Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en we just retrace this story right so you do basis you you have this idea for a stable coin you end up giving back the money when you decide it’s not going to work you um this new new idea for for a decentralized social network you raise some money from legit hitters other people pile in like you’re saying it’s all pretty quote unquote fair which is that we’re all owning the same thing and um and then you get to the point of the launch you’re you decide to be anonymous you try to go the satoshi route um but it doesn’t work why didn’t that why’d you want to do that and why didn’t that work too many people yeah well so yeah so basically you know been working on this blockchain the diesel blockchain for almost two years and uh we were like hey you know we should really launch kind of a prototype app to start testing it like in the in the field so to speak and that was bitcloud um and we wanted to you know not really like have it go mainstream until at least like the middle of this year like the middle of 2021 um and so but you know we obviously launching earlier is better and so we kind of accelerated said okay in march we’re going to start sharing these like password protected links with some people just get a few hundred users kind of see how the blockchain is holding up with like this kind of activity uh and so um yeah so so what ended up happening was uh it it you know kind of went out of control and the links got like way over shared um and to the point where i kind of had to go out there uh you know i had to start you know saying hey like this is what this is and and this is like you know what’s going on uh but um for me personally you know i’ve always been really i think i’ve always admired how like satoshi kind of like launched bitcoin um without creating kind of like a centralized person that everyone kind of relies on or like this is our you know our guy um so it was really i wanted to kind of do the same thing there uh and so i launched with you know uh pseudonym diamond hands um and immediately you know it was kind of very hard to get press it was hard to get people to kind of listen to the story that that is the real story versus making up their own uh and so we had a lot of uh press saying hey like this is a scam and by the way because it was just a prototype there were a lot of things were missing so you couldn’t cash out your money you and i was like wait a minute so you’re telling me that there’s a website that you invest money in you don’t know who made it it doesn’t work a lot of the times and you can’t get the money out right and he’s like yeah i was like oh okay got it just making sure we’re on the same page here yeah right rightfully so uh any any other time i would say that’s a complete scam also none of the code was open so even though it’s a blockchain and it was running on a few dozen nodes like no one could actually audit it or be like hey this is a real thing uh so we were just not prepared at all let me let me tell you something there was a whole bunch of criticisms like what you’re talking about right the code is not open source you can’t cash out oh they scraped our twitter profiles um oh there’s you know there’s a big pre-buy people got in super cheap uh you know all this stuff there was all these criticisms of it we don’t know who the founders are you know they’re kind of anonymous but my theory and you tell i want to know what you think about this so i have this phrase which is i think emotion commits the crime and then logic does the cover-up so all these logical complaints i don’t think are the real reason why people were so like up in arms about this new project that actually is like a really net like it would if something like this existed it would be a huge net positive in the world and those same people hate facebook well this is the antidote if something like this could actually get off the ground and work and so um i was surprised that the emotion was there and i think i at least this is my theory i think that people don’t like when someone gets rich without quote unquote earning it and i think what people saw is that the insiders so the people who created it or maybe the early buyers they bought so early on the bonding curve they got so early on and wow 100 million dollars has come into this thing these coins have run up in price or the profiles of going up in price and there was this feeling like like i don’t know i don’t know how well you did but here’s my guess i think you’ve made tens of millions of dollars already liquid without at the minimum and your project is like under 10 000 dau or something like that right so uh or under 50 000 let’s say so like in already in the tech world this tech gets backlash because people will raise at like 100 million dollar evaluation and people are like oh i’ve been running this restaurant and laundromat for years and how does this little app with you know with with no business model be worth 100 million dollars right there’s already people who get upset about that but but the one saving grace is that they’re not liquid so it’s not like the founders running around in a lambo living in a mansion in l.a but in crypto you’re liquid too so you you get the early hype and you get the liquidity of the lambo and the mansion and i think that that is actually what triggers people about crypto in general bitcoin in general you know people who buy an nft and they get rich you know they make a million dollars off this random image um to i think to other people that feels inherently unfair and so do you what do you think is my theory what do you think of my theory and then what’s your kind of response to the people who do feel that way i think there must be some like validity to your theory because if you read there’s a great book called the infinite machine about ethereum and it catalogs like what happened ethereum how it launched all this stuff they got major backlash from bitcoin people because of the way they raised money where they were like hey like you know projects aren’t supposed to like take bitcoin for you know another coin like you know this is like bad i mean i read that book right after you know kind of everything that was happening with bitcloud and i was like this is eerily similar um so so i think part of part of what you’re saying has to be part like like a factor um you know dude look that said you know since then diesel is listed on exchanges you can trade it on blockchain.com ascendex and a really big one you know a couple big ones are coming soon and you know like the code is all open and people have gotten really passionate about it um you know contributing to it the last couple people we’ve hired are like open source like they were just contributing to and we hired them so i think that um you know if i saw someone who’s very clearly a scammer making lots of money i would be upset in a way that i would be i wouldn’t be as upset if i felt like there was a shred of them not being a scammer which we didn’t have because i was anonymous you couldn’t cash out the app was going down a lot um so uh whatever whatever theory there is is probably exacerbated [Music] you