Matt Huang
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Matt Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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which I think is useful in the sense that it is an analogy that helps tech people understand what might be happening with crypto. But it also introduces a lot of incorrect comparisons too.
And so if you're trying to build in crypto and you take the legible meme too seriously, then you might actually build something very wrong because you're misunderstanding the underlying complexity of what's possible.
Totally. And maybe the modern version of that is seeing like a meme. The ecosystem selects for memes that are very simple because simple memes can gather a lot of power and energy.
and spread and you see this basically on the current topic on twitter every day is people fighting over higher dimensional versions of memes and the memes causing people to misunderstand what everyone is saying but without the meme you don't actually get the discussion the discussion there it's not clear exactly what to do but the same thing happens in the investing world
Peter Thiel has this hate of buzzwords. As soon as there's a buzzword for an ecosystem, run away. Moritz has this great look for the interesting complected bird. Don't look for the flock. I think they're all getting at this idea of the outliers are going to be unique. And if you're investing by meme, you're kind of losing all the underlying texture and complexity.
I think some of the most foundational platforms where generative outlier outcomes can happen like that are the most illegible at the beginning. I think the internet was an example of this. Everyone today, I think, takes for granted how obvious the internet is. But if you think about even just the idea of Google, the pitch for Google was this helps you search the internet.
But like, what is the internet for? Well, Google is like this use case of the internet. There's a circular reference there. And it just turned out that over time, more and more stuff ended up on the internet and became really useful.
So I think of crypto as this very low-level change in how humans coordinate. What does low-level mean? Low-level in the sense of a very basic building block. I see. A change at the bottom of the foundation of the building. And throughout history, we always coordinate through institutions that are centralized. Companies, governments, monetary systems.
And crypto enables us to do it in a decentralized way. I think it turns out that the most valuable application of that is money. And I think crypto is progressing in three rough stages. First, as money. Second, as a financial system. And third, as a kind of internet platform. And I think it's coming into focus most on the first two, useful as money, useful as a financial system.
I think the internet platform is probably the most illegible at the moment. But I think on the money side, Bitcoin is the most valuable startup created in the last 15 years. Except most people don't think of it as a startup because it's competing in a highly unconventional market, the market for money. It doesn't have a conventional corporate structure or a team or a CEO.
But I think if you step back and think about that, I think it's kind of remarkable that that even happened in a completely new industrial organization. Like Satoshi dropped a nine-page white paper, wrote some initial code, and then the whole ecosystem grew up. around it. It's not just the most valuable startup.
I think if you told us at the startup paradigm 2018 that nation states would be talking and actually adopting Bitcoin. In treasury. We would have thought you were crazy. We thought it was possible someday, maybe 10, 15 years. So honestly, I've been very surprised by growing legitimacy of Bitcoin as a monetary asset. And it's not just at the government level, it's at the institutional level.
I think in 2017, Larry Fink called Bitcoin an index of money laundering. And now he's on CNBC once a month talking about how it's the future and it's digital gold. Jerome Powell at a conference the other month, I think was asked whether they would ever adopt Bitcoin or whether it's a threat to the dollar. And he said, no, it's not a threat to the dollar. It's just digital gold.
Even the acknowledgement of digital gold, I think five years ago, again, was deeply contrarian. And if you think about the adoption of any new monetary asset, it is this process of building acceptance and legitimacy. Like that is the actual KPI. Price is an output of that. But the primary input is how many people actually believe that this might be possible.
I think the idea of a money that is non-sovereign is valuable. I'm not someone who believes that crypto or Bitcoin should replace all fiat currency. I think they actually coexist quite nicely. And the rise of stable coins is a great example of that. But I think it's very useful to have an alternative. And we used to have that in the form of gold. And people adopt gold for that purpose.
as a hedge against hyperinflation, fiscally irresponsible spending, etc. But Bitcoin is not just that. It's also something that can help individuals and families preserve wealth in some of the least safe places on Earth. You see, whether it's people escaping Ukraine or Venezuela or other nations in distress, crypto has started to play a much bigger role there.
So I think just from a humanitarian level, it's a tool. That I think is very valuable. And gold solves some of the issue, but it's physical, heavy, inconvenient. Lots of reasons why a digital version is superior.
I think today it's primarily a store of value or maybe more accurately a bet on a future store of value. I think over time it may find some transactional use, but I don't think that's necessary for it to be really useful and interesting.
It has one in a way that's... exceeded what I would have predicted a handful of years ago. But I think we're still early in the degree to which that really is understood, despite some of the commentary around it. And one rough way to think about the adoption of Bitcoin is How many people around the world weighted by dollar amount believe Bitcoin is something they should own?
And then there's the other axis, which is like what percent of their portfolio is in Bitcoin? And I think we're getting to a point where a lot of institutions are starting to think, OK, maybe we should get off zero. Maybe it's one to two to five percent. You don't have fidelity like recommending baskets that have that weighting.
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