Episode 153 - Decentralizing Before our Eyes
The internet is about to go into a massive phase shift over the next few years, and the arms race was kicked off in 2021 with the deplatforming of Parler and Donald Trump. In this solo show, Max talks about the development of the internet, the rise of decentralized services like Mastodon, and the rise of decentralized finance.
Links
Chris Dixon: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
Kara Swisher of the New York Times: Interviews Parler CEO John Matze
QZ: Angry Twitter Users in India Migrating to Mastodon
The Verge: How the Fedoverse (Mastodon) deals with Gap
Simply Explained: How Mastodon Works
Naomi Brockwell: Shapeshift Ends KYC
Blockonomi: Unstoppable Silk Road Clones
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 153.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. This is another solo show for solo show of the year. And I want to call out last week's show. Last week's show was a math show. Hope you learned something about Ramsey theory and something about quantum computing. I know I did. And you're gonna learn more this week because there's a lot going on in the world. And I kind of thought, “Okay. How am I going to cover this?”
First of all, this is going to be a really exciting year to cover, and I don't always have to get—I don't have to get into the weeds of politics. Thank God. I don't want to talk to—there's a lot of stuff I don't want to talk about right now. There are a lot of other people who do that. Sometimes, I just want to talk about where technology is going. And I know people on all sides are kind of panicking right now but stuff is moving. Stuff is moving in 2021: on the internet, on the tech scene, and, we're going to talk about it. We might be covering some of the dark side of the internet today, including dark markets so some of it might not seem optimistic. But again, incredible things are happening, and the phase change of the internet seems imminent. So let's talk about it because this could end up as a really good thing. And I'll tell you why by first going back, all the way back, to actually Episode 6 of The Local Maximum.
Episode 6 was actually the first solo show I ever did on Local Maximum. It was probably—it was early 2018 when we first started the show. And Episode 6 is about decentralized services. So I looked at an article from Chris Dixon who's like a well known tech investor in New York. I almost said here in New York, and then I forgot I'm not in New York anymore. But I think he's invested in Foursquare and other things. And he wrote an article in 2018 called “Why Decentralization Matters”, and I covered that article at the time. But basically, I said at the time that after reading this article—because I agreed with it—I said that massive changes are coming to the internet in five to 10 years. Well, if it's two years later, now it should be three to eight years. And that sounds about right—sounds right on schedule. Here we were–well, I mean, massive changes are coming right away. But we're really lining up to fit that timeline pretty well. So anyway, just to and we'll get to current events, don't worry—or worry we're gonna get to current events. But first of all, we're just going to give a little bit of a history.
And so here's what Chris Dixon said about the internet. First is—the first era was the decentralized era where nobody owns the protocols. So the internet was actually designed as a censorship resistant communications network. Anyone can hook up to it and there weren't big platforms kind of dominating it. And that decentralized era, he put as lasting until 2005, roughly 15 years. Let's say it starts with the advent of the World Wide Web in—let's round it off to 1990. And so you get 1990 to 2005, you get kind of this decentralized era.
Then, you have era two since 2005. Let's go 2005 to 2020, you have the big tech era. Now, this is when these corporate giants come in. We're talking about Google. We're talking about Facebook. We're talking about YouTube. We're talking about Amazon, of course. And I guess Twitter, at some extent, when it comes to news and information gathering. So these platforms made the internet much easier to use. The good news is that many people got access to new technology. You can start a website. Well, you didn't have to start a website to get your thoughts out on the web, like in Twitter, you just type them into a box. It's easy. You could go to a centralized place to search. But one of the problems is that platforms behave badly. They change the rules on you. They prevent people from earning profits. They pick and choose who they're going to do, and they ban who they want in their own interest.
Now, this was written in 2018. Remember, this was not written in 2021. So he's not talking about the Donald Trump man. So if you think that this is a one off thing that happened on Twitter the other day...well, it's not your—it's gonna keep going.
So another point that he makes—the point that I've made—is that centralization leads to social tension. Centralization leads to social tension, and that's because you have a small number of people who are from the same background making the rules for everybody. Well, did that happen? I'm pretty sure we can agree that happened.
So, and then, the third problem with all of these internet giants is they try to extract maximum value from the users, that would be you. So whether it's trying to keep you online for longer and longer and then, as you start to lose interest in what they're saying, they have to ramp it up. They have to get you more and more upset. They have to get you more and more outraged. They have to get you keep coming back for more, and at some point that hits a breaking point. Are we almost there yet? I kind of want to know when we're almost there.
So the era—the third era is that, and this is not me, this is Chris Dixon, but I sort of see this happening. The third era, that's when it really gets going. Centralized internet falls apart and goes decentralized again. I think, from what I look at specifically this week, the centralized internet is falling apart before our very eyes. And they're replaced by what he calls in 2018 crypto networks. Now, I don't think that's what we're gonna end up calling them. But let's say that ultimately, these are networks that use blockchain to maintain and update state, and they use cryptocurrencies for payments.
Now, you might—I'll get into it a little bit because not—the blockchain is the most uncensorable kind of form of communication and database we have. So you don't always need a blockchain. But so long as certain companies keep getting targeted, and taken off, and services removed, etc, etc. Eventually, they'll come back and they'll be arms race. And eventually, I think what we'll end up with is a blockchain in some instances wherein that would be for use cases, where there's a lot of demand for these use cases. There's a lot of demand for these use cases among users, and there's a lot of demand to censor these use cases. So that's when you have the largest kind of arms races. And that's when you end up with the most most kind of secure uncensorable solution that involves now that would end up being a blockchain and cryptocurrency of some type of some kind.
So the problem with some of these solutions, as they develop to review, is that they need better performance and scalability. That's why...why didn't we build these things in 2005? Well first of all, there were some decentralized services in 2005 but people were talking about them. But it's tough to get performance and scalability. It's not easy to set these up. But under the right conditions, these can improve faster.
So an example that's given in the article, an example that I talked about in Episode 6 is Wikipedia versus Encarta, which was Encarta was an encyclopedia that you kind of just download onto your computer. They used to have Encarta on CDs when I was a kid. And Wikipedia, when it first started, was not as good as Encarta. But then people added to Wikipedia, people added to Wikipedia and then it got better, and better, and better. And so by the year 2005, 2006, 2010, Wikipedia was so much better than decentralized solutions. Now, Wikipedia is bad again. I'll just say that. But Wikipedia imprint—now Wikipedia is kind of one of these tech giants where you have kind of a small group who—it has kind of the illusion of being open. But you really have this small group that controls all of the important articles—kind of an oligarchy. So Wikipedia in the early days improved at a faster rate.
Another example that is given is spam. So email spam right now is not a problem because email is—there are tons of companies that worked on email spam for many, many years. Decades, in fact. Probably since 1990, or even before companies have been—at least 30 years, companies have been working on email spam. And so our spam filters have gotten so good. Twitter spam—Twitter is the only company that works on that so it's very clunky. Yes sure, they banned people. They kind of do some spam bots, but it doesn't really work because it's centralized. It's one company trying to fight against millions and millions of people and bots, and that's kind of a huge whack-a-mole, so very difficult.
So those are the three eras. And the question is, are we really going to end up in era three? Is this centralized internet going to fall apart? It really looks like it's happening now. Essentially, in the United States, the internet is starting to bifurcate along political lines. I mean, you see that—so the big news, Donald Trump was taken off of Twitter.
And then a lot of—let's say, Trump supporters. I usually—I saw it like—from what I saw of Parler, it was basically just talk radio. It was like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin were on Parler. And so you can go on Parler, a lot of people were going on Parler, and that was shut down. At first, the apps were taken off the app store, which is like, “Okay, fine.” But a lot of people just use the website, you could go to parler.com. But then their hosting was taken off of Amazon.
So, okay...so let's talk about that a little bit. Now, I'm not going to get into the politics and the reasons so much, but let's just talk about what it is, and how this is going to play out. Because I think that's kind of the interesting part. I always try to make projections here, and I try to hold myself accountable because I want to understand what's going on. I don’t want to be 10 steps ahead of everybody.
So Parler is an alternative Twitter with a different moderation system, and it's preferred by American conservatives. Now, they do have a moderation system. It's not completely unmoderated. They do have kind of a volunteer jury system. It's not a decentralized service which is why it’s made a good target for removal. It's still centralized. It's because they have their own database, and it was hosted by Amazon, and it was fine. So it was the number one app. It's in the App Store this year for a little while which is crazy. I mean, if you think a Twitter competitor could be the number one app in the App Store. That is significant because in the past, it's been very difficult for companies to compete with these big tech companies.
Now it is true that it's only had a miniscule fraction of users that Twitter had–has, but sometimes this industry is about growth. And when investors see a lot of growth in a tech company, it really raises eyebrows. That's where you get the investments and stuff. It's not raw size. It's growth and growth potential, so they seem to have it. It seems to not be a fad or anything like that, and it was growing very fast.
So I listened to this Sara Swisher interview. She's a tech reporter from the New York Times with John Matze about Parler being taken off. She obviously hates him and everything he stands for. I'll post the article online. I don't know. I really don't like her interview style. It's really, really distracting how she's so—I don't know—sarcastic and defensive. And I don't know, I feel like if I interviewed people I disagree with, I would have handled it differently. But I just find it very distracting, so not my favorite interview with Kara Swisher there.
But that's where you can learn a lot about Parler and what's going on with them, what they think about is happening with them being taken down, what she thinks is happening with them being taken down. They say that the people have said, “Well, they promote violence.” And they're saying, “Where? Show us where we promote violence.” It looks like everything that's being organized is organized more on Facebook than Parler. But all of those are facts that have to be kind of investigated and come out. And right now, the people screaming on Twitter don't have the facts. So I'm not going to weigh in. We'll get them.
So anyway, they do have moderation—Parler, but it's volunteer moderation. And so that moderation isn't figuring out which things to remove, kind of a jury pool, jury selection. And that system is considered not enough by the tech giants. So that's why the big tech companies shut it down, Google, Apple, and then Amazon Web Services. So you can’t go to parler.com. And again, Google and Apple, they kind of do without Amazon. It will be a problem if you rely on Amazon servers as half the internet does, which is sort of something I would kind of want to rethink.
It does make me uncomfortable that Amazon can shut down any company's servers like in 24 hours, not even—and it's very complicated stuff—not even give them enough time to move over to different servers. Especially if they're doing something that hasn't been deemed illegal. So it's scary. I would consider it kind of a risk now to use Amazon servers. Even if you're doing something pretty less offensive to the tech giants because you never know when what you're doing is going to be considered competitive and get in their way. And then, they can just make up an excuse and say, “Hey, we see something that you did here. That's bad. We're gonna take you off tomorrow.” I mean, it should be considered a risk by entrepreneurs and kind of board members in the industry.
So what's next for Parler? Do they just go away? They're off. They're off the air. It's not the air, but they're off the internet. Do they just go away and everyone breathes a sigh of relief? That's probably not how this ends if you think about how the internet works. So they say they're going to build their own servers. I see others saying that downtime is going to be quite long. So they, at first, they said one week. That is very optimistic—one week. I would be very impressed if they got it back up that quickly. I wonder if they can get up kind of like a static page that shows everybody's—or that's what I want to try to do. If I were the CEO, I’ll try to get up a static page that shows everybody's tweets. I guess they're not called tweets. What are they called? Parlays? So that way you kind of have something to look at but I don't know. But if they don't run out of funding, and they don't go under, does it come back within a year? Would I be surprised if it comes back within a year? Certainly not. So, we'll see what happens.
So the main point is, this is just one move. There's going to be moves and countermoves. And what happens when they reach their final destination? You have something like Parler. Parler uses Amazon Web Services, then they're going to get off Amazon Web Services. They're going to get their own servers so that's great. Then, okay, what if somebody tries to turn off their servers by refusing to do business with them? Well, then what you get is Twitter on the blockchain, essentially. There are many groups trying to do this, or you get a decentralized Twitter. And there is one group trying to do this that is actually gaining steam. Decentralized Twitter, meaning that there are multiple servers, many server clusters, many different companies involved. And you could try to shut off one but it's very difficult. And they kind of all communicate with each other. And so there's no kind of single point of failure. And this group is called Mastodon. Now, if you haven't heard of Mastodon, remember that name, because you're going to hear it more and more down the line, I think.
So it's crazy how—even though Parler is in the news quite a bit—it's crazy how the news has completely bypassed the Mastodon phenomenon, and I think this is significant. So Mastodon was founded in 2017 by a German 24-year-old. His name is Eugene Rochko. Rochko, I think. And it also uses activity pub which is this kind of open source protocol for social networking. So Mastodon’s servers are not owned by a single company. Instead, they have a system where many servers across many different organizations can talk to each other, and then those form a network. So sounds kind of like the early internet, right? And then users can interact across networks so it's called being federated.
An example of a service that is federated is email. So you have an email service server, let's say you use Gmail or Yahoo, you could still email to each other because I use one, you use the other but they talk to each other. So if I get kicked out of one service, I can go move to another email service, and it's, well, it's not—no big deal. Well, it's only a big deal if I haven't downloaded my emails. I think downloading all my emails from Gmail would be tough, but maybe it's not a totally bad idea at this point. So anyway, that's kind of a federated service. It works pretty well. It's very difficult to get censored from email.
And not only that, email spam is pretty well settled. It's pretty easy to remove it. I get some emails that I don't want sometimes, but it's kind of my own fault because I don't add enough filters. But so it could be a little better. But it's certainly not as...it's not the most nerve wracking thing on the internet anymore. Most nerve wracking thing on the internet is probably Twitter, which seems like at this point. Twitter used to be—it used to be a talk about food, and music, and life, and things like that. And that's not happening anymore. I feel like at some point, Twitter is just gonna be Chinese and Russian bots talking to each other.
So anyway, that was on the side. But all right.
So right. So we have this federated network, it's called Mastodon. It is coming. Each operating server has its own code of conduct, its own terms of service, its own moderation policy, and currently, it's only about 1% of Twitter size. But again, you have to look at that growth. It is growing fast. As of last year—no, as of two years ago, almost 2019, it had 2.2 million. And I haven't gotten a more recent number. I haven't gotten a bigger number than that 2.2 million but it's got to be much higher than that now. I'm guessing it's like three or four million. So lots of users and it's growing fast. And if this becomes the one, or one of the ones that really take off like this, then I could see it being—I could see that network being the size of Twitter in just a few short years.
So the initial uses of Mastodon were fairly diverse. You might think, “Oh, is this another one of those conservative things?” No, absolutely not. It was not designed by American conservatives. There was some Americans involved, but it is an international group. And it did gain traction though, with a lot of people who were marginalized in any way.
So one example is in India. So, for example, they have a caste system in India, which I don't really understand. So I'm not going to talk about it too much. So I kind of read it as kind of lower class—the lower caste—but they, they were on Twitter. And they say that Twitter is allowing them to be constantly harassed by users on their platform. And then when they complain about it, Twitter says it's your own fault, and then they're moderated out. So whether that's true or not, that's the perception. And so it's interesting, because Twitter says, “Oh, no. We're neutral everywhere.” But it kind of makes me think like, “Could it be that Twitter takes on the bias of the tech employees of any country in which they operate?” That's probably closer to the truth.
So Mastodon developers shot back at them, and they create their own Mastodon instance to talk among themselves. These people in India, they moderate their own community in the way they want. So I looked at some of these Mastodon instances, which are like the sub communities. So each of them are kind of small but centralized in their own way. So they're not blockchains yet. Although I don't think you necessarily can do it. I think it could be a blockchain if you wanted to. But essentially, they all talk to each other. And except for one exception, which I'll get to in a little bit.
But so the first exception is mastodon.social. So that is the kind of the main one. It has half a million users. And it's a general Mastodon discussion. So that's the one that's run by the Mastodon developers, the people who develop the software. Also make their own instance to go with it, even though other people can connect with it without permission. So that's one of the communities. They have a community of furries in there. I don't even want to—let's not even dive into what that is. But yes, marginalized group. If there's all these weird marginalized groups using something though, you know that—and it keeps very diverse. And it gets—and people keep adding on to it then you have something big in tech. So it's kind of a good news, you see the furries in there.
You might think that mastodon.social, the main one, is the biggest one but it's not. The biggest one is powu.net. The one run by the devs has half a million. This one has 650,000. And this is a kind of a Japanese animated discussion—animation discussion from what I can tell. And a lot of these Mastodon instances are becoming very, very popular in Japan. Because from what I can tell, they've had quite a big backlash against Twitter themselves. And so a lot of people talking about the Twitter in the United States don't realize this. And I'd like to do more research on this myself, is that these trends—you have to kind of get out of the US bubble, you have to kind of get out of what is happening in the United States right now because these trends are worldwide, and they're manifesting differently in different countries.
Another example, 200,000 users in one of the instances is switter.at. It's an open discussion among sex workers. Again, whatever you think of that, it's sort of a place for maybe marginalized groups to talk to each other.
So these were not by and large, conservative groups. These were, I mean, a lot of them were liberal in the sense of historically—not really politically liberal but kind of historically associated with a certain type of marginalized group in society. Like not a white collar worker, but the ones I've just said. So they kind of kept joining up and joining up.
And then finally, we come to this website called Gab. So, as you will remember, Gab was one of those free speech sites. And initially, it was one where many national socialists like Nazis and White supremacists have found the home. So that's what I found when I went on there a couple years ago. And it was very very frustrating. Although I suspect—not anymore. I suspect as Gab has grown. And because it is like a free for all, I assume that because it was a free for all, the Nazis just went on because they can't go on anywhere else. But now I assume—because they've grown the percentage of Nazis might have gone down. That's just a hunch. I haven't actually gone in and looked at it.
So they were like, “Hey, anyone can shut us down. They're trying to shut us down. So we'd like to join Mastodon.” And the developers, Mastodon, were outraged. They didn't want Gab involved. But there was nothing they could do to prevent it. And Gab was gonna be one of the biggest players. But Mastodon was created for the purpose of being able to connect with them whenever you want. So Gab is now on Mastodon. However, it's kind of been cordoned off. The other instances have sort of refused to communicate with it. And it's sort of—it's kind of blockaded, but it's also still running. So it's sort of in a little bit of a purgatory there. So a little bit more about that in a minute. Is that an example of this working? Or is that an example this not working? I think it's an example of this working.
But I'll talk—well, let me say I think this gives us an idea of how an instance or several instances that cater to conservatives like Parler would work if they went on Mastodon. First of all, I think there's going to be multiple ones because I think that one for Trump supporters and one for—I don’t know. I can't keep track of all these groups that they have.
But anyway, I feel like, instead of being at the mercy of big tech on Mastodon, they can go one to each of the instances and say, “Hey, what's it gonna take for you to connect with me?” And so some groups and Parler might say, “Hey, you need to have these moderation policies and then we'll connect with you.” Maybe some Parler or maybe some mastodon instances outside the United States wouldn't care. And so you kind of end up with a network that's partially connected, except from the people who are really hateful.
And then you end up with some compromise on policy. Instances that really, really dislike each other. Maybe they want to connect, maybe they come with some compromise on their moderation policy, and they come together as much as they can. So I think this will lead to a much less divisive and more cooperative society. And God knows we need this right now, which is what our current social media landscape is causing the opposite. It's causing the divisive, hateful society, not a cooperative society.
A lot of people say inequality causes instability. But I think the case we're seeing here, they often focus on wealth inequality. It's not really wealth inequality, it's power inequality. And right now, the power of the big tech CEOs is huge compared to everybody else. So we'll see how this plays out. I think we're gonna see a growth of something like this.
And what's interesting is, if you've been listening to lots of podcasts and of what's going on, whether it's from the left side or the right side, they're not talking about the big picture here, and how the internet is going to basically flip over. We're gonna see a revolution in the internet over the next, let's say, around five years. And that's why I'm really excited to have a podcast.
All right. So Mastodon already has the scale to grow. And if this one becomes the main one’s take on Twitter, which is still very certain at this point. But I think in like five to 10 years, a billion users, huge scale. So where will the smart engineers go in all of this? Who wants to work for Twitter, or Google, or Facebook these days? It's mostly going to be risk averse people. There are areas in these companies with exceptions. But the most creative, the most entrepreneurial people, which also tend to be sometimes some of the most outcast people, that's where the excitement is going to be.
Whether it's going to be in some of these decentralized solutions, like Mastodon or these blockchain solutions, or these kind of hacks to get around big tech. I think, if you are a creative person, that's sort of where you're going to want to spend your energies and not going to work for Google. I mean, come on? I don't think that's where the most innovative people are going to want to work.
So that's what I have to say about that. That's what I have to say about what's going on on the internet. You might think that's not really the news story of the day. But that's what I wanted to talk about. And that's an aspect of what's going on, that I think's really important, that's going to give you a much bigger picture. Again, if you're in the United States, do research on what's going on in other countries when it comes to tech censorship because I guarantee you if you love what tech censorship is doing in the United States, you're not gonna like—I don't think you're gonna like what tech censorship is doing in most of the other 200 countries. And so you might want to rethink that view Unless you think everybody in charge in the United States is great, but everyone in charge in the other countries are all bad. I guess we're number one. Okay. I get it.
All right. So let me mention two more examples of how this phase three of the web is developing to occur. Well, one is kind of the dark side where I'll talk about darknet marketplaces real quick, and the other one is cryptocurrencies.
So a little note on the dark web marketplaces, the ones that I spoke about before Mastodon, Parler, even Gab. I have a test account on almost all of them, just to see how it works. And because it's pretty easy, and it's good for the research. Here. I don't—I've never been on a dark web marketplace, because it's really, really dark stuff. It's really buying and selling like illegal stuff. And it's complicated to get on there. I don't really have any desire to do it. So I'll just have to rely on what I've read. But lots of these dark web marketplaces have cropped up over the years, and they've been shut down. But it's sort of like playing a game of whack-a-mole. You see kind of one pop up as soon as it gets shot down.
A silk road might be—maybe it's the most famous one with founder, Ross Ulbricht in jail, put in jail for many years. I think that went down in—I don't know, was it 2013, or 2015, or something like that? So it's just a matter of time before these evolve into a crypto network, fully decentralized, and blockchains. And it's really going to be big mixed bag for the world. It means a lot more illegal stuff will be bought and sold. On the good side, it could help people who legitimately want to get safe, say, medicine, and food, and stuff their government is making it hard to get. There are some governments out there that are pretty bad.
On the bad side, I don't really need to say horrible stuff will be easier to accomplish. Hopefully, we can find other ways to fight those. But I think, to have like a silver lining on this, it'll force society to pick and choose its battles. So maybe marijuana becomes less likely to be illegal, as is already happening. But maybe, murder for hire, you could focus on that or something.
So there is a decentralized platform open bazaar that kind of cater to illegal goods and got some usage. But well, because Americans at least that I know, we have a pretty easy way of buying and selling on kind of legacy networks like eBay. There's sort of less of a demand for it right now. I think there's a lot more demand for innovation in the social media space than there is in the kind of dark web marketplace space right now. And so, that's why I think more innovation is going to take place in the form and of course, dark web marketplace. The only people who are willing to take a huge—let's say legal risk, like you'd go to jail forever, would be willing to run these very dangerous, until someone inevitably figures out how to blockchain this. So that's what's gonna happen. But how do we prepare for that? I'm not so sure. But I think that's what's going to happen.
Finally, let's talk about cryptocurrencies. It's hard to deny that is happening. It's hard not to be optimistic about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrencies right now. They've had an incredible bull run with market cap. I think now, the entire cryptoverse has over a trillion dollars in market cap, up there with some of the largest tech companies. But it's going to get even better. Whereas places like Citibank and PayPal are restricting who you can send money to a higher and higher degree, that's going to push more and more development into cryptocurrencies.
Not to mention, the fact that the price of these things goes up means that people who own them have extra cash to invest in technology for them. So it's kind of a virtuous cycle. It's amazing, this virtuous cycle is created, not within a company, but within a crypto community. And this thing will continue to evolve over the next few years. Again, it's so exciting.
Look at this recent news from a company called ShapeShift. So, and this is—I don't know if like, this is significant for just them. But it's sort of a sign of how things go with this. I've been looking like the last five years, 5-6 years now. Facebook, Twitter, they take things away from us. They get worse and worse. So you kind of think if they take something away, it's never coming back. But look what happened with this company ShapeShift.
So they wanted to be private. They want to specialize in privacy, and they want it to specialize in allowing you to trade one currency for another. So in the past, they allowed anyone to insert a coin of one type, I mean, not literally insert a coin. But do a transaction to an address—a Bitcoin transaction, and out pops another one. Let's say Ethereum. So I can like convert Bitcoin to Ethereum, and then I can convert back, etc, etc.
So a couple years ago, because of the way they architected it, they were considered safe, say, money handlers. And they were forced by law to implement the know-your-customer, the KYC standards that you get at a bank. Not necessarily a bad thing for most transactions. But that's not where people in the cryptoverse wanted. Many people didn't want that. They wanted kind of a more privacy coin. Yes. Okay. Of course, you could say money laundering. But there is something kind of thrilling about the idea of having financial privacy. It means more freedom in the world, I think.
But...so okay, so fine. They got big enough. They saw the laws, and they had to enact these KYC standards two years ago. Fine, it's over. The wild, wild west is over. And that private— that totally private ability to convert, to trade cryptocurrencies is now gone forever on ShapeShift, right? Wrong. Because now, in 2021, we have something called decentralized finance, where these types of exchanges can happen without a centralized server. They blockchained it. And ShapeShift, which has a great user interface, hooked into it. So now ShapeShift simply provides a nice interface for using this protocol. They don't handle the currency at all, which is why they don't have to get user information. And therefore they're like, “Okay, now we can remove KYC.” And it's like, “Wow.” I never would have expected that to happen.
In other spheres of tech, it seems like they add more rules. They're constantly adding rules as time goes on. But to remove rules, or to circumvent rules like that seems to be something that happens very frequently in the blockchain space, in the cryptocurrency space, in the Bitcoin space, whatever you want to call it. And I don't know, all I have to say is what a time to be alive. It just goes in the complete opposite direction of everything else we know.
So once again, this new world will have a lot more privacy. There are pros and cons to this but I have to say this is exciting time to be alive and it's gonna be really exciting talking about this with you on Local Maximum as we proceed into 2021. Remember, once again, I am on one of the alternative social networks at maximum.locals.com. Locals is hosted on Amazon, I found out, which could be a problem. Although from what I know. Locals is not really a Twitter replacement. So, it doesn't—it just kind of has these very kind of small gardens that you kind of have to pay to get into. So it sort of works like that. And I think for that reason, it's not going to be shut down. And I'm pretty sure they're working on ways around it in case they are kind of attacked by the big tech giants at some point in the future. But I don't foresee it for Locals, given where the focus is right now because it’s just not a concern for me.
But anyway, check out Locals. There's a lot of I see new people joining Locals all the time. I think Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard just got a Locals at tulsi.locals.com. I haven't checked it out. I'm just like—but it's kind of exciting that kind of I chose this horse, and now it's running. It's growing.
So anyway, maximum.local.com to get to mine. Anyway, if you could just please sign up. You don't have to get the paid version. Although I would love it if you get the paid version. But if you get the free version that helps too, because I have a small audience. And once I get to like a certain number, then there's more that I can do on the platform. So appreciate that.
Hope you understand the point that I'm trying to make here about where the internet going and why this is important to talk about right now. And yes, I'd like to hear from you. Which of these technologies are you most excited about? Which are you most worried about? Where are you? What do you think is going to happen to the big tech companies? Are they going to evolve? Are they going to implode? Are they going to get bigger? I'd like to hear from you go to Locals, maximum.locals.com, or send me an email at localmaxradio@gmail.com.
Next week, I hope to have Aaron back on the show. I'm not sure what I'm talking about yet. And I'm going to try to get a guest lineup for this year. So have a great week everyone.
Max Sklar: That's the show. To support The Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and their online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.
