S17 E45: Talking Tari with Naveen Jain, Fox & Marguerite de Courcelle

0:47Vlad CosteaHello and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17 Episode 45, I think. Yeah, it's 45. Time flies. And we are live with Naveen and Mr Fox. They are two of the people contributing to Tari. And this episode is sponsored by Braiins Hashpower, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, SideShift.ai, and Orange Rock, the place where you trade without KYC. Anyway, I remember as far as 2018, or maybe even 2017, that there was this guy from the Monero space who was advertising this merge-mined Layer 2 that uses Mimblewimble, which is going to be called Tari.

1:30And it sounded pretty cool. It kind of sounds like Atari, except that the aim for it was to tokenize event tickets and video game assets. That's what I remember from back in the day. And for a long time, it was coming in two weeks, which is kind of a community meme that something is coming soon. And I think it took like seven years to ship the L1, which is available right now for mining. But you don't have the programmability and the scaling yet, which I guess is going to be coming with your Layer 2 in November.

2:05And I do have questions, like a lot of people who followed the project over the years. And you guys, I mean, you, Naveen, are one of the three co-founders?

2:16Naveen JainYes, I'm one of the original instigators of this project.

2:20Vlad CosteaAnd Mr. Fox, you are someone who joined the community more recently?

2:25FoxYes, a few months back I started engaging more widely. I'd also seen the original talk and had been following the project for a long time, but really got my hands dirty only a few months ago.

2:37Vlad CosteaAnd there's also going to be Marguerite who will be joining in about an hour or something. And she's also more recent. She's actually the one who did all the magic to connect us and make this happen. So I got to give credit to her. But let's start with the beginning. What is Tari? And how do you think that the original vision is different today?

3:00Naveen JainYeah, so Tari is a default confidential Layer 1 blockchain protocol. There are two layers to it, as you pointed out. There's an L1, which is a Mimblewimble implementation written in Rust. And then there is a forthcoming L2, which is a high performance, super flexible, highly programmable Layer 2 that also supports this concept of programmable confidentiality. And the vision behind the project is to create a world where Tari is super accessible. So we have this sort of unique mining system called Tari Universe, which is incredibly easy for people to use.

3:50It's beautifully designed. And Tari has sort of a very unique approach as it relates to proof of work. We have four mining lanes for Tari. So we have a RandomX lane, which is merge-mined with Monero. We have a RandomX lane that is solo-mined. We have a Cuckaroo29 lane, which is more focused on GPU. And then we have a SHA-3 lane for which there are now ASICs. So the idea was to really create a world where anyone can mine Tari, regardless of the hardware they have, regardless of where they come from and what their perspective is.

4:29And then the goal ultimately is for people to build lots of really amazing things on the Tari L2 that really enable people to treat confidentiality as a kind of like programmable primitive versus it being sort of like a binary sort of thing. So the vision is to enable a world where someone, for example, could issue a default confidential stablecoin on Tari that's actually backed by real dollars and it's default confidential peer to peer, but the issuer of the token has full visibility into the transaction graph so they can actually comply with various rules and regulations as an example.

5:07So it's intended to be super flexible, really high performance, obviously fully decentralized and really enable people to do remarkable things.

5:19Vlad CosteaOkay. So I remember back in the day, 2018, it was the age of the CryptoKitties. It was even before the NFT mania. And at the time, a lot of projects were trying to become the Ethereum killer, the one that actually scales and the one that can actually provide virtual assets without any of the trade offs that Ethereum has. And in the meantime, we received lots of alternatives to Ethereum and I guess the most successful one turned out to be Solana, which sort of gives away some decentralization in favor of high throughput.

5:56And I was going to ask you because Tari shipped last year in 2025 and you guys sort of started this competition seven years prior and then you arrived in a scene which is much more consolidated. How can Tari compete with something like Solana, which clearly is very popular, especially with the meme coin community, even have Hunter Biden launching his laptop token on Solana. And what would it take for this to be Tari?

6:31Naveen JainYeah. So, you know, I guess, and I'll speak for myself, you know, I don't want to speak for the whole community, Tari's a community-run project. From my point of view, I don't really view Tari as like directly competitive against something like, say, Solana or other things that have like programmable elements to them. I think that if you zoom out and really think about how the world works, even in the fiat world, there is a lot of obfuscation around the movement of money. You know, so if you're a business owner, for example, and you're selling a product on Shopify, you know, people don't necessarily know what your cost of goods are.

7:09They don't know what you paid your factory to make the product. They don't know what you're paying your employees or your vendors. Like all of that information, it's not that it's necessarily fully private, because obviously banks know the information or other payment providers know the information, but it's not necessarily public information to everyday people. So the focus for Tari has really been creating a world where people can actually build real businesses, you know, real things using this concept of Internet money versus focused maniacally on things like meme coins, which are fun.

7:41But I think it's sort of like a very small niche community of people that participate in sort of meme coining. It's just a form of gambling. It's no different, really, if you think about it, than sports betting or walking into a Las Vegas casino. Not everybody wants to do that. There's frankly a lot more people in the world that want to run businesses, be entrepreneurs, build things that have value in the world beyond just, you know, trading and casinoing. And so I think the vision for Tari is a little bit bigger and sort of more macro than just being maniacally focused on something like meme coins.

8:20Vlad CosteaI do remember as far as 2020 that Tari had bought some ticket company, and this was going to be possibly the first use case. Cale Sherrock went on Monero Talk at the time, and he said that tickets and the ticket industry is possibly the worst use for a blockchain. And if this one takes off, then basically Tari has proven to work for pretty much everything else. And I think also Fluffypony, who is no longer with the project, was saying that basically Tari, with its privacy and confidentiality by default, was going to be the Trojan horse into getting normies to use something private like Monero.

9:03Because at first they were going to use it for their movie tickets or whatever, and then they were going to discover the technology behind it and become more interested in mining or potentially using this as money. What happened to that?

9:16Naveen JainYeah, so we actually did build a ticketing company that was going to be a reference design application for Tari called Big Neon. And then unfortunately, what happened is the pandemic hit. So what we did is we, the original vision was go out and build a reference design business, which we did, you know, successfully. So we went out and signed, I don't know how much you know about ticketing, but in the US market, there's this concept called exclusive venue contracts. So you, as a ticketing company, you go out and you sign an exclusive deal with a venue, and then you sell, you know, the vast majority of their tickets for all their events and that venue for whatever the term of the agreement was.

10:00So we actually went out and signed a bunch of exclusive venue contracts. We built an actual ticketing system that was powered by fiat currency early on prior to Tari actually existing and working on mainnet. And then, you know, the challenge that happened for us as a group was the pandemic hit. And so all of the revenue that we were earning, all the deals that we had done, the whole structure that we had put together, for this reference design application, essentially, unfortunately, all fell apart because there were just no events happening during the pandemic.

10:34And so the math of that sort of reference design application stopped working. So we actually ended up selling the ticketing business or the remnants of the ticketing business to Spotify. So now that doesn't mean that ticketing is not a great reference design application for Tari. It certainly is. But, you know, ticketing is very complicated and it requires a lot of sort of build up to get to a place where you have enough scale to actually show that it can work as a reference design application. And, you know, because we had to kind of pivot, you know, that's no longer like our focus.

11:15Vlad CosteaYou actually got a very good question from the chat, and there is no way I can ignore this. 0xMason5 on YouTube says, since Tari leans on Monero's RandomX for a big portion of its security, how independent is Tari's security model if Monero ever faced a major hashrate crisis or algorithm change?

11:36FoxYeah, great question. Pretty well independent. I mean, we've got the four mining lanes, so at most you would have one lane compromised if something was wrong with it. You would still have the RandomX mining lane. And I believe the hashrate is pretty well distributed among the set. And if one lane is mining too much, then like its difficulty gets adjusted proportional to the other mining lanes. So like it becomes harder to mine on one when the others are not getting enough blocks. So it makes it to where in order to control the network, you kind of need to control four different kinds of mining at the same time, or at least two of them and a little bit, you know, maybe a third to really get that full control over the network and do some kind of attack.

12:22And we can also add more.

12:24Vlad CosteaI was also curious about this because initially Tari was announced as a Mimblewimble sidechain that is merge-mined with Monero. Monero miners were basically encouraged to also secure this chain to get this token. Now you guys have two tokens and you have like three mining algorithms. And it's kind of odd, like why these design choices?

12:49Naveen JainYeah, so I mean, I can speak to the decisions that have happened over time. So as it relates to the mining lanes, the vision there is twofold. One is security model. So by having this sort of wide range of choices, it actually makes the network a lot harder to attack, right? So you can't just successfully 51% attack the network focused on a single algorithm. You actually have to have multiple algorithms in play in order to actually successfully attack the network. 25% of the hash rate is merge-mined with Monero.

13:25So that's hard because Monero has a pretty high hash rate. You know, the SHA-3 lane is dominated by people who are running ASICs. So that also requires custom hardware and it's harder to target. And so as a result of that, think of it as a way to democratize, you know, it's sort of like, hey, no matter what kind of hardware you have, you can be running a CPU, could be running a GPU, could be running an ASIC, you can mine Tari. So I think it's a unique design choice.

13:56I know it may be viewed as odd because it's not common or normal out there in the world. But we view it as a unique differentiator for Tari and something that actually really materially helps security model. In terms of tokens, so there's a layer one token, which is called XTM. And that is like the primary native token of Tari. There is going to be a token that's related to the L2. And the way it works is you have to burn L1 tokens one for one for the L2 token, right?

14:30So we're not inflating supply. It's just a way for someone to migrate their unit of measure from the layer one to the layer two. But it's all within the same token economy.

14:47Vlad CosteaIt sounds to me like a one way peg. So you burn your tokens on the base layer and then you're going to get them on the second layer. But how do you get back?

14:56Naveen JainWell, I mean, our view on getting back is that's where venues and marketplaces come into play, right? If you want to go and trade a pair, for example, between L2 and Tari, which is literally called Tari and XTM, then there would be either some sort of atomic swap oriented scenario or you would have it available on exchanges and people can trade, just like they do with any other tokens.

15:24FoxYeah. So for clarity, you cannot peg back directly because then the layer two would have to have so much control over the layer one that it could mint coins. And that's a security issue. So instead, if you really do want to return to layer one, you do have to trade with someone who still has it.

15:42Vlad CosteaYeah, it's kind of counterintuitive. But on the other hand, I can understand why you did this, because it's more secure. Like the holy grail is to achieve perfect two-way peg sidechains in this space. And yeah, I do want to ask you, like today, if you want to issue some sort of token on the base layer of Tari, can you do that or is it only reserved for mining and some basic features? And if you want to have tokens and programmability, you're going to have to wait for the layer two to ship.

16:16Naveen JainYeah, the layer one does have a very simplified scripting dimension to it, which is similar to Bitcoin script. So we do have Tari script on the L1, but it doesn't really support the level of programmability that people want to have in this space. So that's the intention behind the layer two. So the layer two will ship on mainnet on November 11th. So in the very near future, people will be able to do all kinds of amazing things on the layer two, whether it's issuing tokens or building decentralized applications or any other thing that they want to do.

16:51Vlad CosteaThere are a couple more good questions in the chat that I want to ask you. But before that, I need to remind the audience that this content is for free and what keeps it free is ads. So here's a couple of ads. First of all, there is layer two labs, which is building the drivechain, which is trying to achieve that two way peg. But unfortunately, it's not going to happen on Bitcoin, at least not yet. And they're launching their own hard fork of Bitcoin, which is called eCash, ECX.

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19:04So there's alphaarc84 who says on YouTube, after the recent C29 consensus issue, how has the multi-algorithm design held up in practice and are there plans to adjust the block distribution ratios between the lanes?

19:22Naveen JainSo actually, having it be equal is really important to the security model, believe it or not. So we actually did evaluate an idea historically of having like different apportionment between lanes. But we actually discovered that that creates a whole different security issue. So that's why we have it apportioned equally between the lanes. In terms of the C29 issue, I mean, really, it was still operating as traditional proof of work. It was just like easier to mine blocks with C29 than it should have been. And we, you know, corrected that via hard fork very recently.

20:06So there was no problem there. The network was not impacted in any way, shape or form. The network is still secure. So from the community's point of view, and again, I'll speak for myself, and then I'll let Fox speak. Fox is on the Tari Council, so he may have his own point of view. But from my point of view, I think that it's actually working really well, because we have these different groups of miners that are actively participating in the network. It actually makes it more decentralized if you actually zoom out and think about it, because you have different types of people, different styles of people coming in and participating collectively together and organizing around Tari in a really, really cool way.

20:49Which I don't think you have with the other protocols. And then as it relates to how we've architected it in terms of apportionment, I actually think it's totally fair. I think it's great, you know, that the people who are mining, you know, RandomX solo-mined have, you know, 25% of the, you know, blocks on average are going to flow to them, just as 25% of the blocks are going to flow to people who are mining with the GPU or with an ASIC.

21:17FoxYeah, I was very happy with the four lane arrangement and how it performed during the bug. Because, you know, even though those blocks were easier to mine, the rest of the lanes are really helping keep it secure. And there still was some proof of work going on there. The fact that, you know, if someone had managed to exploit that lane, you know, they still wouldn't have been able to control the network, because there were still three other lanes doing their job. And that that really helps.

21:45And, you know, there will be bugs in the future. There's bugs that happen all the time, we find them, we fix them, we fix them as fast as we can. And it's really a matter of how you manage it. But having that backstop of having additional lanes has proven very helpful. And especially on a smaller chain like ours, you know, any clever thing you can do to keep that security up is good to have. And so far, it's working really well for us.

22:09Naveen JainYeah, I think I think Fox brings up a really good point. You know, Tari is a nascent chain, right? Like we're small. And as you know, Vlad, when it's, you know, proof of work, and things are small, if it was like a single algo, you know, completely solo mine, then, you know, chains get 51% attacked all the time, right? Smaller chains get attacked all the time in this way, right? So I think that, you know, that is part of what makes Tari special is that it actually is difficult to 51% attack Tari because of a combination of the architecture, plus this sort of like indirect, if you will, connection to Monero.

22:55So I think that that's actually to the community's benefit.

23:01Vlad CosteaYou have, like a flowing number of questions in the chat, but I'm just gonna ignore them for a second to ask you about the differences between Tari and Beam, Beam being the other Mimblewimble programmable blockchain, which to be honest, I've tried their software, I think it's pretty impressive what they were able to accomplish. They have like a DAI-style algorithmic stablecoin, they have quite a lot of interesting stuff that they built, they complemented the security of Mimblewimble with the Lelantus protocol, which they took from Zcoin, now it's called Firo.

23:42And for some reason, they never reached any kind of adoption or success. They have a small community, they're still building, they're able to finance somehow the development of the project, but it's like a solution that's in search of a problem to fix at this point, because they have a very interesting and smart implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol that never got traction. And how is Tari different from this and what are you going to do differently to not have the same fate of Beam?

24:18Naveen JainYeah, that's a really good question. So oftentimes, and this is true not only in crypto, but I think it's just like broadly true in most technology oriented fields, having great technology is not enough. It's just not enough. You have to capture hearts and minds, you have to inspire people to build really cool things, you have to inspire people to use it, you have to go out there and have a business mind as well and connect with people on that level. People are not going to just discover technology or software just because you build it.

24:54I think sometimes in crypto, we tend to believe that the software is enough. But from my experience as an entrepreneur, that's actually never been true. I've never actually found that to be true. I think that distribution is key. I think relationships are key. I think how we foster the community around Tari is key. I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to collaborate with the community at large and with the amazing people we have on the Tari Council. And each of these people are bringing their own ideas, their own relationships, distribution, connection to the table.

25:37And that's ultimately the only path to success that we have. So we can sit here and debate technology choices or implementation decisions, and we're happy to have those conversations with you and with the audience. But I don't actually think that's what carries the day. I think what's going to carry the day is inspiring people to build really, really cool stuff on Tari that people actually want to use. And the technology decisions, the decisions we've made from an implementation standpoint behind the scenes need to be supportive of those kinds of products and applications.

26:17Vlad CosteaSo if, of course, nobody can tell the future, but what would you say could be one of the killer use cases of Tari and something that is really going to take the network to the next level, like top 20 on CoinMarketCap or further?

26:35Naveen JainWell, I think, I mean, again, I'll answer the question for myself, but, you know, I know Fox probably has his own perspective here, but I think that I look at it as a combination of things. I think there's like primitives that we need to have. So there needs to be a stablecoin, right? There needs to be not an algorithmic stablecoin, like an actual US dollar denominated stablecoin. And the reason why is because that opens up the aperture in terms of the type of applications that people can then build on Tari, right?

27:15I think that there needs to be connectivity to other networks, right? If Tari is an island, I think that makes it a lot more difficult for people to be able to participate in Tari and the Tari ecosystem easily. I think if the more interconnected Tari is, the better off the Tari community is, and I think the better off all the ecosystems are out there. In terms of the types of applications, I think that applications that involve medium of exchange where you can have interesting outcomes for people based on this concept of programmable confidentiality are really, really interesting, right?

27:55So being able to do business-oriented transactions, whether it's things like payroll, whether it's things like paying a vendor or whatever it is, and knowing that people can't just spy on your transactions on some public block explorer, I think is really cool and really, really important. I think also fun things are important. So like one of the applications I'm personally building for the launch of the Ootle is like a multiplayer board game, where because of the privacy elements of Tari, you can't really front-run other players very easily.

28:30It's entirely a game of skill. So I think there's a number of kinds of things that people will create out there that are not just copy pasta, that are unique, that use Tari's sort of strengths to hopefully create things that people actually want to use out there. But it's hard to predict because what do people want to use, right? Well, in the crypto space, people have only what they've already seen, right? So someone who's a meme coin trader is going to get on some trading application and want to flip coins as quickly as possible, be in and out, in and out, in and out as fast as possible.

29:12And that's kind of the direction of meme coining, right? But sort of where we've gone in the crypto industry. As it relates to something like Tari, where it's sort of a little bit of a unique animal, well, maybe there's like entirely new things that are created on Tari, right? And that's our hope. That's our dream is that for people to be creative and come in and invent with the community on Tari. So that's sort of how I see the world.

29:39FoxI can see a few pretty good use cases for Tari, and it's a programmable confidentiality, one of which is, you know, securities trading. Right now, if you're trying to like trade stocks for something, you can't really do it with confidentiality on a blockchain in most places. So it's like, you know, you need programmable privacy to be able to do some of the transactions you would like to do at scale there. Otherwise, you know, you're broadcasting who owns what, and that can be really bad for a lot of people who are trading those kinds of assets.

30:13Another thing is, you know, just having the privacy so you can have more confidential transactions generally. So for markets that are underserved because they have social stigma, there's more likely to be transactions on that front that are able to do their movements, you know, with confidentiality that they otherwise couldn't do. So, for instance, if you were to do sort of like an escrow-style payment system, the cool thing is you not only have the escrow style payment system, but you have the smart contract enforcement and you have privacy on top of it.

30:45So if you were running a market that maybe is not popular, you can have a way to do that.

30:54Vlad CosteaYeah, Mr. Fox, you're getting compliments in the comments about your shirt.

30:59FoxYeah, this is a birthday present I got. This is my cat. I have shut the door so he can't come in. I don't want him to like meow all over your episode because he would do that.

31:09Vlad CosteaThat's wholesome. I also want to remind the listeners that this episode has a $100 gift in Monero. So you have to pick a number from one to 100, and then I'm going to ask the two of you to pick a number from one to 100. And then I guess we'll add them up and divide by two or something. And that's how we're going to get the winner for this prize. Yeah, so start typing numbers, but also type questions because I think they're amazing. So a number from one to 100 is going to get $100 from Cake Wallet.

31:44If you don't have Cake Wallet yet, download that. It's really cool. And I'm going to ask the next question from Aaron Dzaks or something. Anyway, he says, what's the most surprising or underappreciated thing about running a project that deliberately shares security with Monero?

32:05Naveen JainI think the community behind Monero is amazing. I've been involved peripherally in the Monero ecosystem since around 2016. And I think there's just so many really cool things about Monero. I love things like, in the community, like Skepticism Sunday, for example, is just such a cool thing on the Monero subreddit, just the people that I've been able to meet around Monero, whether it's the folks associated with products like Cake Wallet or members of Monero Core over time. Yeah, just the people and the people behind the project. At the end of the day, people make these projects, right?

32:56Like we like to think about, again, the software, and we like to think about the infrastructure, but they're human beings behind all of these things. And I think the human beings that are involved with Monero are just cool as fuck. And they're just like the people that I would want to hang out with, because I think they have a unique perspective on the world, on life. I think they have a very crisp definition of freedom. Like their definition of freedom is a definition that I agree with.

33:29And so, you know, to me, that's been one of the coolest parts about working adjacent to Monero and then also working within the Monero ecosystem.

33:40FoxYeah, for me, one of the cool things about having such adjacency to the Monero community is that, you know, people who come over there from there get it already. They understand already the importance of confidentiality of private transactions and what this kind of technology could do for the world. I don't have to sell it to them in the same way that I have to sell it to someone who doesn't quite get why privacy and confidentiality matter, because they already get it.

34:07Vlad CosteaYeah, I was actually going to ask you this because I've seen people in Monero. So there's also Zano, which is using the same codebase, which is CryptoNote, not the codebase, the protocol, which is CryptoNote for accomplishing confidential assets. And when that one came out and it got some support, people were saying, well, we're not going to get on board with this because we're waiting for Tari to launch. And Tari was supposed to be similar. But of course, the design is different. You're using Mimblewimble, you're merge-mined.

34:41It's quite different. But did these people keep supporting you over the years? Like since launch, have you seen any consistency in their support or was it just like a curiosity in the beginning when they started mining and they said, yeah, this is going to be our token layer or whatever? And then the interest lowered over time.

35:02Naveen JainI mean, look, we have a very, very strong community within the Tari ecosystem. There's a lot of people who've been involved with the project for many years. You know, we have folks like Fox or like Marguerite, you know, Kinkajou, OKZ. I mean, these are other amazing people within the Tari community that have a very deep passion for the project. And I think that's really important. You know, these projects live and die by, you know, people caring. Like either you care or you don't. Right. Like you've been in this ecosystem for a very long time, Vlad.

35:41You know, it's like very easy for someone just to like buy a meme coin, buy a token. Does that mean you love the token? Does that mean you love what it stands for? Does that mean you love, have you even looked at the codebase or looked at what's happening, you know, with it? And nine times out of 10, I think the answer is no. Right. Like nine times out of 10, most people are not actively paying attention. So I think that, you know, obviously we have people who've come and gone, you know, people who have participated and then decided that Tari wasn't for them or decided that this was the wrong time or they had different expectations.

36:17You know, and that's totally fine. You know, like obviously it's a permissionless system so people can come in and participate as they wish. But I think we're very blessed as a community because we have a very strong core group of people that genuinely care, like deeply, deeply, deeply care about it, and believe strongly that it is going to be high impact both for themselves as individuals, but also in a more sort of broader context.

36:51Vlad CosteaYeah. And also to complement your previous comment about use cases, I think in 2017, 2018, people noticed that Ethereum doesn't scale. So projects like Cardano and I guess a couple of others, EOS, they were trying to make ICOs more accessible because ICOs were like the killer app at the time. And then two years later it became DeFi. Like these projects were sort of trying to compete with something that was no longer the trend. And then everything shifted to DeFi. And then a year later we got the NFT mania.

37:26Like it's very hard to keep up with what's fashionable. But also it seems like the pattern is reductionist where in the ICO era you had white papers, which by the way, I know that Tari doesn't have one because you decided along the way that you don't want to be guided by a piece of text. And then after the ICO era, you had DeFi, which sort of had like a technical paper, but not so much literature as the ICOs. And then you had the NFTs, which basically made you buy a JPEG that has a token attached to it.

38:04And now with the meme coins, you have nothing. You just have a name, a ticker. You're like, oh, I like the ticker. I'm going to buy this. So it's almost like we went from actually reading stuff, which we used to pretend that we read it. Like I don't think anyone actually went through everything and did analysis. And I think many of this was before AI, by the way, before LLMs. You couldn't just generate text instantly. So it took some labor to write that up. I know people who made money writing white papers.

38:38But my point is that, first of all, the use cases evolve. Secondly, the amount of intellectual input in these use cases tends to degenerate. Maybe it's part of the mass adoption that we used to dream about. Like the more people we get in, the lower the level is going to get, which means that we need to dumb down everything, which is depressing really. I wish we had more of the 2016 or something spirit when people were more educated.

39:13Naveen JainYeah, it's really interesting. When I first started my career in the music business, one of the very first projects that I had to do was set up the official message board for Linkin Park. And one of the things that was really hilarious to me always just cracked me up was we had this concept just, you know, called lowest common denominator in terms of the conversation that people would have on this message board. And it was a huge message board. We had over a million registered users in this message board at peak, like during like Hybrid Theory mania, like leading into Meteora.

39:52And I remember that, you know, people would come on there and they would ask if Chester was single, they would ask, when is the band playing my town or my city? Interestingly enough, they would ask, is Linkin Park a Christian band? They're not. But they don't use any profanity on Hybrid Theory. So people thought that they might be a Christian band because they don't use any profanity on Hybrid Theory, right? And so it was like this lowest common denominator of conversation. And what we realized is that if we didn't instigate better conversation, that it would always revert to the lowest common denominator.

40:41And that's exactly what's happened in crypto, to your point, right? So, you know, we had this like original idea where, you know, people, to your point, were writing white papers, and they would express an idea, you know, white papers, an idea, and say, okay, they'd say, oh, here's an idea around, you know, a new way to, you know, new form of cryptography or a different way of handling sort of the game theory behind these systems or whatever, whatever the idea was that someone wanted to like essentially sell via a white paper.

41:19And then today, to your point, it's like we've dispensed with all of the pageantry, right? Like there's no white papers. It's just, oh, it's a ticker. The ticker is cow. And I think cow is pretty great. What's the contract address?

41:34Vlad CosteaOkay, let me ape in.

41:36Naveen JainYeah. God, no. Well, I didn't see a network, so sorry. You don't know where it is. You don't know where this ticker is. And that's literally all it is. So I think what's really cool, though, about the folks that are involved with the Tari community, especially the deep, passionate core, is that these are people who are actually actively contributing to the codebase. So one of the things that's really happened that's been really cool with AI-aided sort of development and just, you know, as we call it, vibe coding or whatever you want to call it, is that it sort of democratized contribution.

42:13So now you have people out there that are just turning their agents, you know, at the codebase and finding bugs, adding features, doing all kinds of interesting things that, you know, even if they're not engineers, but they care about the project, they still have that sort of like core level of passion. So look, I don't think you can change the fact that there's a lowest common denominator in crypto, which is clearly meme coins. Like, that's as low as it gets. I don't think it's possible to get lower than that.

42:39But I do think there are people, frankly, like yourself and like Fox and like Coin Artist and like others who care more. They want to learn. They're curious. They have an intellectual curiosity about how these things work and want to be sort of more engaged and involved, and I think that's great, and that's the audience that obviously you want to foster around a protocol like Tari.

43:10FoxYeah, I like seeing what people have been building. We started running some contests. We wanted to see, hey, what's the coolest idea you can quickly build up and get scaffolded and show off. And so we're going to be like awarding some tokens to the winners of that contest soon. And we're going to have contests like that for the next few months, just trying to get people trying it out, building things, seeing what they come up with. And there have been some really cool projects there. There's been like, you know, encrypted messenger with payments.

43:36There's been kind of decentralized escrow based marketplaces. There's been voting systems, which I am very interested in because it's like one of the big things is you want decentralized voting, but you want to make sure that everyone's vote is still confidential. Right. And that's really difficult to do on any other chain. So just little things like that, that people have turned their agents on or they've written themselves and they're able to show it and hey, look, here's a cool use case, something you can actually build.

44:06That's what really excites me every morning and that's what keeps me going. But you know, the reason why a lot of a large reason that the lowest common denominator is that, you know, crypto is one of the few places where you can become rich overnight if you happen to pick the right thing. And so a lot of people are just looking around and they're always like peeking at stuff and trying to game out like what's going to be the thing. And meme coins are like, OK, it's like the lowest-information way you could possibly engage with it.

44:33But, you know, you want to gamble in some way. But so I think there's always going to be some of that going around. But I think Tari is one of those projects that rewards you the more you look at it.

44:47Vlad CosteaI like the way you describe that. And Naveen, for the record, you did something horrible to my mind. You said the word instigate in the context of Linkin Park. And now I have the song Breaking the Habit playing in my head because he says, I'm sorry that I instigate and say what I don't mean. And the reason why I know this is that this is how I learned English for music.

45:10Naveen JainOh, really? Wow. Oh, that's amazing.

45:13Vlad CosteaI'm Romanian. So I was a teenager when Linkin Park was around. I was never on the forums. I was just reading magazines at the time. That was kind of the thing. Yeah. And I think for a while it was my favorite band. But part of the reason why it was my favorite was that it was making my dad angry. And he was like, just stop listening to that crap. That's not real rock.

45:37Naveen JainYeah. For me, my parents hated the fact that I loved Rage Against the Machine. Because especially once I started driving or something, playing any Rage song where it's like the profanity and Zack just going off and all that. My parents are just not into that at all. They're happy listening to Lionel Richie or something else. They don't want to listen to Rage Against the Machine. I think that's probably a common thing too. That's maybe part of how kids separate from their parents is through music.

46:25Vlad CosteaI still listen to that in the car when I drive sometimes.

46:25Naveen JainWhich one? Rage?

46:25Vlad CosteaLinkin Park. Rage sometimes. I like their first album, but I don't like the follow-up. I don't like it so much. The one that has "Sleep Now in the Fire" in it, I sort of like it.

46:46Naveen JainYeah. Is that The Battle of Los Angeles, I think? But anyway, yeah. I think self-titled is amazing. That record is one of the best records in my opinion.

46:58Vlad CosteaBut I also like Meteora much more than Hybrid Theory, which I know is a non-popular opinion. But Meteora came around the time when it came out at the right time. I was a teenager. It just resonated.

47:11Naveen JainYeah, Meteora was really fun. I'll never forget, the first time that I got to hear Meteora, it was this really funny event that they did. It was for the team, you know, people who work with the band and the record company and other people. So the way they did it, which is really humorous, is we all got together in a bank vault. Because the management company, there was an abandoned bank on the ground floor, and so the vault was still there. So I'll never forget, we were all in this bank vault.

47:53They took our phones, of course, which they should. And then one of the band's security people came in, and they had a little boom box or something. But you can imagine, a bank vault does not have great acoustics. That's not the place where you expect to have a great audiophile experience. It is not in a bank vault, you know, with the sound just bouncing off all the walls. And they played Meteora front to back for us. And yeah, that was wild. That was really fun. That was like a fun way to just be introduced to the music in this kind of crazy, crazy way.

48:40Because at that point, security was really important, because piracy of music was a really big deal in that era. This is like pre-Spotify, pre-Apple Music or whatever era of time. So we had to be really careful about how the music was presented before the release date of the record. So anyway, that was really fun.

49:07Vlad CosteaWell, that's how I got their music. I illegally downloaded everything.

49:07Naveen JainYeah, sure.

49:07Vlad CosteaIt was on Napster, I think it was LimeWire at the time.

49:20FoxSure, yeah. Get yourself an album and a virus at the same time.

49:25Vlad CosteaThat's the way to do it. Anyway, you have three mining related questions, and I'm going to read the three of them at the same time. MetaMaze33 says, if a major Monero mining pool suddenly decides to stop merge mining Tari or start censoring Tari blocks, how resilient is the network right now? So let me read all of them because they're sort of similar.

49:25Naveen JainSure.

49:25Vlad CosteaDaniel Rowan44 says, if you could change one thing about how the merge mining protocol works today, what would it be? And Lucas Ferdenly, you already answered this, but I'm still going to acknowledge it.

50:00If Monero ever changed its proof of work algorithm again, how disruptive would that be for Tari's RandomX lane and overall security model?

50:12Naveen JainYeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, the Tari community has a sort of deep connection to Monero. If Monero was actually going to go and change away from RandomX, which I think would be a really big deal. And I'm not convinced there's that much appetite for that in the Monero community. But put all that aside, if it was going to happen, just hypothetically, I think the Tari community would probably very seriously look at that and say, okay, well, how do we continue to partner here with the Monero community?

50:47I mean, I can't say for certain, obviously, because that's not my decision to make. That's the community's decision to make at large. So that's my perspective on that one. In terms of if a large pool operator decided to stop merge mining Tari, I mean, you know, I think what's interesting about that is that's like against their economic incentive to do so, right? Like, you know, if you can do the same amount of work and, you know, essentially be paid twice, you know, why are you going to stop doing that?

51:21I mean, obviously they could, you know, someone could say, okay, we're just pure Monero. You know, we're going to just do Monero. And we're not going to support the Tari merge mine. And that's obviously some pool operator's prerogative. But that pool operator then may find that other people might move to another pool that is supportive, right? Because at the end of the day, you know, miners are economic actors. You know, they're paying close attention to economics because there's a real cost of goods sold for them, right?

51:52Like they're paying for electricity, unless it's free, of course. You know, they've got the hardware, they've got all the other sort of elements, environmental elements associated with mining. So, you know, I think that'd be a really interesting thing, right? If some large pool operator was like, fuck Tari, we don't care about Tari. Okay. You know, I would say, well, I think there'll be other pools that will support it, right? So that's just, you know, that might end up being the differentiator for some other pool operator to say, okay, well, we are going to support Tari.

52:22And so therefore, you know, come and merge mine, you know, Tari here, mine Monero here, and you'll get paid your Tari, right? So actually, that did happen. There was a pool when Tari first launched, if my memory serves me, there was actually a pool that just refused. But then, people complained about that pool because they said, wait, you're not giving us the coins, you're like selling the coins, you know, and then they said, oh, no, no, no, we're going to sell the coins, we're just going to give you more Monero, right?

52:52So that may still actually be out there. I don't remember which pool that was, but that was a thing, you know, it was like, okay, if you want to be a Monero purist, and just get, you know, incrementally a little bit more Monero, because someone is, you know, doing the swap for you for Tari on the side, fine, you know, again, I think it's an open market, you know, it's permissionless, people are going to do what they want to do. And we don't have a say in the matter, right?

53:20Like the only thing we can do as Tari community is to advocate for Tari and to say, hey, this is why Tari deserves to exist. This is why you should consider Tari. And people are going to do what they feel strongly to do.

53:36Vlad CosteaThat's a good answer. You have another question from Zaden6646, who says, do you see other privacy focused projects eventually adopting a similar hybrid merged mining model? Or is Tari's approach quite unique?

53:54Naveen JainI think today it's unique. But I think that, as you know, in crypto, as we all know, in crypto, when something is working, you always have people who clone it, right? I mean, that's why you have a million launch pads and a million DEXs and a million, you know, that's why you have so many repetitive things in the space. So I think, you know, as Tari grows prominence and is more successful out there in the world, I would fully expect for people to want to adopt, you know, certain elements of Tari's architecture or approach. And that may very well include the sort of the way that the proof of work orchestration.

54:38FoxYeah, I would expect that over time, more people will adopt it if they find it convincing, which it's been very convincing for me. And as the project gets larger, I think it will convince more people.

54:50Vlad CosteaAt this point, I got to present two more ads and then we can get to the next question. First, there is SideShift, which is the place where you swap your stablecoins. Every week we get this report from various accounts on Twitter that there's a lot of Tether and CircleUSD that's being frozen, seized by the issuer. And if you receive payments in these stablecoins, it's possibly likely that, I mean, you don't know where it comes from, first of all. And Marguerite is here. I'm going to let her in.

55:22But let me, okay, I'll let her in and now I'll continue my ad. So if someone offers to pay you in stablecoins, you go to SideShift.ai. You post your Bitcoin address, Ethereum, Litecoin, whatever it is that you prefer. And then you send the stablecoin address to the person wanting to pay you and what you're going to get is what you want directly to your wallet. Check out SideShift, not available in the US, unfortunately. Thank you very much, regulators. But it's pretty cool and you can find workarounds if you really want to use it.

55:54SideShift.ai. And last but not least, we have Orange Rock, which is the place where you can do perp trading without limits, without KYC, without any sort of inconvenience. It's an app that you can download today on your phone. I think they have iOS and Android at this point and the desktop app is also coming. And it's very cool and built by the same people running Bitcoin.com today. Check it out, Orange Rock, trade without limits and with privacy. And we have Marguerite, the Coin Artist, who just joined us.

56:28Hello.

56:30Marguerite de CourcelleHi, guys. Thanks for having me on, Vlad.

56:33Vlad CosteaWell, thanks for joining. You said it's going to take a while and I'm happy it was only one hour. It was almost one hour on the clock. Like, it's impressive. Yeah.

56:43Marguerite de CourcelleYeah. So I, you know, I haven't been able to hear the conversation so far because I had my conflict. But I am I'm curious where things stand right now. Like, what have you guys covered?

56:54Vlad CosteaMostly mining stuff, but you can go ahead and introduce yourself first so people know who you are. And also the AI transcribing this is going to get an idea of what this is about.

57:06Marguerite de CourcellePerfect. So I am Marguerite de Courcelle, also known as Coin Artist. And I have, you know, if you're talking about Bitcoin mining, gosh, that's where I started my career as an artist and then game developer. Then I started playing around with was very fascinated with decentralized distributed technologies and the creative applications. So I'm more of the like run fast, break things. And I think that's exciting. And also, you know, what's the weirdest idea anybody could actually get away with on a lot of the different networks of protocols we've seen along going way back.

57:43Been here for a lot of the I mean, gosh, Ethereum ICO all the way to MaidSafe shenanigans, which was the decentralized Internet. If anyone remembers that to, you know, was a big fan of Decred being one of those Bitcoin forks, the various forks that happened with Ethereum, wild days on BitMEX. So, like, definitely a hardcore crypto nerd from the beginning. And then I grew up along the way with the open source community. I made friends, I met other creatives, and then I launched my own company with a lot of the various pockets of success I had.

58:21I met Naveen along that journey. And when I launched my blockchain game studio and had a lot of growing up to do around what's it take to have a successful business. You know, it's different than just having a crypto project or this flash in the pan sort of creative ideas. But what really has legs in the end. And so he's been a part of my journey along the way. And we've connected over. Gosh, Naveen has an incredible creative background. I don't know if he's talked about that at all, but his business genius and his way he thinks about products, I just fell in love with right away.

58:58And when I saw this mining application, so taking me back to the days of being able to mine and how much I love doing that, like when we could mine Litecoin and all these various forks that were just fun. Like it reminded me of how much I missed that onboarding experience of not needing to deal with the KYC for cash to try to get some crypto token, but like having this very accessible mining application that could be in my hands or in my laptop, I get my first crypto introduction into this ecosystem.

59:30And then this idea that it was going to have an application layer in which people could participate and come up with, I guess, these sort of rails that felt very user and creative driven. And I don't think we'd seen anybody do that, that end-to-end user experience. So that's where I got excited about Tari. And I onboarded, I think, with the testing phases back in 2024, maybe, when they were kicking the tires on some and they had like fog of war chess game happening. And so, yeah, and the privacy layer also fascinated me with me because of some of the applications we've seen.

1:00:09You know, in Ethereum, there's the front running that can happen. And then that kind of ruins your game design when you think about how, well, the bots are actually ruining all the fun for everybody. So never mind. And then how does that change when you have a real privacy network to help with those sort of experiences? And of course, I'm thinking from a creative lens. I think the more serious applications of that are on a financial side, but I like to think about more, you know, the fun space that exists.

1:00:36I don't know if I like, like I also, by the way, I saw you had Amir Taaki on a few episodes ago. And my very first crypto puzzle featured him, him and Cody Wilson. That was my first, the first time I combined putting hiding private keys into artwork. And that happened because it was 2014 and they were making a mixing, like a mixer wallet to hide or obfuscate Bitcoin transactions.

1:01:03Vlad CosteaDark Wallet.

1:01:04Marguerite de CourcelleDark Wallet. So my very first art...

1:01:05Vlad CosteaVitalik was also part of that.

1:01:07Marguerite de CourcelleYep. And there was actually, I think Peter Todd too, was a part of that. But anyways, I had, when I was doing their portraits and I was, because I had to do one for Bitcoin Magazine. And as I was putting stuff in there, I was like, well, gosh, if it's all about hiding something, we definitely should hide something in here. And so that was the beginning of like, oh, you could just put a Bitcoin private key in here and obfuscate it a little bit and ta-da, you got a, you got a crypto puzzle.

1:01:34So that was the very first crypto puzzle that ever happened. And he never spoke to me about it, by the way. He never said like, hey, Marguerite, that was so cool. But anyways.

1:01:48Vlad CosteaYeah, I think you're the first one to do puzzles and hide stuff. Like I remember there were some, maybe there are some unclaimed ones where there was some Bitcoin hidden inside and you had to figure out the puzzle. Like it was a thing for a while. I'm not sure if people still do this, but early on it was very cool.

1:02:10Marguerite de CourcelleThere is an actually just shout out to Tari. There's something that no one's ever found before that is on the Tari network. That was a big collaborative project. And there are a number of things.

1:02:25Naveen JainThere are a number of things. Yes. Hidden in sort of Tari blockspace somewhere. That's true.

1:02:39Vlad CosteaSo what you do for Tari right now, Marguerite, because you talked about your career in this space, but you didn't say specifically what it is that you do, except for setting up this interview for which I got to give you credit.

1:02:54Marguerite de CourcelleWell, I got to give the credit back to the community because when we wrapped one of the other podcasts, I was like, hey, guys, what's the one if you could get on one show, what would it be? And they thought for like 30 seconds. And then it was just like, we've got to get him on Vlad's show. And it was just total chaos. So I would have been a total failure for them if I hadn't like really tried. And so thanks for allowing us to come on.

1:03:20But what I do for Tari, I would say I'm looking at Tari and I'm part of the Tari Council, which I was voted in by the community to do work to make sure that I think just historically my associations with the project, but then also, you know, the little bit, I bring a different lens to the council space. And so as we're preparing for the L2 launch, I've taken up the torch to think about where could our most viral moments possibly live in a way to help educate the community because we're seeing some amazing traction with our creators and our developers.

1:04:01They're building applications, shipping things for the testnet that are really exciting. And these pockets of innovation are happening kind of all over the place. So I'm working to try to aggregate some of this content and development in a way that creatives or other folks who want to get up and running, even just with a vibe-coded project, could have enough information to get started. And there's been big efforts, like there's Tari Playground or Ootle Playground, which does a lot of this. And then Fox has even worked on a wiki that covers a lot of this as well.

1:04:34But I'm thinking about it more as a creative that I maybe want to make a game. And then if I make that game, I might want to share it with people. You know, where do I drop that into the community where it doesn't get lost? Where can it become an ongoing conversation piece? And so, yeah, I guess like that's the area naturally that I'm focusing on because I see this L2 position for a massive growth moment. And that makes me excited because I love it when we can make things successful and bring in a bunch of just that next generation of creators on something that never has existed before.

1:05:08So that's where I'm focusing right now. We don't have a lot of time. And so I'm actually meeting with our community tomorrow with some of our community members to get some feedback on something I've been working on, which is I've been calling. I can't really talk about it too much until I guess really put this past the community and we flesh it out a bit more because I don't know if it's going to be something that lives or not. I am hopeful that it will, but that's a work in progress.

1:05:34So I guess it'll have to be TBD, Vlad, I'll have to come back to you. I would love to get your feedback on it too at some point. But I guess in this age of AI and development, we just get to move at such a faster pace. It's really actually exciting to be a part of an open source community that can leverage those tools.

1:05:51Vlad CosteaI was going to mention this because it seems like a lot of projects right now are building for agentic payments or for AI agents. And I haven't heard any of that from you. Maybe it's part of the roadmap or whatever, but you seem to be focused on building use cases for humans still. While a lot of the other projects are just saying, well, since humans did not adopt this, let's optimize it so that AI agents will choose to use our blockchain for whatever.

1:06:23Naveen JainSo first of all, Tari is hyper AI native. You can literally just point any agent at the repo for the Ootle and say, build an application and it'll go do it for you. There's really great documentation. codebase is very clear. So I think Tari is actually hyper AI native. And it's not all that we don't believe or agree with AI in other words, whether it's agentic payments or these sorts of things. I just personally believe, and it's just me speaking as myself, that you have to pair any work you're doing in the AI space with connecting with humans because who's behind all the agents?

1:07:17There's a human being behind all the agents somewhere. Anyone who says it's like, well, it's completely autonomous. It's like, is it? Show me that it's completely autonomous. Well, there's a human behind the curtain somewhere. And agents don't feel passion. Agents don't care quite literally about anything. So I think reaching people I think is pretty important for a project that ultimately is comprised of people who are making decisions on behalf of the project. And it's a human being who decides to set up a node, a validator node on the L2.

1:08:00It's a human being who's going to decide whether they want to allocate partner in some way, shape or form to, I guess an agent can make that decision too. But again, there's a human behind the agent somewhere. So I think that the best thing to do is not like throw the humans off a cliff entirely. I think it's actually really important to connect with human builds that humans actually want to like fall in love with and tell their friends about and connect with on an emotional level.

1:08:33And at the same time, it'd be foolish for the protocol not to be completely native, you know, so when I'm working on my little board game or whatever, you know, my agents are quite literally just connecting with Git and looking at the space and able to implement, you know, anything really, really quickly. Because Tari is already sort of set up in this sort of way. So that's how I see it.

1:09:08Vlad CosteaOkay, I want to announce that in 15 minutes, we'll do the giveaway from Cake Wallet. So to the listeners, people in the chat, pick your number right now from one to 100. Now I guess since we have three guests, we're gonna ask each one of them to pick a number and then add them up and divide by three and get the winner. But yeah, this is your last chance. Do it as fast as you can. There is a question from someone named AWSMAW.

1:09:41And he says, is attracting normies to Tari still a thing? For example, there was a plan to do it through some payment rails for Blink. But it's written off. Any other ideas in mind that you could share?

1:09:58Naveen JainYeah, I mean, attracting normies. Yeah, I mean, again, I think it comes down to creating things that people want, right? So the vision for Blink was to create agents that are really good at browser use. Because then agents can actually buy shit for you on the internet, right? Like if an agent is actually good at using a browser, then the agent can go and like buy stuff for you, right? That was the original agenda there behind, you know, the Blink idea. That idea is obviously not dead.

1:10:34There's a lot of people who are pursuing that, like, you know, Facebook, just, you know, meta or whatever. You know, that's like one of the core, you know, things behind Muse, is that Muse can go and like buy stuff for you on the internet, right? I think that's a good idea. But I don't think it's the only idea, right? So I think that there are many other things that people may fall in love with or want to do. And again, it could be as simple as just playing a board game for real money with other people on the internet, right?

1:11:02It could just be that. You know, so I don't think it has to necessarily be. One of the things I've learned in startups is that sometimes the right thing to do is just start really small and just find something that, you know, like a really small group of people really like love and want to be super passionate about and like do all the time. And then you kind of like expand from there. And that sometimes is better. As you know, crypto, sometimes people come in and say, we're going to tokenize the world's real estate.

1:11:37Every single house in the planet is going to be tokenized. And if you want to own one one thousandth of this house, this house on the corner, you know, like you can do that on Solana, you know, and you're kind of like, yeah, yeah, bro, cool. No, that's not actually happening, right? So I think sometimes it's better to be a little bit more focused and say, okay, you know, first of all, what does normie mean? Okay, does that just mean someone who's not a gambler in the sky casino?

1:12:08Is that what a normie is? Like someone who just doesn't want to like flip meme coins for 18 hours a day and try to get rich quick? Is that a normie? Or like, what is a normie, right? Because that's not actually a real thing. And really, then it's, okay, well, just create things that people want to do. You know, and by the way, it could be a super nerdy group that loves to do the thing initially. That's perfectly great. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. Enormous businesses have been built by targeting hyper nerds.

1:12:39Like, that's cool, too. So, and are those hyper nerds like normies? Or are they hyper nerds? Like, I'm a hyper nerd. You know? So anyway, I just think that that's a very fun question sometimes in crypto. You know, it's like, okay, well, what is a normie anyway? I'll be right back.

1:12:58FoxOne thing that we are, if you were talking about normies or whatever, I guess really what you're asking is how does the average person really get engaged with this as a product? And one thing that's really good that we have right now is Tari Universe. If you haven't tried it yet, you just you download it and you can start mining with like a click of a button. And it's really simple. I really love that it was one of the things that showed me that every single crypto project doesn't have to be a total UX nightmare.

1:13:27Which is a consistent problem for a lot of crypto projects as they have been UX nightmares. And so seeing something like Tari Universe, maybe say, okay, cool, this is possible to do this without, you know, requiring people to go read a whole bunch of documentation just to get it running. Right. And I think that keeping that ethos of seeing how to take a product that is really useful and then just present it well is important to getting people on board. And I think we'll see a lot more of that.

1:13:56These days, especially with good primitives in place to where people want to build things. And when people want to build things, people start wanting to build them well.

1:14:09Vlad CosteaThere's actually someone in the chat named OKanceGlam, I think. I'm not sure. Is it OKanceGlam? OKanceGlam? I don't know. He says, Vlad, can you ask Fox where can I buy XTM?

1:14:26FoxIf you want to buy it directly or you can buy the wrapped stuff on Uniswap right now. I believe MEXC is the exchange that currently lets you buy it directly, isn't it?

1:14:43Naveen JainYeah, I mean, there are a number of markets for XTM, right? MEXC is one, you know, I think Biconomy, you know, there are a number of other exchanges.

1:14:57SafeTrade supports XTM as well. So, yeah, there's a number of markets out there.

1:15:07BTSE, NonKYC for all of the non-KYC people out there. So, yeah, there are a number of exchanges out there. Or you can just mine it.

1:15:19FoxYeah, you can just download Tari Universe and hit the button.

1:15:24Vlad CosteaYep, one button, one click. Yeah, I did see that you optimized this for every device. Do you have any sort of spreadsheet where you say, well, for this configuration with this graphics card or CPU, this is what your hash rate is going to be like and this is how much money you can make just to estimate?

1:15:47FoxI mean, I would just go and download it and hit the button and see what actually what it does, because it'll tell you approximately how many you're going to earn over what period of time and you can do the math from there. But we had a spreadsheet at one point someone was compiling and I don't think that's in repair anymore. But yeah, if you just we've now got like little tickers that show you approximately how many XTM you're expected to get over time.

1:16:13Vlad CosteaYeah, but people mining Tari are also mining Monero, right?

1:16:18Naveen JainIf they're doing the merge-mined lane, right, so if you are merge mining with Monero, then yes, you're earning XMR and XTM. But there's also a solo mine lane where you just earn XTM, right? So you get to choose how you can choose your own adventure, Vlad.

1:16:38FoxAnd I'm trying to remember, but I think Tari Universe currently doesn't do the merge mining out of the box, it might be an option. But it can detect if you have a GPU and can put you on, you know, the C29 lane, or it'll just start doing XMR on, you know, on the RandomX lane. If you just have CPU to work with.

1:16:59Vlad CosteaNow, this is the way Satoshi intended. There are actually emails that he sent to Laszlo, the guy who bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin, but before that he was the first GPU miner in Bitcoin. And Satoshi was sort of pissed off because he wanted people to mine with their processors. And he sent an email to Laszlo and said, Hey, man, can you slow down or something or just log off sometimes because I want new users to be able to mine themselves and discover how this works.

1:17:28So yeah, it's kind of cool that we have some of this spirit still happening and people can just mine without actually having to configure anything.

1:17:39Naveen JainYeah, we have people mining on laptops, you know, and I think that's freaking great. Like you don't even need to have like crazy hardware. I have to jump, but Vlad, I just want to thank you for having...

1:17:52Vlad CosteaOkay, what's your number? We got to get your number.

1:17:54Naveen JainOh, should I say it verbally or just text here?

1:17:57Vlad CosteaYes, you can, because it's going to be the average between three numbers.

1:18:04Naveen Jain43.

1:18:07Vlad Costea43. So I guess some low numbers just became unlikely right now. Okay, that's fine.

1:18:22Naveen JainOkay, thank you for having me. I'll see you very soon. I appreciate it. Bye. Bye.

1:18:29Vlad CosteaOkay, there is only the three of us now. Let's talk about gaming. That's fun, but I don't get why it should be on the blockchain. Like I do get the point of tokenizing assets from games on the blockchain. I would like to have my old World of Warcraft character or whatever saved somewhere because it's gone with the server. Because I couldn't, you know, I'm from Romania. Okay, we didn't pay for stuff. So I was playing on private servers and every now and then they would just shut down and you would lose everything.

1:19:04Be like, okay, I just wasted my summer creating this build for nothing. So I wish there was this third party way of storing your assets. But I do also see gaming on the blockchain, which sounds kind of dumb because blockchains are slow. They're not efficient. Sometimes you have reorgs. Like, why would you get any of that?

1:19:27Marguerite de CourcelleWell, I think so when I was developing for blockchain games, I was excited about rails in which people could come in and create money for the first time from through their gameplay, creating value by making unique assets that if you ever played Diablo 4, you know, like the super excruciating inventory management that you go through, like I was imagining a world where you could specialize your asset development and have a little bit of control over how those assets would become higher level instead of like more of a broad tools approach as opposed to having like a giant powerful hammer, but making things very, very specific for different use cases.

1:20:13But as we saw with the NFT boom, like the technology or the why behind a lot of those things is not really what people cared about. It settled with like profile pics is as far as we got basically into anything like really interesting. And so as I was like trying to do this super complicated executions, like complex ideas, I was like, oh, everyone wants to stop at PFPs. And that's the end of this bull run. That was sad. I mean, we had things like Axie Infinity that of the genres probably did the best with, you know, volume for different gaming use, but still was that massive grind.

1:20:54And we never figured out actually unique applications of those assets in a way that could tie to an economy in a really creative way that justified it being on these on-chain assets. I think that dream is still there. And I think with the rate of AI and AI development, and Vlad, I don't know if you got a chance to look at that gaming platform I sent you, but I this weekend was able to vibe, basically vibe code with a it was like an Opus 5.5 create that game developer harness with this proprietary engine on this new platform that exists.

1:21:34Three games this weekend. And I don't know, maybe three, four hours each. And my children were playtesting one of them last night. And it was probably an hour game experience they played through. And they loved it. They were able I was able to get that game experience good enough that they were able to walk through onboard and story had tutorial. And I was thinking, wow, so now that we've made it possible to ship these hard, complex, creative applications faster, and able to play test them and probably collaboratively, you know, work through where's the really, good idea and where's the fun, I think we'll be able to focus more on the economies of them.

1:22:14And the economies of them historically is the hardest part of game design. And if you have these, these economies that have real money involved, very difficult to not make it a, you know, pay-to-win game. And I think that you'll see probably choices of where people would just straight up, you know, embrace that as that is the thing they're doing. And some people might want to make it more, you know, explore how do you get like real time balancing happening with some of these advanced economic systems.

1:22:49And I don't know, I wouldn't rule out that we're going to not, we're going to revisit some of those good ideas we had, I think everybody just got massively burned out that we made only made it as far as PFPs. And with creative content on-chain, and then nobody really wanted to learn more. So like you were saying, I love this end-to-end educational flow that we have with Tari and the Ootle. Because when people have the ability to onboard and run Tari Universe too, I would say just a few days ago, I opened the application, I didn't realize I was mining when it was running.

1:23:20And by the time I went back to turn it off, I already had like one, one Tari there waiting for me, which, like, was only in a few minutes. And so, you know, just and that was on a laptop. So anyways, being able to do that and learn what is mining, what's working in the background, and then, like our Ootle templates that we have these smart contracts that are meant to be modular, and the way that our application system is designed to be modular, is exciting for that educational purpose.

1:23:50So that if you see apps pop off, you'll be able to look at how they were built and modify them riff on them. What's that one thing you might want to add to them? And I think that's a perfect fit when you're thinking about more interesting, creative or complex systems that you people want to explore. So I get the and what you're talking about, like, that's not a good fit for the blockchain, I think you can save state to the blockchain, you can use different processes that are able to prevent from cheating, and also saving state, but not necessarily having to put the whole thing on the blockchain, if you wanted to do a completely decentralized website, where everything is decentralized, and you can do that, I think there is an opportunity to do that.

1:24:32And maybe that makes sense for some applications. But I think if you're doing something just for fun, and all you need is game state, not like with no cheating, and you want to utilize the economies, then, you know, that's, I think that makes it lower-hanging fruit there. But if I wouldn't be shocked if, you know, with privacy, the different applications people might want to try to make, and I don't know, people say, like, I don't want to see an online casino, but like, I want to see an online casino.

1:25:00I remember the days of poker back with Bitcoin, where all the all the poker players had their accounts frozen by the banks. And so they were some of the first people that got onto Bitcoin, because every time they would go on to play online poker, yeah, the accounts would freeze their assets. So then they were Bitcoiners, and then there were hardcore Bitcoiners, and they understood why their technology was so important. It would be fun. I have game developer friends who launched online casinos in Korea, and they became so popular that I had to take them down quickly before they got in trouble.

1:25:30So I guess the degenerate, like, side of me is like, I want to see people go do fun, wild things and see what happens. I mean, I don't know, like, if, when we did social tokens a while ago, and that was a thing for like, I don't know, six months. It became like, this thing where you couldn't really do them because it wasn't worth the legal bills to explore ideas. And I love that the US is exploring safe harbor right now on a lot of blockchain applications.

1:26:01And I think people should embrace trying stuff, and we should keep the best ideas. And as a community, I think we should have less censorship. And we should, you know, like, if the things that are open source, then maybe things are more fair. It'd be great to not have a house that was stealing your money all the time, but you had a more fair casino design.

1:26:20Vlad CosteaI think you might be the most OG of all of us. Sorry for interrupting, Fox. I just realized, okay, she knows about the poker days. That's like Amir Taaki territory. That's why he got into Bitcoin. Like, okay, you're probably the most OG.

1:26:38FoxI was just going to say that I don't really do much of the online gambling myself, but if I were to design an online gambling system, I would very much want a system that both had confidentiality in the transactions and which had smart contracts to make sure that like the actual, you know, output of the game is fair in a way that can be validated, right? Because, you know, again, as Marguerite says, one of the classic problems of gambling and gaming casinos is that someone cheats. And often it can be the house.

1:27:08Having known published templates for certain kinds of, you know, gaming transactions means that you know what the rules are. You can examine it. And then you also know that, like, what you're doing isn't being broadcast to everyone in the world, which I think is often important. And so if you're going to if you're going to elect to do gambling, if you're going to elect to do any kind of like casino style gaming, you want those features and those features are often absent in other chains or, you know, other projects.

1:27:41Vlad CosteaYeah, the 15 minutes that I promised are over. So we got to reveal the numbers and find the winner. So what's your number, Mr. Fox? And what's your number, Marguerite?

1:27:41Fox55.

1:27:41Vlad Costea55.

1:27:41Marguerite de CourcelleAnd what was the top range?

1:27:59Fox100.

1:28:04Marguerite de CourcelleThen I'm going to go with 23.

1:28:13Vlad Costea23. OK, we have 43, 55, 23. Let's add them up and divide by three.

1:28:23Forty-three plus probably someone already did this or someone who's smart did this without a calculator. It adds up to 121, which is 40.33333. So let's say 40. So whoever said 40 in the chat is the winner of the $100 from Cake Wallet. Download the wallet. Try it out.

1:28:51Let me type in the chat. The number is 40. I'm going to look through the comments maybe tomorrow to find the winner. There are too many of them. But yeah, thanks all for participating. And now let's talk more about Tari. You know, it kind of sucks that Naveen left because I really wanted to ask him more questions. You guys are new. You were not around in 2018 when I was interviewing Fluffypony. I feel like I missed some opportunities there. I was not aware he was going to leave after one hour.

1:29:27But let's follow the logic of chat questions first. So, there's a fun one from Robin Gomez Gems. He says, if Monero and Tari were roommates, who would be the one leaving passive aggressive notes about hashrate contribution?

1:29:57FoxWho would be leaving passive aggressive notes about hashrate contribution?

1:30:03I guess maybe Monero because it has one lane and so it would be like, okay, any hash we're contributing is only part of it for them. But I don't know. I don't even know how to conceptualize that question. It's pretty funny. I think we're both benefiting from the merge mining and I don't think there's any ill will there, that's for sure.

1:30:28Vlad CosteaYeah, but there has to be one who's like, oh, you're not bringing enough hashrate or whatever. I'm doing all the hard work.

1:30:37You're a loser who sleeps on the couch.

1:30:40FoxFirst of all, you're both getting it, right? I don't know what the problem is so I guess I don't get it.

1:30:45Vlad CosteaIt's a fun question. There's another guy named Leo Montgomery 71 and he says, how does Tari handle the fact that Monero blocks can sometimes arrive with slightly different timing or orphan patterns than a standalone chain would?

1:31:05FoxI don't know the answer to that because I haven't worked deep in the mining consensus code. But I would encourage you to ask that on the forums that we have because we have community.tari.com and ask that question and it's very likely that one of the core devs that does know the answer to that would be able to answer it for you.

1:31:29Vlad CosteaThere's a question for Marguerite from Dr. Curcasso, I think. What's up with these names? Why can't you have Joe or whatever? He says, Marguerite, how could Tari's privacy first design unlock more meaningful on-chain games or experiences than what transparent chains have delivered so far?

1:31:51Marguerite de CourcelleWell, I think about, on the application side first, I think about prediction markets and how, and also just various on-chain activity like the ability, even just in marketplace sales for example, when there were NFT sales and there were these auctions, the bots would front run everybody for once transactions were starting to hit the queue. And then actual users wouldn't get a chance to participate. So, I think like when it comes to gaming applications, that privacy layer becomes really important when you have these different states where you can't monitor what other users or user behaviors are actively doing in a way that preserves the moments for the people to have their genius moments in participation.

1:32:45And so, like, if you can protect on-chain activity like that, then you can have various states. So, like, even like, what was one example I had when I was thinking about this? So, outside of prediction markets, there's just, I think, a lot, like, I like the fog of war example that they were doing, because I think that's basically like the MVP of what's being talked about here is when you are, or like if you're doing that kind of thing. And so, I think that war ship game, what's it called?

1:33:18Battleship. If you ever want to know where different positions are, you can secure these positions, but nobody knows what those positions are, but there's still the state saved. The state is saved. And then when the moment happens to execute, then it's a surprise. And I think that, I think that is, and I know you can do some of this stuff with, like, with other privacy applications, but I like the fact that it's inherent to the, you know, the settlement layer, because that settlement layer I think is where it gets gamed in the end the most.

1:33:54So, anyways, like, as far as additional, I haven't spent too much time thinking about making a game for privacy yet, which I eventually, I will get there, but my creative process where I'm at right now is thinking about what is just really fun games we can make in today's world with the tools that, you know, we didn't have a few years ago. I've been working in a space where we've been serving, like, UGC assets for various, like, large UGC platforms, and now we're getting to a place where the solo developer can ship their biggest idea they've ever had in their life within a matter of a weekend, a week.

1:34:31And so I'm thinking more about what's possible with going back to the ecosystems, and then I think I need to get another layer down and think about the actual privacy side of this, but this is where I'm thinking about the community side. So the faster we can pull the community together to be playing and getting the fun ideas going, that's, I think, where you get to that, that more educational layer of, like, the aha, this privacy moment. Because building out the fun of the game versus the fun of the game with the blockchain side is just, it's harder, and the ecosystems and the game design aspects are harder to get right.

1:35:09So I think first, I'm just personally having a lot of fun of community engagement and building together, and then, and getting ready for the L2 launch, and then it's going to be more of, you're going to see people do an idea and you're going to be like, oh, that idea, but then plus this other one more thing. And that's, I think, where we're going to get that momentum going. And we haven't really seen, correct me if I'm wrong, but is there another L2, like, privacy L2 out there that exists right now that can really serve applications in this sort of capacity?

1:35:46Vlad CosteaThere might be some Ethereum rollup, I'm not sure.

1:35:52Marguerite de CourcelleYeah, I just, I haven't like, and because I've been in the development, the game development, and then the creative asset development space for so long, there may be some other applications, and I would love to learn more if there are, but I have not come across. And nothing with this sort of mining, onboarding rails either. And I think, like, the whole thing about how you can participate in the network end-to-end and never touch fiat is really cool. And, and also opens up ideas for onboarding users into your games in a way that there's always been that friction that has happened.

1:36:26So even early on was, you know, how do we get? How do we onboard these users without ever, without ever them having crypto in the first place? So then everybody does the airdrop model. But it's a lot cooler if you can participate through your own contribution, be it network or otherwise nodes. And, and then you get some sort of asset that's valuable that allows you to play and participate in the system. And, and so then we have the privacy L2 and the application space. And I know there's different people exploring prediction markets.

1:37:01In fact, you probably know off the top of your head to some of the other applications that we've seen. And there's like a government private governance voting. And I get excited about that part because then I think about, okay, let's say we're making a game, and it's an open source game. But let's say there's an aspect of game balancing, and we don't want it just to be AI, we want it to be more like community, you know, gets the last shot of the this consensus layer of what's happening with the game or game design or balancing, then you could have this privacy governance consensus layer.

1:37:32And yes, it sounds over complicated. But honestly, I feel like you can design applications to be user friendly. And that stuff is happening in the background. But Fox, I don't know if you want to add any of the additional like applications people are already shipping.

1:37:45FoxWell, I know that there are people who are working on the prediction markets, there's I think soon.fun is being built on top of the L2 right now. And that's, that's if you go to again, if you go to the community forums, it's great there, they got a listing of a bunch of stuff going on right now and the wiki does two of the current projects that are being built on it. So that's wiki.tari.com. If you go to...

1:38:10Marguerite de CourcelleAnd we have these contests happening.

1:38:12FoxThe community application, you'll see everything that's being built right now that is out there for you to try.

1:38:18Marguerite de CourcelleYeah. And we have these ongoing contests that are happening every month that have different themes. So this upcoming month for October is privacy themed. So in that chapter of the contest, we'll be hoping to see, you know, that aspect of the L2's privacy feature, getting some showcases. And which, you know, hopefully be talking about more. But yeah, sorry, I don't have a deeper answer to the privacy side of the gaming application. I know they're there, but really, it's I think just the settlement and being able to prevent front running as far as those on-chain, those aspects, which might just be too boring of an answer.

1:39:01Vlad CosteaWell, that was a good answer and a fair one.

1:39:07I see that the questions are flowing. This is actually pretty cool. So Marguerite, this is once again for you from Marques Mark, I guess. He says, Marguerite, where do you see the biggest overlap between AI tools like Skybox and private digital assets on a network like Tari?

1:39:31Marguerite de CourcelleSo Skybox is what my company Blockade Labs does. We generate 360 images and HDRIs, which is a light map, and different assets that are used for the 3D world game development. I would say that those assets can be unique in the sense that you could be a creator and you could know where they came from. So you could have your history of content creation. And if people, if you're an affordable creative hub and things have the license that allow you to just share, you could like, for example, Blockade allows for remixing.

1:40:13So you have your original asset, starting image, and you can remix these assets in certain ways. So you could have the original stamp of what that asset was to then the, you know, how that was remixed. And it can be used in everybody's games for free, you know, based on people sharing the content freely. But I would say that, like, the creator side of submitting assets to a platform, so as an artist, or if I made my entire AI set of rigs to be animated or characters, you could upload them to a, think about your largest mod communities, right? Modded communities. I think of Balatro with Steamodded.

1:40:57I think of, what are some of the other larger ones? Like, SimCity has some fan-made forked content. There's just very large mod communities that have spun up over the years. And they have to figure out standards and things for these assets to then work cross-game and into other fan games. And the ecosystem they build around them are really willy-nilly at the moment, but if you were able to stamp assets or know where they came from, then you could eventually, you know, this has been a vision for a long, long time for a lot of people in the creative blockchain space, is to be able to have that proof of, you know, who made it and then to get that long tail revenue from the asset, where it's used or, you know, if you made a game, not even just the assets, but made a game and that game got riffed on and forked.

1:41:46And every down tail success of the thing you made could be carried forward and you could receive that small transaction of that. And we saw a little bit of that with those creator fees, with NFT assets and stuff before, but I think with everything from an end-to-end creative application to unique content being used or resold or remixed, I don't think we're going to slow down in people wanting to do those things. Licensing is an issue for open source gaming, but it does seem like the, like I said, the modded communities have figured out a lot of these harder problems.

1:42:23So it doesn't, if we can get some traction and we get people making and creating a reason to support this and have assets on-chain, then I do think that if people are making money, I mean, that's a pretty big incentive. You've got, like Roblox takes something like 80% of your game's revenue and even some of the other models I'm looking at, they take 50%. And so the more a creator can capture and the long tail revenue of that, then like, why would people not want to build there?

1:42:58And they have to get the users too. So you have to bring the users, you have to have the growth. But I feel like those are all actually solvable problems because we have the advantage of having the economic backbone that exists. And you can turn that conversation of, you know, when does token go up or the price of the token focus into these ecosystems where the token is being used and you have so many more transaction volumes happening that collaboratively, yeah, you just, it becomes a bigger conversation than just the price of the token, but the incentive is baked into the ecosystem to start with.

1:43:38Vlad CosteaYou actually got two more questions, Marguerite, but I feel like Mr. Fox is underutilized right now. So he might have comments on some of the same stuff.

1:43:47If you have any questions for Mr. Fox that are not what does the Fox say, please ask him questions.

1:43:56Marguerite de CourcelleAlso, he's wearing a cat shirt. I feel like he is underrepresenting Fox.

1:44:02Vlad CosteaNo, there's a Fox in the background.

1:44:05FoxI got lots of Fox pictures on the walls.

1:44:10Vlad CosteaAre you a furry, Mr. Fox?

1:44:10FoxI am.

1:44:10Vlad CosteaThat's cool. You're the third furry on this podcast.

1:44:10[unclear speaker]That you know of.

1:44:10Vlad CosteaYes, that I know of. There is Hunter Beast. There is Karo Zagoris, the BTC Dragonlord. I guess there's also you right now. I don't know. I'm not aware of any other furries that were on my show.

1:44:37Marguerite de CourcelleI really love Hunter Beast, by the way.

1:44:40Vlad CosteaThey kind of, oh, go ahead.

1:44:43Marguerite de CourcelleI was just gonna say they're cool. I knew them pretty well in Denver. Yeah,

1:44:48Vlad CosteaI met him in January at The Space, which is their bar where they do meetups. And he's very cool. Like, he's kind of a walking contradiction in some ways. Like, he's a gay furry who's also a very devout Christian. Like a serious Catholic. And how does he reconcile these concepts? I don't know, but he does.

1:45:12Marguerite de CourcelleWell, he's also a really creative developer. And we did some project exploration before, especially when Bitcoin was doing the whole Ordinals stuff, when I actually shipped a project about Ordinals.

1:45:28And anyways, they were one of the few people that I could actually have some of those conversations with. Because, as you know, Bitcoin maxis are like not Ordinals-friendly, generally. And then you have your one subgroup that was kind of like, yeah, no, Ordinals are cool. So anyways, they were a friend.

1:45:45FoxSo it's actually kind of funny, the reason why I'm so actively involved in Tari is actually because of my work in the furry fandom. So I run an online commissioning platform. So you go and find someone who will draw you something of your character, what have you. And we're using Stripe as the backend for payments. And as you can imagine, this is a little bit constraining because they have a lot of controls over what you're allowed to draw and what you aren't allowed to draw. And this is kind of a pain for a lot of people in the fandom because, you know, they want to draw creative expressions, as you can imagine.

1:46:21And what I've been looking at is like, OK, how do we make something that we could basically route around all the BS with PayPal and Stripe and make it work? If we had something that was like programmable confidential and that we could make smart contracts for, we could do kind of an escrow system to do payments that are safe without having to like do the full like clawback transactions that standard credit cards do. And if we could use a stablecoin, the on-ramp is relatively easy. Right.

1:46:49So if we can have a stablecoin with confidential transactions and then if we can set up the right smart contract, suddenly we have a viable alternative marketplace that can do these things and we don't have to worry about getting permissions from banks about what we can create.

1:47:09Vlad CosteaThat's cool. Like you have a problem and you find the solution. There is no better way to look at it.

1:47:15FoxThis is exactly what I need. I want to see it succeed. How can I help?

1:47:22Vlad CosteaNow to the question about actually I'm not going to say what it's about. It's for you, Marguerite. And in caps lock, this guy said, important question I need to know the answer to. I guess it's more like important question I need to know the answer to. And then he said Marguerite chose her manicure color based on Tari's mascot. So did you choose the color of your nails according to the Tari mascot?

1:47:45Marguerite de CourcelleIt might have been a subconscious choice.

1:47:50It's more like I was having fun thinking it's witch season, you know, like we're in spooky season. But then I did and I was like, oh, that's on brand. And I do like the Tari green. It is it is a cool, catchy color. But I'm going to go with my subconscious. I did.

1:48:09Vlad CosteaAnd now the more serious question is from Arveen D'Souza 18. And he or she says, Marguerite, what lessons from early crypto puzzles and projects like Neon District still guide how you think about the building on a privacy focused chain like Tari? Sounds like an AI generated question, to be honest. Who talks like this?

1:48:35Marguerite de CourcelleMaybe they like my background. I don't know. But I would say that Neon District.

1:48:47Our problem was honestly, it's not a privacy related problem as much as how do you support millions of game assets indexing for blockchain purposes. And we hit some bloat there. That was really tough. So like because it was similar to that game design I was talking about earlier. But I would say like I never we never really made it to the big, big moment for Neon District, which was that which is sad because we acquired an AI studio back in 2022, right when Midjourney was coming online.

1:49:22And that was because of, you know, we were bottlenecked by producing the amount of assets we needed to produce in order to support the type of game we wanted to make in the game economy we want to make by art. And if we had this really highly developed art catalog, which we did, we could train on our own art and create our own assets to create this universe that could be endless. And then you could with the economy and everything else, the demand we had for fulfilling those assets, creative assets, assets, the game design, was very difficult to keep up with the appetite.

1:49:58So anyways, when we acquired them, that was the that was the vision. And where we landed was just a high level asset that was universal, which was the Skybox. But going back to the privacy side, I don't think we ever made it, we didn't make it to the game state where we would have really, really explored that on deeper conversation. Although I can tell you, like little things like loot boxes, and stuff like that is, those are how do you have this randomness on-chain that is that you can protect with true randomness.

1:50:31We did some of that, but I believe we took a lot of that was done offline for the randomness of loot boxes that we did. So I would say like loot boxes by themselves is a great spot to think about for on-chain, like on-chain loot boxes, because they're highly regulated. And I think that's probably now somewhere I'm gonna have to go think about.

1:50:54Vlad CosteaI hate loot boxes for the record. Like, I do get why they were introduced in games, but I feel like they perverted like the whole fun. People just play for the loot boxes or actually my brother was playing CS:GO at some point and he found like a very expensive type of knife skin, and he sold it for like $2,000 and went on vacation. To Rome with that money, which is crazy. I'm surprised he's not into Bitcoin at all. Like I tried to explain it to him so many times and he's like, I don't care about this, but he plays CS:GO.

1:51:30Marguerite de CourcelleYeah, yeah. Well, so if you had, though, like an evergreen game, and if the game could go in lots of different directions, loot boxes become more fun, because then if you're pulling out assets of the game, they can be specific to what the game needs right now. If it has this self balancing built in, what the game needs right now to keep it balanced. And then, I don't know, I think that would be really, that's kind of where we were going with our vision before we pivoted. We pivoted because, as you know, the NFT space was going to crater, and I've been through enough.

1:52:04I was through the ICO era, I was through so many of these different eras, I knew that that bubble had popped, and people would never come back to being like all warm and fuzzy about the concept of NFTs for a while. I think the concept will have to be reintroduced at some point in a new fun, engaging, viral app way. But anyways, like, I still think that, yeah, that evergreen model, I think is possible, especially tied to these ecosystems that can evolve together. And I think like we were talking about on-chain agentic systems really will make all this, but no one person or I think one company is able going to solve that.

1:52:42I think it will come from an open source, very much a modding type community, people who are contributing in different lanes to be able to produce those kinds of wild combos of things successfully. And I think you're going to have a lot of failures before you get it right. But just like, if you remember, like Loot, Loot was an NFT game that happened, and it was just text based, and it was this similar to concept of a loot box, but you got a text line and it had this dream of it was going to be so much more.

1:53:06But honestly, that app, it was viral for maybe a month, but everybody had so much fun with just dreaming about where that could go or what it was going to be. And I think we're going to have a lot more of those moments before we get the, like, hit the mother lode of putting it all together and like having the actual thing that's going to do all this stuff. And I think it's okay to have the bite-sized moments along the way. I think that's part of the fun.

1:53:32It's part of the journey. I don't think it has to be everything right away, you know.

1:53:38Vlad CosteaSince we're on the topic of video games, no pressure here, but for the both of you, what are your top three favorite video games of all time?

1:53:52Off the top of your head, don't think too hard.

1:53:55FoxOcarina of Time, what would be the third one?

1:54:02Vlad CosteaWait, I haven't heard the first one. You said Ocarina of Time?

1:54:06FoxYeah, Ocarina of Time was the second one I listed. Final Fantasy VII was the first.

1:54:22You know, I've played a lot. I played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog when I was younger. A lot of it.

1:54:28Vlad CosteaYou're a Sega kid.

1:54:30FoxI'm playing it again because I have a kid and the kid likes to watch me do all the loop-de-loops. And so I got obscenely good at it recently. And now I have like, I kind of played it to the point where like it's overplayed, but now it's kind of like almost like scratching an itch. So I don't know, maybe I'll like that one the most next.

1:54:50Vlad CosteaI think Sonic 2 is better, to be honest. Much better.

1:54:53FoxI meant like the category, because there's like 1, 2 and 3 and then there's 3 & Knuckles and then there's like Sonic CD. And then there's like, I didn't want to pick one specifically because I probably, if I had to pick all of those, it would probably be when you put Sonic and Knuckles on top of Sonic 3 to get like the entire thing, you know.

1:55:15Vlad CosteaI'm a Mario guy for the record, but I respect Sonic. Oh man, cool.

1:55:23Marguerite de CourcelleWell, I would say when I was little, Final Fantasy VII like really blew open the door for me as far as what game art could be. And the story, I mean, when I look back at it now, it's not how I remember it. I lived that as such a different experience than what I see it today. And then I would have to say a game that really surprised me in the mechanics was Phasmophobia with how it engaged the microphone whisperer and audio spatial to really help create.

1:55:59I'm like, I love scary games. So it's my favorite genre because it's, I think the hardest to get right. And it's really easy to make something not fun anymore or just to be annoying instead of scary. So anyways, I thought the Phasmophobia game design was really cool and then the cooperative experience of it. And then I would say, without giving another horror game there, I would say, I think the Doom franchise is super cool because of how over the top, crazy gory rock music in the background it is.

1:56:36It's just like such a vibe when you play it. So like, and it feels like you're in god mode all the time. Did you forget one Fox?

1:56:44FoxI thought probably a better slot for me for number three, because while Sonic is playing, is scratching an itch, this one was actually a lot of fun objectively is New Vegas, Fallout New Vegas.

1:56:54Marguerite de CourcelleYeah, I think the games that blend genres, even create a new genre that teach a new mechanic and inspire. There's games that, I know I mentioned Balatro already, but Balatro's premise was all about breaking the rules of the game. And so that opened up this entirely new genre. And that's why you get this wild modding community around it, because it inspired so many mashups, like combining concepts and mashing them up. Experiencing two genres in a new way that you never thought of before. I think those kinds of applications are very, very cool because they make you think about things differently.

1:57:37Vlad CosteaYeah, I'm gonna disappoint you a bit, the both of you, and I'm gonna say that my favorite Final Fantasy is X.

1:57:46Marguerite de CourcelleOh, I'm trying to remember, which one was that? Was that the one with the lightning?

1:57:50FoxNo, that's 13. It was the inaugural one for PlayStation 2. It had Tidus and Wakka and... Yuna and Auron, who was really cool.

1:58:02Vlad CosteaAuron, yeah, that's such a cool character.

1:58:05FoxHe is a very cool character. Very conflicted.

1:58:10Vlad CosteaAnd the twist towards the end when you fight Yunalesca, and it's revealed that he's actually Unsent. That's what they call dead people who did not want to die, and they just sort of stuck around in the world. That's also cool. I mean, spoiler for a 25-year-old game, but it's so cool. I love it. That music still gives me chills.

1:58:32Marguerite de CourcelleIt's great music.

1:58:33Vlad CosteaAnd the ending is just perfect. I like to pretend that X-2 doesn't exist. I've played that one, it's the most disappointing sequel ever. The gameplay is fun, but the story just feels off. You just beat the primordial forces of the universe, and then you have to go back and watch the world. It's rebuilding, it's sort of optimistic and enthusiastic, but on the other hand, it's just not the same place.

1:59:04Marguerite de CourcelleI think, not to give this a different twist, but the game Dead by Daylight, where you get to play as the demon that's harassing the party of survivors, is like, that was such a fun new concept, too. So like, I don't know, like, [01:59:24] Vlad Costea: I think Capcom did that first. So there was Ghosts and Goblins and they had another one. I don't remember the name, but you were playing as the demon.

1:59:32Yeah. Yeah. That demon mode. And then, yeah, I like when I also watch my kids play games, the things that they pick up and run with, like can be. Did you see the game Choo-Choo Charles, by chance? It's not meant to be this good-looking game. It's just kind of a simple game loop, but it has so much built into it to make it extremely streamable. So that if you're engaging with your audience and you're going through the story, the engagement levels are just off the charts.

2:00:06So a lot of these games that get streamed are not even high-quality games, but they're just meant to be a fun time. And so even the kids, when they're playing together, they'll be walking through the experiences and the conversations they're having about the game experience is so much part of it, instead of just the merits of like, you know, is this an academic-level good game? And I think that opens up the door for people to be not intimidated to create content and gaming content in this sort of like new genre that is becoming more and more accessible.

2:00:39Vlad CosteaIt's kind of cool that you're looking at the new stuff. Most of us are stuck in the past just thinking about our childhoods or whatever.

2:00:49Marguerite de CourcelleWell, I'm still a child. I don't know, I guess like I'm still here playing. And I feel like growing up along the way with... I don't know, there's so many disappointments I've had with different things that you're like, oh, I didn't realize it was going to be that way. When it comes to certain aspects, and it feels like the game space is so young at heart with as cynical and skeptical as it is. Like if you meet with... I met with a guy who made Diablo II, and he is still out there shipping amazing projects even after having so many heartbreaks with other games that were not the Diablo IIs of the world and big platforms.

2:01:29And you can have these wild successes and then big heartbreaks, but these guys like they get back out there. And even though they have all this cynicism, there's something about I think being in the creative spaces that keep you younger.

2:01:44Vlad CosteaOh, I agree with that. I remember reading about John Carmack and I was mind blown. I was like, I want to grow up and be just like this guy. Obviously, I never did. But it was such a cool aspiration. Like this guy who was... Like what John Carmack was doing was to find roadblocks, like patented compression algorithms or something, and sort of reverse engineer them and release a different version that was not patented and open source it. And he was also open sourcing the engines for Doom and Quake when everyone was telling him that it's a bad idea.

2:02:21And I guess a lot of the modding community owes a lot to him. Just this idea that he was puritan.

2:02:31What was that?

2:02:33FoxI was saying Doom would not be what it is if it had not been open source. It's the thing you run on everything to prove it works, right? Yeah, "Can it run Doom?" It's got that aura that goes with it forever.

2:02:48Vlad CosteaBut I think only the first couple of levels. No, I think episode one. And that's the only one that you get because it was released as a shareware. So I think the rest of the levels, you got to pay for them. But the engine itself without the level design is open source. I played Chex Quest back in the day.

2:03:07FoxBattle Chess.

2:03:11Marguerite de CourcelleBut I was going to say, somebody who I really look up to that is a cypherpunk who plays in the creative space, who also really values privacy and e-commerce is Tim Sweeney. And oh my gosh, he's like one of the original cypherpunks. He goes way, way back, like 80s, doing some pretty hardcore cypherpunk work. And so him building the engine, his passion was to build this engine. And so then they needed to have their hit game. So they were building Fortnite in story mode as the game.

2:03:46But then when Battle Royale as a genre came online, they just in three months made Fortnite the Battle Royale version, which is the one that took off. But the place that he came from passionately was building the next state of the art engine. But yeah, as a cypherpunk, his core values come from that space. And so, yeah, it's amazing how in the e-commerce, he's done so many things. I feel like that people, he made it look easy in the end, even though he's been on this incredibly long journey to get there.

2:04:21Vlad CosteaI mean, for a while in the 90s and early 2000s, everyone wanted to sort of use the Quake engine because that one was the most advanced. You have Half-Life, which is running on the Source engine, which is like an updated port of the Quake 2 engine. I think it's the Quake 1 actually. And the next iteration was like a fork of the Quake 2 engine. But my point is that the Unreal engine, which was supposed to be a commercial product and it still is, it became wildly successful.

2:04:54And it was mostly showcased with the Unreal games and Unreal Tournament. And it sort of became the industry standard right now because it's free to use. I think you can download everything for free and you can use it to create your own game. And then I think if you cross like a million dollars in sales or something, then you owe some royalties to the Unreal team. So that's the way in which it works. Most AAA games nowadays are using Unreal engine, which is crazy that they rely so much on it.

2:05:30Marguerite de CourcelleWell, and they were able to, unlike Unity, who's really struggled to have those hit games, and they were trying to do that for a while. Epic has different ways to monetize and have revenue. And they're making so much money in e-commerce. And I know that they've had some cutbacks on that, but I would say they did that really well. And that was a hard thing to pull off. But then their creator hub is starting to get traction. Roblox is an example of a project that, gosh, did it happen and start in the 90s?

2:06:04At least early 2000s. And then they didn't really start to get any traction until like 2011, 12, 13. That's when they started to actually get some traction. But if you go and open the Roblox creator engine, it is like, what is this? Because it feels like it came from the 90s. And it's because it's so big, it's hard to update it and keep it fresh. But the kids are, you know, they're figuring it out. But I would be worried about being one of these creator platforms in the way that we're moving away from having to interact with engines in that capacity for that particular type of user.

2:06:42I think kids are going to definitely love to voice make games and not even have to text. And there will be engines probably pretty quickly soon that won't be introducing them to these more archaic frameworks.

2:06:57Vlad CosteaOh, yeah. The connection between cypherpunks and gaming goes all the way back. You mentioned Amir Taaki and you said you worked with him for the launch of Dark Wallet and you drew some portraits. The reason why he became a C++ programmer was that he heard a rumor that he could mod his PlayStation to see a nude version of Lara Croft. So he found some, I don't know, some ASCII code that he typed and then he inserted that into the controller port. And then he saw that it did nothing.

2:07:33And he was very disappointed. He thought that he was going to hack the game to be able to see that character nude and he was not able to. So eventually he said, screw this, I'm going to make my own game. So he picked up a book of C++ because someone told him that games are made in C++ and that's how his career started. But eventually he gave up on the whole game concept and just became a programmer.

2:07:57Marguerite de CourcelleYeah. Yeah. I mean, you had, right? Vitalik's story starts when he rage-quit WoW.

2:08:04Vlad CosteaWorld of Warcraft. Yeah.

2:08:07Marguerite de CourcelleHe was like, F this. I'm going to go, you know, he got so mad he went and launched Ethereum. Yeah. Although I really did love Vitalik's writings, his Bitcoin writings for Bitcoin Magazine that covered a lot of these sort of like creative concepts. And he had that passion place for what happened with World of Warcraft that carried over with colored coins. So, like, I was reading and thinking about colored coins with Andreas Antonopoulos' group and they were all like putting these ideas out there.

2:08:35Vlad CosteaOh gee, are you, really?

2:08:37Marguerite de CourcelleWell, I think we were mining with our gaming GPUs in 2012. And so we were still mining Bitcoin with our right before the ASICs came out. And so I'm from that era. And right when crypto Twitter was becoming a thing and I had to go follow everybody and.

2:08:56Oh, sorry, my camera just switched. So yeah, I'm from that era, but I was probably one of the earliest creatives in this space alongside Cryptograffiti. If you know who he is. And you should have him on sometime if you never had him on. His story is really cool. And there was a few other people, too, that started. But colored coins was the very first idea of what Ethereum then became. And it was neat to see those thoughts evolve. So anyways. Yeah, I'm excited to anyways bring it back when I'm talking about the Ootle launch, like this end-to-end onboard with all the history and all the things I loved about what brought me into crypto, especially the gamer.

2:09:37And I think earning your own tokens directly in your wallet when your machine is being put to work. I think that ties to things that like gamers love. I think there's just so much overlap with that. And then the application space and smart contracts and what you can do when you don't have a middleman in the way of some of your creative ideas. Agents included, because agents then you don't have to think about, well, I don't want to give them access to my credit card. But how can you design for that kind of support for e-commerce?

2:10:09So I don't know. I think we're about to enter a new dawn of a lot of playful, a lot of bad ideas. But the bad idea is a part of the fun. You can't be afraid of the bad ideas. I remember when MakerDAO, you know, the DAO hack happened and like, listen, it was a bad day, but everybody moved on and there were lessons learned. And I think that's just part of, you know, as long as our spirit stays in the right place. And I feel like Tari does a good job about not giving up on some of the creative ideas, not giving up on the things that we were promised before as far as Bitcoin really did want the user to be a part of the whole experience and to have the education plan.

2:10:50Not to let it just become this big financial like, I don't know, it feels like a lot of that user and the open source magic has been wiped out of this space because the larger players have come in and made it, you know, all the focus has been on the financial hubs. And they're not really going to, are they going to really adopt our open source tools? Like, are these banks really going to, you know, like that's going to be where they transact? They might have a stake in some of these things, but I think everybody's going to have a stake.

2:11:22I think everybody's probably going to be trying their own tokens in their own ecosystems, even if there's different things that will have value along the way. I don't know. I just am skeptical about the spirit being protected in the way that we all thought it would be from the beginning and preserving that inspiration space for people to be able to walk in the door, walk into an open source community, have an idea, not need to submit a job application, do something that's super cool, and watch it take off.

2:11:51And then watch people contribute to your project.

2:11:56Vlad CosteaThat's wholesome. And I'm happy that you sort of brought the conversation back on topic. I was going to do that, but you did it for me, so I appreciate it. There are two comments in the chat for Mr. Fox. I see that he became sort of bored. He's not part of this conversation. So let me just quote AWSMAWSM-B5Z. And he says, for Mr. Fox, I would like to say that he's a real machine, and I admire how much he does for Tari every day. Huge F.

2:12:30I don't know what F means. Oh, like "F to pay respects." I understand. It's a reference from Metal Gear Solid. Okay. I get that. And also Aaron Dzaks. He says, Fox, what kind of digital art or commissioning tools would you most want to build or see first on Ootle?

2:12:53FoxReally, it's the payment systems. It's not really the art I would want to put on the Ootle necessarily. It has more to do with the fact that we just don't have a good way to transact without the banks getting in our way. So the primary thing that matters to me is making sure that artists can create, whether they're creating games, whether they're creating drawings, whether they're creating just whatever they're creating, they shouldn't have to ask permission to do it. And that's what really bothers me about the current system, and it's what drives me to keep working every day on this.

2:13:27Vlad CosteaOkay. That's the short answer.

2:13:30FoxHave I gotten too far away from the mic? Am I real quiet? I have to get closer.

2:13:34Vlad CosteaOh, you're better now. Yeah, so much better. I'll fix it in post anyway.

2:13:39FoxThis is a thing that I keep on going back here, and then I need to remember that I have to get closer to the mic so people can hear me.

2:13:46Vlad CosteaIt's the laws of physics. You got to get close to the mic or someone's ear if you want them to hear you. But yeah, is there anything on Tari that you really like today and you feel like is underappreciated?

2:14:06Marguerite de CourcelleI'll set Fox up for something I've been really impressed with is, as the community just gave the shout out in the chat, we have this super hardcore community that's been brought up, and Fox has been one of the pillars behind that. And there's a lot of other people that are doing some very heavy lifting. So Tari went through this past year, this community takeover. And then people who were there kind of in the wings have decided to pick up the torch. And there's a lot to, I guess, talk about on all those just different things I laid out, but I feel like Fox is the best place to really get into it because he has definitely been such a leader for the entire community and organization.

2:14:54FoxThank you. Yeah, I'd love to talk a bit about how that transition went. So it was several months back, not too long after Fluffy had left the project. I was hanging out in the Tari show and I had been watching the project for a long time and what I had noticed was that although the source was open, there's a way that you run open source communities to get them to interact and grow and commune. And Tari had mostly, even though they were publishing the source open, they were kind of like doing kind of behind closed doors, cloistered work.

2:15:29And I think that this had resulted in them having a difficult time really organizing community work around what they're doing. And I had been active in other open source projects. One of the main ones I work on these days is the Open edX project, which is an online learning management system. And I'm a core contributor for that project. And so I had seen how well organized systems that have like, you know, forums and wikis and people able to communicate with each other over chat, how they can be constructed in such a way that people are able to take stuff and run, and also meet other meet other people that are interested in what they're doing, and have an influence on the project's overall direction proportional to the kind of work they're putting in.

2:16:13And you really want that because you want people to feel rewarded for what they're what they're putting into a project so that they keep on doing it and so that they really become involved in investing in what you're doing. And up until that time, Tari had not set anything up like that. So I spent some time thinking about it and I was like, okay, how about we, how about we figure out how to do a core contributors like how do we make it to where we have the ability for you as a community member who continues contributing to become one of the people that has a strong say in the direction of the project in electing the council in, you know, and get access to things you need to do to make the community move forward to make your job easier, because you're actually the person doing the work, right.

2:16:54So, I wrote up the core contributor program and it was a long process getting everyone kind of on board with like the wording of the con of like the charter for the core contributor program, because everyone, you know, there's a lot of like in the blockchain space especially there's a lot of mistrust right there's a lot of concern about people like, you know, trying to do underhanded tactics and sometimes it's like to the point of like it's ridiculous like how will we even function if we were doing some of the stuff that you seem to think we're going to do or whatever right, but it's real because people have been bitten continually in the past right.

2:17:25So, coming up with a program that was both, you know, that was open that was possible for people to contribute to and which people could get pretty good consensus around was a challenge and important to do. But once we got it out there we got several people on board already as core contributors from the community and I'm one of them now. And then I was part of the initial council selected by Tari Labs. And now, when my term is up, the people who will be voting for me are the other core contributors that have been inducted.

2:17:54So, I don't get a say on like whether I stay or not, ultimately, that's going to be up to the people that I serve as a council member.

2:18:08Vlad CosteaOkay, so let's unpack a bit in the sense that in this space we talk about decentralization and the fact that we don't follow leaders, but on the other hand, we have councils and we have boards and we have people to whom we'll refer as leaders sometimes. So, I guess at some point during the development of projects, we need to sort of step down and just let hand this to the community or whatever and just not have any kind of planning anymore. How far would you say that Tari is from that point?

2:18:46FoxI think we still have a good way to go. We've only actually been doing the community takeover for a few months now. I think this is our third month of being on the council and having the council. But we've already gotten the core contributor program launched. We've already gotten some core contributors onboarded and we've already gotten a release date for the L2. So, we're getting a lot done. But from my perspective, there's still a lot more to do to improve the decentralization of the project. I want more core contributors.

2:19:14I want more people who are able to really take ownership of the project. I want to make sure that we have a consistent budget process for the community tokens, stuff like that. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done before we have the processes and traditions in place to keep running this continually. And where the people who are on the initial council no longer feel like they have to be on the council for it to continue to function. We want to get to that point where anyone who really feels they can take it up has the tools to do so and they're not reinventing the whole wheel from scratch just to do day to day work.

2:19:53Marguerite de CourcelleI would add, though, that, you know, I don't think DAOs have been figured out totally just yet. And I think when I even look back to, you know, when I was helping out on the Decred project back in 2016, 2017, there was always Company Zero, who is the one paying for development. This like, these guys are definitely going to be contributing. And you have the open source group that is somewhat organizing themselves around it. And it was always the dream with their on-chain governance. To at the consensus layer to be able to have that completely decentralized model.

2:20:28And I think I don't even think that they are totally out of that yet. And I still think that there's a lot of work that needs to happen before. And I think, honestly, projects feel more supported when there are these hired companies. Like, isn't it like Blockstream has like, like just the companies behind certain protocols is and then having maybe more of them, you know, these groups that organize. And we've seen that with some, I guess, networks. But having the community being able to come in and be heard and then start driving different directions that get picked up, I think that the most that can happen at this age without getting in our way.

2:21:12Because I still think speed is important and getting having a decision making process that kind of works for everybody right now to get out there and get things launched. And then and then I think it's okay. To like, when it's the right time to move into, I guess, move into like, what does a truly decentralized governance look like that can allow for innovation? I can't, I don't, I mean, like, unless you're Ethereum. And at that level, where, you know, Vitalik is still de facto leader of Ethereum. Like, there's really hard to get out of people just wanting to have faces or leaders to look to.

2:21:52Even if they have like, refused to take the label, they're forced constantly. You know, like, I think, like, Vitalik has really, really tried to get off the conference circuit, and the community refuses it. So, you know, I think people, there's a sense of what works for people. Also, people like having leadership.

2:22:15FoxYeah, I do think that people like to have leadership, not just because it's not like they just need someone to follow so much as like, they want someone to kind of aspire to, they want someone to, you know, projects require a handful of people who are paying more attention than the rest of the group. Because you can't have everyone, anything that's so divided that everyone has equal responsibility is a thing that has no one taking responsibility. Like someone has to take some kind of responsibility. So having a process of how that responsibility is granted, how it is, you know, managed and how it is handed off is important.

2:22:52And I think really, the test of what we're doing here is the inaugural council is how well can we build the community? How well can we build the handoff for the next council that's going to take our place? Because I do think we should have leaders, but I don't think that we should have cult-of-personality-like strangleholds. I think that's dangerous. Or just a lot of them.

2:23:19Marguerite de CourcelleThere's a lot of different personalities. I don't know, like, you know, somebody I miss when I was learning in Bitcoin was Andre. So Andreas Antonopoulos, as a leader in Bitcoin, was my absolute favorite leader. And then when he started to think about Ethereum, he just got absolutely crucified by the Bitcoin community. And then it wasn't as fun for him anymore. He like, and then now he's completely phased out. And he was one of our, like, our best educators. And so I think, like, and he was a personality, I would say, like, and he was one that people like I signed up for his Patreon and went to his meetups, you know, and, like, like, you were saying people to aspire to, like Naveen.

2:24:06Naveen's got that that sort of charisma that I love him around. And it makes it fun for me to want to come and contribute here. And the community, though, one thing I think about with, you know, on the council, like, what, how I'm thinking about is, it seems like we have some serious talent in the community. And so it's not really about me as much as, okay, how do I use my strengths and things that I have in my network or otherwise, to help elevate and support the work that these really talented individuals are doing, and get them to where they're trying to go faster.

2:24:37And so I guess, like, that handoff in helping people get to their next chapter creates your next generation of leaders who will also do the, you know, pulling other people up with them.

2:24:47FoxMy thoughts exactly. That's a that's exactly how I view it. It's like my job as a council member is to make it to where everyone can grow in the community as far as they want to get and, you know, help people build and ship faster. Like the goal should not be to centralize all decision making within the council. The goal is to make it more and more decisions on the ground that people make as they as they do what they want to do.

2:25:16Vlad CosteaWell, yeah, I think that the example of Ethereum that you presented is relevant in the context that this year, they sort of cut down some funding for the foundation. And they decided that a lot of the stuff that they were paying for is unnecessary, and kind of dead weight. And then we saw Bankless, I think, which was a podcast that they have been sponsoring for a long time saying that, well, we sold our Ethereum, we're not supporters anymore. It was fun to watch. Anyway.

2:25:45[unclear speaker]Wow, I didn't know that happened. That's some drama.

2:25:48Vlad CosteaYeah. Yeah. I mean, it's part of the evolution of projects, I guess. They sort of get people on board to make decisions and stuff. I think Zcash is also going through its Ethereum Foundation phase, where they're getting more and more organizations and companies that are joining. And at some point, they will have to cut that because there is not as much need for development or there's not as much need for people to stick around. And that's like the UN problem or the NATO problem more specifically, like these organizations were created with a purpose.

2:26:23I think NATO is more obvious because it was created for the purpose of fighting the Warsaw Pact, which was the USSR and its satellite states. And once the USSR was over, what's the point of having NATO? Well, they constantly reinvented a purpose for the organization. And they said, well, it's to fight terrorism or it's to do this and that. And that's, I guess, a danger, especially when it comes to governments. When it comes to decentralized organizations or whatever that are paying people for doing stuff, it's less dangerous.

2:26:58But still, you're going to attract a lot of rent seekers and guys who don't really do anything and they just expect the next paycheck. And that's a danger. And it's kind of dead weight after a while. You're hiring people, you're getting them on board, and then they don't really provide any value, but they sort of become friends with everyone and it becomes difficult to remove them. And it becomes ugly. On the other hand, I do like that the space is so large and diverse to the point where maybe there are billions of people who don't care about Bitcoin.

2:27:34And if you tried your best defense of Bitcoin or your best, I don't know, like narrative, you're trying to present it to them, they're going to be like, I don't care about that. Why would I want to have a scarce asset or whatever, like the one that's preferred by institutions? But then you present to them something that's more fun that they can mine with a CPU or GPU or something that lets them try stuff that has more to do with their gaming background or whatever. And that's going to attract them.

2:28:07And I think indirectly, they're also going to become interested in Bitcoin, which is part of the adoption process. You join a community at first. I remember I was excited about Steemit at some point and I was like, I think this is the future of social media. You're going to be able to upvote posts and they're going to get paid for their contributions and you control your content. And I remember at some point I posted on Facebook, I'm leaving Facebook, goodbye, you'll see me on Steemit. If you want to talk to me, you got to sign up to Steemit.

2:28:39In hindsight, that was silly, but I did believe that it was the future, right?

2:28:47Marguerite de CourcelleI was there for that. Yeah, that was fun. I feel like the next generation, what was that app that came out this last cycle that was like another social media app? No, no, it was crypto. What did you say? Kaito? No, it was very Ethereum, I would say, focused, but it had a token and you were doing a lot of this. It was more like a Twitter platform, but very much reminded me of like the Steemit days, but a different version.

2:29:17And I think that whole project has closed down now also.

2:29:21Vlad CosteaSounds like Twetch, which is what the BSV guys are doing. Oh, yeah, a clone of Twitter, except that every message gets posted on-chain, which is very stupid. But they like it. They use it.

2:29:36Marguerite de CourcelleYeah, I mean, I think they've yet to see any sort of social media hub really take off. That's a crypto like first social media hub, except for like through channels like Telegram, where you have rails for crypto. I would be interested to see if X now with the money, if their new onboarding, you know, like how you can have your X money if there's going to ever become a crypto rail for that, because I think that would be super. If you remember, like back in the day when I was doing marketing stuff, we used to be able to send crypto directly to people just directly on Twitter through tweets.

2:30:17Vlad CosteaOh, yeah, we had bots that were doing that. And you would tag the bot and be like, send this amount to this person.

2:30:23Marguerite de CourcelleMake it rain. And do you remember, like, I think it was like a Dogeparty bot too, and like there was a Pinkcoin tip bot and like, you could make it really do it. It was just fun. Like, there was just so much fun. And the way you could spam people into their crypto into their lives to like, like, just bring them on was easier. And then I don't know, it felt like then when it became more serious, everybody thinks about it more seriously when it still is.

2:30:46It still has a very playful way to adopt people. So it would be great if X anyways brought that up. But I...

2:30:53Vlad CosteaI think right now you can put your Bitcoin and Ethereum address in your extended description. I think I have that.

2:31:02Go to profile. And then I'm not sure exactly where. But there used to be a feature where you would add your Bitcoin address for people to see. I put my Counterparty address in there. That's still a thing. I have Rare Pepes.

2:31:20Marguerite de CourcelleIsn't it too bad that those assets... OK, so you would have thought that those assets would have ever had their day. And like, nobody really went. Yeah. Counterparty never really had its asset moment.

2:31:32Vlad CosteaIt did sort of. So during the NFT mania, for some reason, they started out with these Bored Apes, whatever, CryptoPunks. And then they sort of started this race of finding like the original NFTs, like the oldest ones, the older, the better. So they came around and they found the Rare Pepes and they found I think the first asset on Counterparty was called test. And they were very much searching for that one. There was also like a collection of Japanese model pictures that was posted on Counterparty, which was promotional for I don't know exactly what, but it was kind of popular.

2:32:15And then it all went to Namecoin, which is the original altcoin. Satoshi

2:32:20sort of co-founded that one, gave some input. And you basically had to buy for a certain amount of time your domains. And there were some assets that were created there, except that the domains expired. So they were searching for ways to be able to recover them. It was crazy. Like, I think that was sort of the top of the market when people were looking for the oldest ones because they thought they were going to be more valuable. And they started opening museums around the world. But these NFTs and then the most ridiculous moment was with the Bored Ape Yacht Club or something, which was just the Bored Ape, except that it had like a designated purpose of making you rich and rich people bought them.

2:33:06Marguerite de CourcelleAnd this sort of worked. Really clear marketing, right? I mean, you can't like, if you're bored... Yeah, I even went, I think around the time where after COVID, we had this, some of the boom happening and I was living in New York City and they had a legitimate yacht that you would onboard with your proof of PFP. You got on the Bored Ape Yacht Club yacht. But I was going to say, like back in the day with Counterparty, I had, I did some of the first token controlled access work for some of the puzzles and games we did.

2:33:39So if you, we created a Venn system where if you completed the right step, then you were issued your key and then you would get access to the next level. So it was this whole forum that was token controlled access space. You would get the next information and you'd be able to go continue down the treasure hunt. And we were trying to recover. We're like, oh man, we have so many of these Counterparty assets. Where are they? And like similar to other people, it was just stuff that had been toys that we hadn't been like, oh, I should definitely keep these.

2:34:12But I never had my CryptoKitty pump moment either. And that was one of the first, you would think that it's just, it's just interesting how the community organizes around projects and they're the ones that decide what's going to be successful. It really comes down to the communities that are there. More so than, I guess, technologies by themselves are not that interesting if they don't have a community there embracing them.

2:34:39Vlad CosteaI think the most ridiculous part of the NFT mania was when you had VCs that were browsing on OpenSea, just looking for the next big collection. They're looking for very cheap stuff that they could flip for more money.

2:34:56Marguerite de CourcelleYes. Well, that's usually when you know. And VCs are always a little bit like that anyway. They always try to present like they're serious people that are bringing the next generation of real technologies forward. And they do do a lot of that work. That is true. But there's a lot of degeneracy that they are doing behind the scene just because it's greed. And greed is, like even when we in our space had the blockchain gaming for a minute, we thought that was going to be big.

2:35:28And Gala Games and some of these other big projects come in and they raise hundreds of millions of dollars. And if you were somebody that was grassroots, had been in the space and you've fundraised and let's say you raised five million and you thought that was really good, then all of a sudden you have like these legends come into the space and raise hundreds of millions of dollars. And then they have this idea of building out incredible studio token and blockchain ecosystem all at the same time.

2:35:53You knew as somebody that's been in the space that that has a high chance of failure. But that is what people are betting on is that like that five to 10 percent chance that they actually pull it off. You think you're going to have these massive returns. So anyways, it was always sad to see those big investments fail, though, because then the VCs always got burned on the people that were truly trying to build something innovative that came up through the space and getting money then later became a lot harder because they were like, no, I already bet on the best and they couldn't do it.

2:36:25Therefore, nobody can do it.

2:36:28Vlad CosteaHave you heard of the game Infinite Fleet?

2:36:32Marguerite de CourcelleIt sounds familiar.

2:36:36Vlad CosteaIt's actually so in the Bitcoin space and especially the Bitcoin maximalists, they like to brag that they're honorable and principled and they don't scam other people. But this one was made by Samson Mow and his team.

2:36:52Marguerite de CourcelleOh, yes, I do remember this.

2:36:54Vlad CosteaHe was selling in-game assets as NFTs on Liquid, which is the federation built by Blockstream, and the game never really delivered. I'm not even sure if it's released. There are some trailers. I just looked it up.

2:37:10Marguerite de CourcelleI remember they did put out a good trailer. I do remember that. Yeah, so what happened? Did they never ship it?

2:37:16Vlad CosteaI don't know, or maybe that they shipped it and it sucks because Samson used to work for Ubisoft and that's another connection that we have with the video game industry. I shouldn't have compared it to, but Hal Finney also worked on some Atari games before he worked on PGP, which was his big cypherpunk project. There are so many connections with the video game industry, but Samson used to work at Ubisoft and he said at some point that he hired some Ubisoft developers to work on his game.

2:37:51Yeah. I guess Infinite Fleet sucks. Let me search for some reviews. I guess he had enough of a budget for that.

2:38:02Marguerite de CourcelleIn saying that game, you reminded me of EVE Online. If you've never had Hilmar or spoken with Hilmar before, the CEO, he definitely looks like a Viking. He comes from Viking land and he has a big red beard and he's a huge guy. Anyways, this very small startup went and made this AAA game and they had been astrophysicists and they just got together and decided they were going to make this massive multiplayer online space game. I feel like Samson Mow's game was inspired by EVE Online, if I remember. Anyways, Hilmar is a cool dude and we tried really hard to get him to bring NFTs into his game because he had this very, very deep game economy and that it would be super cool to own your own assets in game.

2:38:54And so he was actually making a version of a game and I don't know how far it got, but it was a crypto-backed type of fork of EVE Online. And I feel like if someone was going to pull that off, it would have been him because of how he's so smart and just this hardcore nerd. So I don't know. I think those problems are hard to get to pull it all together and get it right. And I think it's easy to get tripped up too over small problems.

2:39:25Like even if you can't even get a good multiplayer experience, then you've already lost, right? And if you can't hit scale in the basic things.

2:39:35Vlad CosteaIt's funny because I've had a similar conversation with John Romero, one of the creators of Doom, and I have like a connection to him because he used to be married with a lady from Romania and I'm Romanian. So he visited my country in the 90s and sort of has like some sort of nostalgia for her. I don't know. Oh, I have no idea why but he answered to my emails and I tried to pitch him this idea of having some sort of NFTs and in-game assets to allow the players to get paid for winning at the game, basically.

2:40:13And I think his answer was along the lines of well, it's very hard to distinguish from gambling if you're gonna have players that win and others that lose if they have some sort of prize that they put together. And secondly, he doesn't understand why this can't be US dollars. Like, of course, he was like, there's too much friction. And the other argument, which I guess he was right here, is that most people don't play for money. They just play for fun. And once you introduce money as an incentive, it becomes less fun.

2:40:50Marguerite de CourcelleOkay, so on that point though, I was thinking about this recently and I would say though, like my crypto puzzles that we did and put out along the way, people would go and walk through those experiences and at the end, even if they didn't win, a lot of them felt like they picked up education or new friends had felt brought into a new community. They definitely had new skills and the vibe afterwards was generally a really positive one, which allowed me to continue to go on and continue to make them.

2:41:22So I had thought like does bringing in the money to the art experience, does that like ruin the art? Does it make it, you know, less than what it would have otherwise been, because you're basically incentivizing people to care about your art experience that you have put together. And I was also thinking about what you just said about how like it does feel like the minute you introduce these incentives into the game loop, that it becomes a grind and it's no longer really worth it. Anyone who's done a really grindy game knows that like that can really suck and then the fun starts to bleed away and you don't want to go back anymore because now it feels like a job.

2:42:02And so like I do think there's a middle ground there and where I think that space lives is in the puzzle example, it's a more of a choose your own adventure where you as the player isn't put through a specific path, but the paths have enough flexibility or a way for you to somewhat be the author of your own experience. And how you're getting to the end. And I think that's a little bit of the difference. I think like when you're walking someone's path very, very specifically that that it loses your, like where you're contributing.

2:42:40Like how are you contributing your genius and how does that fit into the story? So I think there's a space, I don't know how big it is, but there's a space where people can be incentivized and have fun and make money at the end and still continue to grow in a healthy capacity.

2:42:57FoxI mean, it's worth noting even like local game clubs will have contests locally. Right. And you can win prize money for that. It's not often a lot. I mean, you're not playing the professional leagues, but you'll go in because it's kind of fun to imagine winning it. And, you know, sometimes you do maybe, especially if you've been practicing.

2:43:17Marguerite de CourcelleYeah. And like Magic: The Gathering tournaments, right? Don't you play for money with those too?

2:43:21FoxI think some people do. Yeah. I would even think just like your local golf tournament. Like my dad goes on golf trips all the time to do his like club stuff. And he often wins a game or two and has some cash he gets.

2:43:35Marguerite de CourcelleYeah, I do think that there is more flexibility around organized tournaments in general and how they're structured. But anyways, well, I'm going to have... Vlad, my kids are about to burst in on me any second from getting off after school. So I don't know if I...

2:43:53FoxHe's screaming behind the door right now. He wants in.

2:43:58Vlad CosteaLet him in. Show us your cat.

2:44:04But yeah, this was a very fun conversation. I did not expect for us to have so much in common, which is weird. What did you think? What did you think this was going to be? I don't know. Just talking about Tari's stuff, reminiscing about the days when Fluffypony was involved and now he's not around anymore. He was on my podcast in February and I think our interview ended because he had to go. And I was like, oh, we didn't even talk about Tari, which in hindsight could have been interesting because this was before he left the project.

2:44:39But maybe that his mind was already elsewhere. I don't know, because he hasn't mentioned it during the interview. Yeah. What's your cat's name, Mr. Fox?

2:44:50FoxHis name is Hunter

2:44:51Vlad CosteaHunter.

2:44:55FoxHe's a silly orange boy.

2:44:57Vlad CosteaI have a tuxedo cat.

2:45:02Marguerite de CourcelleOh, that sounds pretty. Where's he at?

2:45:06Vlad CosteaOutside, because I don't like him. So usually when he wants attention and he sees me sitting for too long, he jumps on my keyboard. And that's the way that I know that he either wants food or he wants outside or he wants to play. Maybe I should get him one of these boxes or buttons, whatever, that he can press. So I know exactly what he wants. But he's smart. His name is Salieri.

2:45:32So from a video game, actually, there is a video game called Mafia from 2002. Yeah. And you play as a character whose name is Tommy D'Angelo or Angelo. I'm not sure. But the mafia family with which you're working is called the Salieri family. And the others, the rivals are Morello. So if I ever get a second cat, that's going to be Morello. But he sort of looks like Sylvester from the cartoons from Warner Brothers.

2:46:07Sufferin' succotash.

2:46:13Marguerite de CourcelleWell, yeah, I didn't get to make you I was going to make you a little mini game for your website. And because I got sucked down that new platform I was telling you about, I'm really hoping I'm actually going to have a game to publish here in a little bit when I'm not doing work. But I still it'd be fun to send you maybe some sort of themed crypto game to get there on your website for a big thank you for having us on.

2:46:42Vlad CosteaOh, no worries. Take your time. If you don't deliver it, it's still fine. In this space, it's quite normal to promise stuff and deliver. No offense. OK, this was mean. But yeah, I look forward to seeing what's happening with Tari. I do like that the people behind the project are creative and creatives. So it's something that you don't see too much. Like I'm aware of other projects in the space that do the same thing, more or less like not with the layer two, but they still there is Beam, which is a Mimblewimble implementation that does tokens and Ethereum stuff.

2:47:24There's Zano, which is the same codebase as Monero, and it does tokens, but they don't have as many creatives. So if you're able to come up with the new cool use case, and I think this goes all the way back to Fluffypony, who said in 2019, if I'm not mistaken, that the next big use case is going to be movie tickets and event tickets. And if Normies start using private currencies for this, they're going to be like attracted to using Monero or something else that has privacy and they're not going to go back to using something that doesn't have privacy.

2:48:05So maybe you're going to be the Trojan horse. I sure hope so. It's a difficult job and you took on a huge responsibility and you basically have to deliver what other people promised they were going to deliver before they left. That sucks.

2:48:21Marguerite de CourcelleWell, I don't know if you think about it too, though, something Naveen pointed out was that a lot of the developers, the people who have built Tari and who are responsible for building the Ootle are still here. So Fluffy didn't actually contribute to much of the codebase or the team is still here. And so it's a change of that leadership thing that we were talking about before, but the project itself is moving on. And maybe, you know, probably for the better because Fluffy is such a big personality, it gives a lot of room for the other people to have their moment.

2:48:59FoxAnd I would also note that in the life cycle of a company, a project or anything, the leaders that get you up to a certain point are not often the leaders you need for the next point of what your project is doing.

2:49:14There are people who are really good at the very beginning, people who are good at transitioning it to its long term role. There are people who are good at like guiding it to its close. Wherever your project is at, it usually needs a different kind of leader for that time in its life.

2:49:30Vlad CosteaYeah, sort of like Gavin in Bitcoin, like he was the right person at the right time. Then he got phased out when he was becoming more... authoritarian, should I say.

2:49:43Marguerite de CourcelleI'm still sad about that one, though. He was a good dude.

2:49:48Vlad CosteaHe is, yeah. I wish I would get him on my podcast, like him and Bitcoin Belle and Mike Hearn and Nick Szabo, they're like people I would really want to get, and also Andreas, but I know he doesn't do interviews anymore.

2:50:03Marguerite de CourcelleI might know Bitcoin Belle still. We used to be friends. I could maybe get you her if I could try.

2:50:09Vlad CosteaI mean, I contacted her a few times, and the last time I spoke with her, she said, well, I'm only going to join if you read my book. That's kind of like a hard requirement. How long is your book? It was like 300 pages. And it's not like a technical book where you just read what you need at that time. It's literature. It's a novel, so you have to read from cover to cover to understand what's going on. So that's why it never happened. Maybe I was lazy.

2:50:43I admit, but it felt like too much work for doing an interview, and then I was going to ask her questions about the novel. I don't know. It felt weird. But yeah, she's one of the OGs. She's one of the people who preached and practiced this whole living without banks lifestyle. She never held any coin. She was selling everything to not touch the US dollar, which is amazing.

2:51:15Marguerite de CourcelleAnd is she still on X? Because like, I'm not seeing her account here anymore.

2:51:24Vlad CosteaNo, she sort of appears and disappears sometimes. She's really good at picking fights for some reason. I don't know why. Maybe she enjoys it.

2:51:37FoxShe was really doing the uphill thing the entire time, so that would make sense.

2:51:45Vlad CosteaYeah, so last question. Why do you think it took so much for Tari to get shipped? And maybe you're the wrong person to answer it, but how long do you think it's going to take for the L2 that you're launching to really take off and have its cool use case that makes us join the network just because we want to be a part of this movement?

2:52:07FoxI can't speak to the history of the project that far back. I know there was a lot of talk about experiments and side projects to figure out how to do different things with it and then not all panning out and then coming back to the drawing board a few times. That's the general sense I got for it. But I know for the L2, the fact we're shipping, we stuck a stake in the ground and said November 11th. I don't think this project has ever had a due date like that before. I don't think it ever broadcasted one like that before. And I think that's a feature of the Council really knuckling down and saying, OK, we're going to ship.

2:52:42And I think that with that attitude and with the continuing growing of the community, it won't take us long to find something that you're interested in.

2:52:49Marguerite de CourcelleWell, and I would say that I've launched a few things before, whether it's a puzzle or a product. A lot of times successful, but like Fox just said, under the gun like this, you never know. Never know what's going to stick and hit. But I do feel like there are some opportunities here, and I'm doing a community call in the morning for initial feedback that then I'm hoping to open up to the broader community as far as some stuff I've been working on and hoping that they'll be excited about.

2:53:18But a lot of this stuff is stuff that I can't build by just myself. So I've put some building blocks in place and I've put some ideas and concepts in place and I have some working MVP. But I have to get community buy-in to actually see some of this stuff get over the line because we're not in the sort of bull money era day anymore where all of us have all this money to fly. This is people working because they're passionate and they want to see these things come to life.

2:53:52So I think if we do our jobs right, you're going to hear about us. We should be on your feeds and you're going to hear about us and we're going to be bringing you in to something hopefully that's a new experience you've never had before. And maybe even revitalize how you feel about blockchain projects because I think a lot of the soul has been sucked out of the space in different areas. And I definitely want to bring back that love end-to-end, like we were saying, mining to crypto to onboard to creativity, community, open source, and just breathe some fresh into the space.

2:54:30Vlad CosteaI like that. So how can people follow you and how can people start mining today?

2:54:38FoxIf you want to start mining today, go to tari.com. You can hit the download button, grab yourself a copy of Tari Universe and push the start mining button. You're good to go. If you want to get involved, the website also has the links to our Discord, our forum, our Telegram channel. They're all worth joining. Lots of cool people doing cool stuff. Come join us. You can be one of them.

2:55:01Marguerite de CourcelleThe Discord too. Like, come into the Discord and you'll find all of us there and we have a lot of people very highly engaged. So if people want to come and contribute or help build or kind of check stuff out, just drop into the Discord or Telegram too.

2:55:19Vlad CosteaOkay. Thank you very much, Mr. Fox and Marguerite. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to seeing what you're shipping. Let's see the layer two. Let's see what kind of projects are going to get built.

2:55:34Marguerite de CourcelleAppreciate it. And thanks Vlad for entertaining us. Yeah.

2:55:40Vlad CosteaEven your cat said hello or something or bye.

2:55:46Okay. Goodbye.