even more weirder situations with multiple personality type situations. So if you take that context, there is functional components of your brain that are sort of decentralized from each other, and do their own tasks, but they all come together in a central way to ultimately get you the outcome that you desire, which is to make bows and arrows, and farm shit, and do degen DeFi shit. But ultimately, there's a mixture of that interplay between central and decentralization, every organization, every system. It's not all bad that certain things that are central are bad for you, I think people have a problem with certain things that might be ultra decentralized, and certain things that are ultra centralized. Cephii 1:27:19 But yeah, there's no such thing as like some perfect system that doesn't involve some mixture of the two. If there was, by the way, nature would have found it, after 5 billion years of evolution. You think you're so smart, you're like a little political wizard, or you're in the little econ class, and you think you've sorted this shit out? You haven't sorted shit out 5 billion years of like energy optimization via DNA, and you have the world you live in now. If it was possible to eradicate every thing you think in the world is not helpful. It would have been eradicated by now, to some extent or the other. But a lot of things are preserved through diversified DNA mechanisms as an example, because they have certain utility. And then when certain things have certain utility, like let's say chlorophyll in plants that work in leaves to turn sunlight into energy, then certain things are so profound, they cause a growth explosion. Those are called catalysts, or enzymes, or things like that, where basically an invention or an innovation has come about to solve a problem in an energy efficient manner, and it just changes everything. Like that's what I see in for example, Prism Protocol, where they're creating these interesting derivatives of proof of stake. Proof of stake itself was an interesting methodology and evolution in crypto, but then you look at what Prism is doing, you're like, "Wait a minute, that's a different evolution that maybe I haven't seen exactly that in other traditional finance." But you could do this across proof of stake and maybe that creates lots of new opportunities for engineering systems and such. Cephii 1:28:57 So once you create a primitive like chlorophyll, well, you can make plants all over the world that can feed on sunlight and garner energy. When you have something like a blood cell in your body, right, not... Your blood cell and the blood cell of a cow and the blood cell of a sheep and whatever, they're gonna be all very similar. So you don't need to necessarily reinvent the wheel for every creature that needs blood, right. The DNA sort of preserve certain things that tend to survive because they're useful and similar things are happening in defi right now. Take for example, the Olympus DAO concept or bonds or whatever. A lot of the things that have already been invented in traditional finance are being reintroduced in DeFi in a slightly different way. And some things are going to survive, some things are going to not survive, some things that you like about certain coins or tokenomics, they'll survive. Other things will simply dissipate into the ether because I think what will happen is the most capital efficient ways, the least energy intensive way to solve a problem problem is the way that problem will get solved. And this goes for Bitcoin too, essentially. If you find that you can create all of the equivalent outcome benefits of, say, Bitcoin but with lower energy usage, well, that's exactly what will win in the long run, because that's just how it works. If that wasn't the case, if it was just like, "Hey, you know what, I want to use more energy to solve the same problem," there would have to be a compelling reason for that. Because it takes... It's just not how evolution works. You're gonna want to use the the most evolved methodology with the best catalysts, the best enzymes, the best systems efficiency wise, and then you build out a system. And I think that's what's happening in DeFi now. Cephii 1:30:43 And that's what we talked about with Nexus today with them possibly partnering with Apollo DAO, I'm sorry, not Apollo DAO, Olympus DAO, to possibly do something different with their liquidity and such. So the reason I was asking about all that shit is because if something's gonna make my Psi coin price gonna go up, right? It's gonna be that in the backend, they're building things over the number of years, because if I bought it high, which admittedly, I bought some of mine high, if I'm going to hold it, it's because I think it's going to go up for some reason. And putting people who are building those things, their feet to the fire to determine, "Wait a minute, do I actually believe that's going to happen? Or is my capital spent elsewhere going to be better," is something you should be asking yourself, and I think that's what... What's amazing about Twitter Spaces is you can get people like that on. I think doing things via Discord and everything is fine, too. I just think, I don't know, there's something more personal about hearing someone's voice, their inflection just sort of feeling, do I believe where this is going. I don't know, for some reason, in written text, it just doesn't seem the same way to me. Maybe some of you guys would agree, but I think it's been valuable to hear from these people directly. Anyway, any other last questions and such? I know, we kind of carried this on forever, we can kind of kill it right now if nobody has anything else interesting or some comments to say or whatever. Machina 1:32:13 Oh, this was really cool. When you talk about science. I like listening to it, it's so interesting. I was also thinking about internet, and how TCP works, and everything. We pretty much already have that within ourselves. It's kind of crazy when you think about it, you know? Cephii 1:32:27 Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, what we're doing in neural networks, essentially, is duplicating to some degree what living things have already done, right. Machina 1:32:37 Yeah, exactly. Cephii 1:32:38 'Cause you know it can be done because a bunch of molecules were put together by nature to make a brain. So it's not a fiction to know that it can be done. It's already been done. And now it's just a question of reverse engineering or developing an even more efficient way to do the same thing sometimes. Machina 1:32:57 Now, I actually have one question. Cephii 1:32:59 Yes, sure. Machina 1:33:00 That's really interesting to me. So what are your thoughts on Kadena actually having first truly decentralized DEX? I don't know if you heard about it, the news. Cephii 1:33:10 Yeah, I don't know what makes it like "truly decentralized". I guess what they're saying is because it's a proof of work network, that their sensibility is like proof of work, number one, is more decentralized than not, right. Machina 1:33:24 I don't know if you've heard about it, but they're gonna be running on Flux. So that's the difference. Flux is decentralized cloud provider, and basically the DEXes that are working currently, like PancakeSwap and stuff, they are all running on AWS, which is a centralized entity. So if one day, CEO of AWS woke up and said, I want PancakeSwap off of my platform, it's just going to go down, for example. So that's really interesting to see how that plays out. Because you can't really call yourself decentralized if you're running on a network that's under control... Under one entity. Cephii 1:34:01 Yeah, we talked about that a little bit for Terra too. It is a serious project to build your own appropriate server infrastructure and run a validator, for example. It can be done but at the same time the yield rate on running a validator has to exceed the cost of running your own physical plant. And that always remains a challenge for smaller projects as such. And then the flip side of that is you have industrial grade validators who do this for a business, like Hashed or whatever, probably like Smart Stake and some these other things. And the problem with them is they're sort of quasi-centralized too, because now you have professional validators running on lots and lots of different proof of stake networks. You can never really be sure that there's not a negative actor among those systems, right. So it's not just where your actual validators sit, it's also how much control over various networks they might have. I think until you have some sort of incident where a malicious actor on a high powered validator does something really bad, then you won't fully realize the problems. And you know how it is, people tend to react after the fact. It's like having nuclear weapons all over the world, but no one gives a shit unless one goes off, right? [chuckle] It's similar to that. Machina 1:35:35 Oh, by the way, that which you're referring to, I was thinking about machine learning, because I was scared for a while, I'm not gonna lie. But then I thought about it. I was born, I'll die, so why the fuck would I be scared. And so with that, I was thinking about machine learning. And I think eventually, maybe it's just gonna become like a nuclear warhead, where everybody has one, but no one's gonna deploy it, because we will all just incredibly fuck each other. Cephii 1:36:01 I don't think that's going to be the case, unfortunately, with this. And the reason is because unlike a nuclear warhead that actually requires a fair amount of physical materials that are sufficiently rare, you can run a reasonably powerful neural network on what's going to become fairly routine hardware, already. So the problem is going to be... The other thing about neural networks that's important understand is, so let's just pretend like I'm a really bad person, and I'm going to use drones to my advantage. Once you've created a neural network that ties in to, say, the optical sensor on a drone to reasonably control on a drone, like the yaw pitch, and the velocity of the drone and all of that, acceleration. Then what you do is you basically create a system where... You've seen this. You've bought little drone things at your local store, and you can get those things that pretty much hover now, you can get them to follow a specific subject that you're trying to... People videotape weddings, and whatnot with these things, or whatever, right. And once you've created that one time, notice how powerful such a small device becomes, right. The temptation to deploy is pretty much going to be not even temptation, the consumer is going to want this shit, right. They're gonna want the things that self-drive cars, self-drive drones, and whatever. And then you're just hoping no one uses it for a malicious purpose. But the reality is, is that like, those techniques are so powerful, that... And you've seen this play out in movies, like crowd strikes with drones, and this and that. Those are all very, very feasible to do right now. You don't even need any additional tech. Any kind of... Whether it's DARPA, whether it's Lockheed Martin, everyone's got their finger in the pie when it comes to combo drone attacks, and defense and everything. So all of that militarization has already started, and the problem is, once you know it can be done it's already too late. Pandora's Box is opened, and then you just have to assume someone's gonna do it against you one day. And if you see, for example, what you've seen with human beings that are bad actors, for example, someone that might shoot up a school or a mall, or something, you guys have seen these things happen. The effect you can have with a drone based outcome would be to take that and multiply it by like, 1000. You could literally take out God knows how many people with those types of attacks and such. So, I'm not as optimistic as some people are that these things won't be used for reasonably malicious purposes by various actors. Machina 1:39:21 Okay. Can I give you an idea on how to defeat it? Okay, maybe someone will use it, but... And you tell me where I'm wrong, because obviously, I don't know, but I was just thinking about it. Okay. To me, this is just another challenge, just another a battle. So anyway, just deploy another machine learning. Cephii 1:39:36 Yeah. So that's what's happening now, actually. We're in an arms race at this point for building defensive systems to combat offensive systems. And that's a really big... That's really what everyone's doing, quite frankly, if you look at the targeting systems on some of our missile systems and defensive systems. We not only have to... We have to have robotic systems because we can't... We're not fast enough to defend against hypersonic attacks, whether it's ballistic projectiles or whatever. So we've had no choice but to build, essentially, exotic, really, really nasty sorts of things to combat other really nasty things. So yeah, we're basically in this nutty arms race. And they tend to be the same types of technologies that can make a robot walk, or a robot function in a Amazon warehouse to ship stuff to your house or whatever. There's not that much difference in the type of computational effort required, because once you have sufficient optical capabilities, and you have modules to do different elements... You know how we're talking about Lego blocks in DeFi where one module is to earn yield, and the other module is to auto compound or whatever. Those types of exact same Lego blocks happen with ultimately long run with... You got an app store of ways to build a robot or to build a computational system. And it's very similar to how right now, if you want to make a video game, like using Swift on Apple or something like that, if some of you guys are coders, you don't have to reinvent everything, right. Let's say you want your terastation wallet to use Face ID. Well, the Face ID API is there, and the phone's already created it, it already recognizes your face and does all that shit. You don't have to learn how to do the ML computational activity of the neural chip on your phone, or how the damn thing works, right, it just sort of does. And you as a developer can build some shit that can use Face ID to execute someone or whatever. Cephii 1:41:57 So the problem is, is that there's nothing specific about the Face ID on your phone, that couldn't be used to basically... Park it in front of a wall somewhere, and if someone walks in front of it, and recognizes them, you could send it to a Siri shortcut to execute them. So the reality is, is that the... I know, I'm not trying to give everyone ideas to murder people. I'm just saying, you don't have to use your brain for very long to find very malicious activities with very simple systems that you think are just not a big deal, but are entirely new attack vectors for crime and mayhem and whatever. So... [chuckle] Before we dismantle all of our centralized systems, and I'm not particularly advocating for any particular central anything I'm just saying, before you dismantle all those, those are the same people you're going to be calling to help for when the shit hits the fan. And, they're the same ones that you tend to lean upon when you need them. And then it's easy to make fun of them when you don't need them. And it's an interesting thing in DeFi and whatnot. Like the other day in the congressional hearing about DeFi, Elizabeth Warren who decidedly has, half the time, no idea what she's talking about with this shit. But if you watch what she said, and you saw that... They reposted on Twitter and whatnot, they're like, "Well, what happens if DeFi gets in the hands of terrorists?" And that's always like... You use the T word, next thing you know, everything's fucking... The, what do you call it, the boogeyman, whatever. But it's not entirely wrong, this is what people at central agencies are trying to figure out. Because when the shit hits the fan and someone blows up your downtown or whatever, right, the public is not simply going to say, "Wait a minute. Oh, it was my fault because I let DeFi take over," or, "I bought the Cosmos token or some shit." What they're gonna say is, "Why didn't my government officials fix this," right? That's the first people they're gonna blame, is those people in those positions. So those exact people in the position that they were hired, or voted in to apparently protect the public from these problems, they're the exact ones that are gonna see the attack vector and go, "Wait a minute, we don't have a solution for that." Anyway, just something to think about when it comes to the yin and yang of those kinds of systems. Finn 1:44:17 Thanks for checking out another episode of The Ether. That was part two of a two part Cephii Space, recorded on Friday, December 17th 2021. For terraspaces.org, I'm Finn, thanks for listening.