#477 Avichal Garg on His Crypto Thesis

What do you need to do if you're the US government? I would argue you actually need to embrace crypto because crypto is the one thing that the Chinese government will not do. They don't want capital to leave China and not be in their control. They don't want to give away privacy ... All of the things that make crypto work are all of the things that the Chinese government doesn't want to do. So, I think if you're the US government, you like double-down on crypto... You like really embrace it.

What you have here is, in our opinion, the pendulum swinging away from the Internet, like the Internet as we know it today. You think about what the Internet was designed to do or what it has become—it really optimizes for speed, and throughput, and scalability. And what we gave up were things like privacy—as we've now realized, the ownership of our data, and we've handed over control to these massive centralized organizations.

Bitcoin is really, really important, but we sort of think that there are going to be many, many thousands of tokens and many, many thousands of protocols. They're going to all sort of interact with each other, and we're going to essentially recreate a lot of, in our opinion, what the Internet was supposed to be. But it'll take 20-30 years. I think we're in the first inning of this.

I think hype cycles are actually really important. I think a lot of people think hype cycles are a bad thing, but I think they're necessary. You have to get the hype cycle because the over-investment is what allows you to invest in the stuff that needs to go mainstream or cross the chasm. And if you don't get the over-investment, the thing is never going to accrue enough capital or enough attention or enough people to really make sense.

When you meet with a founder and you walk out of the meeting saying 'Well, I went into the meeting believing X, and I walked out of the meeting believing not X, like that person actually turned upside down what I think about the world' — that's the kind of person that you just bet on.

Bitcoin is the biggest and most important protocol today. It will be one of the biggest and most important things in this entire space. It's the gateway drug for a lot of people. It's how you get into the space—you sort of get your head around Bitcoin.

That's a fantastic investment thesis—you just do what the young people are doing. If you just bet long on that, you'll probably do the right thing.

Things that are created when you're 65 don't make sense and are unnatural; things that are created when you're 35 are innovative; and things that are created when you're 5 are just the natural order of... the world.

The world is waking up to the idea that literally five to ten companies control whether or not you exist on the Internet, and the Internet is like your life.

Smart contracts are this really interesting thing because what they do is they take like a quadrillion dollars of stuff that's happening the world and allow you to express it in code.