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Greg Meredith discusses the implications of proof of stake economics with Isaac DeFrain and Steve Ross-Talbot.

Transcript

Greg: Today’s topic is proof of stake economics because I think a lot of of people haven’t really thought through the proof of stake economics and what it implies. Even Vlad has not actually thought through the macroeconomics of proof of stake. What’s going to make proof of stake actually work and how that dictates the market that we have to go into. The argumentation is really pretty clear and it is mathematical, but it’s mostly arithmetic. It’s not this crazy category theory that Mike and I have been slinging for the last seven or eight years now.

The first piece of the argument that we’re making is—and this really important to grasp from the outset—is that proof of stake requires a much larger volume of transactions. This is basically because you don’t have, you miners minting coins, and you don’t necessarily have the same kind of token appreciation or the same kind of token appreciation dynamics. And then the other piece of this that is specific to the current market as opposed to the protocol is that you have all of these entities that are already wedded to proof of work and that have made large-scale infrastructure investments that don’t necessarily lend themselves to other kinds of protocols. So you have all these people that have invested tens or hundreds of millions in special purpose hardware that is not necessarily easily repurposed to anything else.

Isaac: As you’re talking about that, I’m thinking of like the oil industry and how there’s been a lot of pressure to move towards like renewable energy, but the powers that be have built this infrastructure to produce the energy they’re producing and they have no interest in it. I feel it’s pretty similar in that regard.

Greg: Well, that’s a very good analogy. Especially when you extend the analogy: there’s highways and gas stations and all kinds of infrastructure. It goes pretty deep. That also has implications for supply chain management and logistics. So all of these industries are interwoven in a particular way. It’s very hard to move the needle, to get people to move over in a particular way. Since we’ve got Steve on the call, I just want to see if that lands for you, Steve. Is that making sense to you?

Steve: Yes it is. I mean, just a little interjection. I had this bizarre experience early in January, where the University of the Third Age, as it is called in the UK, which is really university for people that are retired. My dad’s in it and he’s 88. They asked me to do a talk on blockchain; the science and technology. I go in there and obviously, I’m old enough to be their son, all of them. I walk them through some of the hidden economics in the world as public blockchains. What was really interesting in my investigations into this was I looked at some public data about the bitcoin blockchain: number of transactions per second, and some anecdotal evidence that people have often said that every day bitcoin’s blockchain uses the same amount of energy as the entire island of Ireland.

So I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be a good idea to put a number on that and look at actually what’s the hidden cost that we can calculate without thinking about the environmental aspects? Just the hidden cost of all the electricity spent across all the miners, because that’s who actually pays for it. For every transaction that’s not the block, but for every transaction that you do on bitcoin, the actual costs that you don’t see is just shy of $10.

When you start thinking about proof of stake economics and you start thinking about, well if people want to transact and swap value, and they want to use some digital means to do that, then whatever they use to do that, the cost from our perspective as trying to change how blockchains work, the benchmark has got to be less than $10. Now I know it’s a lot less than $10, but when you start putting that number out there, $10 per transaction with bitcoin, and then you look at proof of stake and RChain. When you say those words, I think then people start to think, oh hang on a minute, maybe these guys that are using proof of stake over at RChain have got something really quite important here, just as a utility. It’s kind of interesting that you raised the topic of proof of stake economics because it’s set in a backdrop where proof of work solutions that are public have a hidden cost that nobody dares talk about. And that doesn’t include the environmental impact of the transaction.

Isaac: Right. Wow. $10 a transaction. That’s crazy.

Steve: You wouldn’t go to the bank and pay ten bucks for me to send you money, would you Greg, you’d say, “you’re out of money.” Yet, everyone that’s doing a transaction with bitcoin, the miners are the ones who are spinning, they don’t see it as a big number, but if you add it all up and aggregate it, apparently that’s kind of what it’s looking like.

Greg: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, your analysis is in many ways is trying to get closer to the actual cost of transactions, if I’ve understood you correctly. Being more inclusive in terms of the way we cost our transactions. That’s exactly the right kind of analysis that has to be done in my opinion. But I think that that lines up with the next step in the argument that I’m making, which is that the nice thing about proof of stake is that it lines up with the market requirements in order to move people from proof of work over to proof of stake. In order to move people over, you have to have a much greater volume of transactions.

What we’re seeing with the proof of stake algorithms is that they support a much greater volume of transactions. This is important, but then the other side of it is that you have to lower the fees of transactions. This was becoming clear to me by the end of 2016 as I started talking to people who are considering real-world dApps. For example, could you do identity doubts for something at the scale of an entire nation-state where you do have these massive transaction volumes and you need to make it cost out in such a way that whoever is supporting that transaction load in terms of server infrastructure and software infrastructure can get a profit after the transaction fees.

The transaction fees are prohibited. You only have so much money that you can spend out of the space. For example, if the government is supporting these identity-based transactions, there’s really a cap on the amount of dollars that can be spent, and if all of it’s eaten up and transaction fees, then it’s a no go. You’ve just eliminated that entire market. If you go and do each market analysis, what you discover is that you have to drop the transaction fees at least as measured by the Ethereum network or the bitcoin network by two orders of magnitude to get even close to the kinds of market at scale that we’d like to see. But there’s nice economics here. If we can, in our first leap, we can get to about three orders of magnitude greater transaction volume, but we only have to draw the transaction fees by two orders of magnitude, then we can attract the miners who have now become validators.

We can attract that market because they can now get 10x on what they were seeing before. If a miner was seeing on the order of $1 million a week in transaction fees, because they’re getting three orders of magnitude—in other words, a thousand times more transaction volume—but they’re only charging 1% of the transaction fees, they’re now getting a 10x or $10 million per week take off of the transaction fees. That’s good economics. That’s more or less the kind of economics, the kind of back of the envelope scale that you have to have if you’re going to move people off of their vested infrastructure. You basically need a 10 x improvement to attract economic interest.

This is just standard VC kind of stuff. If a VC is going to put money into your project and accept the risk, they need to see a 10 x return over a period of time. So the numbers line up almost perfectly. This is the next step in a chain of reasoning that gets us to a particular market approach. That’s a lot to take in. I just want to stop there and see, Isaac and Steve, does that make sense to you as an argument?

Isaac: Yeah, certainly. As you were saying, people have invested lots of money to build an infrastructure to mine, say, bitcoin for example, or Ethereum, so you have to give them the right incentives to make them want to switch over. A promise of 10x on their profits is highly desirable.

Steve: In my simplistic view of all this, I started looking, because I had to talk to the University of Third Age, I had to talk to them about volatility. They all asked me for investment advice. Of course, I did tell them, “Don’t also me for investment advice. I’m the last person you should ask on the planet.” Nevertheless, I told them a little bit about why I felt that cryptocurrencies, in particular, are very volatile. We all hear that it said from financial services companies, it’s a currency with no assets so it can go to zero. It’s actually not true that it’s not an asset. It starts off with very little asset, but the asset grows as the transaction volumes rise.

The higher the transaction volumes at any one second—so looking at that rate of transactions—the more valuable, ultimately, the backing behind the currency becomes. And so the currency itself, the token, has a higher impeded value as a result because the asset is seen as important. Now when you’re the Bank of England, you’ve got gold; when you’re the Federal Reserve, you’ve got gold, all these other assets. But when you’re a blockchain with a crypto token that’s representing value, the only asset you have is how popular you are. And the only measure of that popularity that actually makes commercial sense and fiscal sense, is actually the volume of the transactions. So you can actually see why it’s not just about the previous state needing larger volumes of transactions.

Actually, the argument’s bigger. Blockchain as a whole needs to stabilize. And the only way it can stabilize is to increase the total volume of transactions, so that when we look at the token and we say, well, what’s the probability of that token being worth zero (like all the tokens get stolen overnight), it’s a very low probability, in the same way that when we look at the dollar or the pound and we say what’s the probability of the asset being stolen overnight (or stopping overnight), we’re going to zero value overnight is also a very low probability.

There’s a threshold. The issue for the previous incarnations of in the crypto world and the fact that they can’t do the volumes of transactions is precisely why you have volatility. The proof of stake and the concurrency, which is built into RChain, addresses that concern. If we’re right in our thinking economically, then it will stabilize the entire market, not just with RChain, but anyone else seeking to increase that volume of transactions. The discussion about proof of stake economics and the need for large volumes of transactions is not just about proof of stake. This is about the whole blockchain space. I just think we’re at the head of it.

Greg: You know Steve, you are absolutely spot on this. I’m so glad you made that point. That is a really good point. It lines up with the next series of points that I want to make.

Steve: I didn’t rehearse any of this by the way.

Greg: That’s the of the magic of RChain, right? It’s like the magic of RChain is that we are following the wave of the inevitable. We’re not doing anything that isn’t basically completely dictated by necessity. If you sit down and you do the math, you do the argumentation, there’s just a bunch of necessary steps that have to be taken. And it’s actually worthwhile to go into that math and become aware of what is necessary in order for the operation to be viable.

You just pointed out something that is a part of the necessary elements of the landscape. Building on your point, if we take it as stipulated that transaction volume is also directly correlated to the volatility of the token, then the next step is: if you have a market that is high-risk, in the sense that if you draw one, two, three transactions on the floor, then the transaction volume is at risk of going away precipitously, then it becomes absolutely clear how you have to go to market. To put some more color on this, if you try to go after, for example, air traffic control, and you drop one transaction on the floor and the plane crashes, people will run screaming from your platform. There will be no forgiveness because there was a loss of human life. So as a result, you can’t go after markets that have that kind of risk profile.

So you eliminate any markets that have to do with a loss of human life. You eliminate any markets that have to do with a loss of high dollar values, trillions to billions, possibly even down to millions. Those markets are a no go in terms of your first go to market. Why? Because we know that the first iteration of the software, it is quite likely that despite all of our best efforts for quality control, there will be bugs. In some sense, this is just the wisdom that we got from Web 2.0. Very, very few people were going to run screaming to the courts if a Facebook post didn’t make it or got deleted accidentally or anything like that. Very, very few people are going to run screaming to the courts about their Snapchat posts or their song’s going missing, or anything like that.

The distribution of low-risk digital assets is a very natural thing to do and was essentially the building blocks for Web 2.0 for companies like Google and Facebook and others to roll out a global scale infrastructure. And then, having proven it out at scale and ironed out all the kinks, go after higher and higher risk markets. This is a tried and true approach to the market that we’ve seen Apple use and Google use and Facebook use. There’s nothing surprising, nothing weird about first going after global scale on low-risk digital assets.

Once you’ve proven it out—you’ve seen five years of operation with no serious hiccups—then you can consider other kinds of markets, higher-risk markets such as supply chain management or even higher risk markets, like global finance. So let, let me stop there and make sure that that line of argumentation makes sense to both of you.

Steve: Yeah, that makes sense.

Isaac: I’ve heard you talk a little bit about this topic before. I think it was an interview you did became president of RChain. You were talking about how we had made a mistake in immediately applying bitcoin to world finances and trying to take over the financial system, or overhaul it rather. Maybe instead we should have had an app for like a dating site or something along those lines, where you can actually use some of the features of the blockchain, but maybe a little lower stakes then like billion-dollar financial transactions. Absolutely, that makes sense.

Steve: Yeah, makes sense to me too. I remember you talking in a similar way at RCon in Berlin. Because I suppose that’s because I’ve been in RChain Europe all this time as well. They were talking about decentralization and social structures and how we work together as human beings. My thoughts always turned to the visionary statements on the front page of the RChain website. We’re all mad enough to think that we’re contributing somehow to save the world, which is kind of what pretty much everyone I know is trying to do. You’re kind of thinking about how do you roll it out. Where should the validators be? If I could wave a magic wand and have enough validators and do it in a particular locale. So if I just pick the UK, I’d love to be able to offer an alternative to every single community that has its own coinage.

I know they have this in America too. We have the Lewes pound, and there’s the Totnes pound. There are lots of communities that are very cooperative in nature and they do exchange value. If you go to Findhorn, which I know Greg’s been to, there’s a Facebook page where people are exchanging value all the time, every day. It may be to get a lift, but it’s a value exchange. Whatever it is, it’s a value exchange and it’s remembered. What gets really interesting is how you get those communities to talk communities near them. So if you’re trading fruit and vegetables, you’re not going to be doing it over a thousand miles. You’re going to do it with the co-op nearest to you. One of the most interesting prospects, once main net is live and we’ve kicked the tires on it, is to be able to go and visit a number of those cooperatives, understand how they’re structured, and see if we can make it super easy for them to plug in as a validator.

So each one owning a validator. So it’s a bit like validator pool in Florida but centered around this notion of people wanting to work a different way in terms of fair value exchange. You imagine what would happen if we could get enough of them so that those validator nodes start to talk to each other. They’re joining a mesh, and they’re co-owning it with everybody else. The problem with banks; there are two problems with banks. First of all, what we would do with, from RChain’s perspective, once we’re able to compete on that level, is it’s very disruptive because an awful lot of the money they get right now is about being the intermediary. So they then have to look for what is it they have to do to stay alive. There must be other financial products.

And that gets quite challenging because insurance could be crowdfunded and all sorts of other things. So it’s starting to make them uncomfortable. Part of the reason for talking about this now, co-ops and becoming validators, creating those pools and then connecting up, is because if we’re going to really succeed, I really do think that James Lovelock, who’s one of my guides in all this, his words are probably the most important for us all to understand, which is act locally, but think globally. Acting locally, getting those co-ops on board, talking to them, getting the software ready so that they can do that, but with that global vision that binds us all. That’s a really good way of starting to have the large volumes of transactions that are very meaningful in a social dimension as well. It’s not just about the transaction. It’s about no common ownership.

Greg: Again, you’re absolutely spot on. There’s an economic dimension to that as well, which lines up with how information flows in these social networks. There’s tons of market data on this. We’ve looked at a range of distribution of digital assets and applications, and there’s tons of market data on exactly those kinds of applications. So in particular, if we were to go to the end user route—so we’re trying to build up network effects to get transaction volumes at the level of the end user—we know from the market data on Whatsapp and Snapchat and Facebook and all of the other social networks, which are effectively digital asset distribution platforms, we know the user acquisition spin. Minimal. It’s something on the order of $19 per head, which means that just to acquire the first one million users, you’re talking about a $20 million spend.

So the go-to-market spend, if you don’t have some kind of meaningful interaction, is quite high. It’s way too high for blockchain institution at this point. It means that you’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars to get the kind of network effects that you need in order to generate the transaction volumes that we’ve already talked about as necessary. Following exactly your intuition, Steve, you have to approach people through the meaning in their lives. The interactions amongst them that sort of brings people together. When we go to the arts and entertainment sector, that’s where people begin to feel some of that meaningful interaction. The example I like to use in these arguments: When Taylor Swift announced in November of 2018 her feelings about the participation in the electoral process, 65,000 people registered to vote that day. Let that sink in. So if you wanted it to move 65,000 people in one day, then you want to go to the thought leaders and influencers and have them do the work for you.

That’s the basic point. And again, it’s a point that’s been well understood for a long period of time. There’s nothing magic here. There’s no kind of giant leap of technological insight. Just go to the people who are thought leaders, who are innovators, who have influence within these social networks that we’re trying to develop in order to bring transaction volume. Music is a particularly good one. It really is structured in that way. You have someone who has a certain kind of skill and talent that they’ve developed, and a lot of people respond to and resonate with that skill and talent. So if we’re thinking about building out network effects, then what we’d want to do is get the right 100 artists. If you could approach them in a way that you had something that was very compelling to them, then if each one of them had a following of only a million people with not too much crossover from artist to artist, a hundred artists constitute a hundred million potential adherents or users of the platform in order to get to whatever the artist is offering.

If each one of those hundred million users only listened to an offering from one of these artists ten times a month, which is an extremely conservative number, then you now have one billion transactions on your platform inside a month. That’s the kind of transaction volume that you need. And it’s the right risk profile. It lines up exactly with what you’re saying. Whenever you look at these kinds of social movements—and this really is a social movement—music has always been a part of that social movement. It’s a way that we come together, harmonize with each other around certain expressions of our shared ideology, our shared world view. So again, it sort of path of least resistance kind of argumentation.

Steve: So the world of these smaller co-ops, these communities, is very similar to the world of music festivals. In fact, the cross-pollination between them is pretty intense. There’s a lot of people that go from community to community and go to festivals on the way. I remember that Tim from Berlin went to the Burning Man festival. And I know that at Glastonbury last year there was a lot of talk about decentralization. Inevitably technologies are talked about. The same with these blockchain being decentralized. It seems to me that the strategy of seeing if you can sign up enough artists who care, they’ve got to be well enough known and they’ve got to care. Signing them up and actually telling them, look, this is what we’re planning to do, we want to get you guys on our RSong platform, and hey, there’s some good goodies in there for you too.

But actually, this is a much bigger thing. And the much bigger thing is, go back out there and talk to those communities. You know, the ones that have those little workshops in the tent at the festivals. Go talk to them, reach out to them, and get them to embrace this idea and become validator pools. You don’t need to be a computer scientist to set that up. Other people can help, and I’m sure will help, in the community. But it doesn’t make sense to do that because while you get the Big Bang on volume of transactions with music streaming, what you get is this massive network effect.

But it’s not just the network effects that are undirected. This is a very directed network effect, by going after these sorts of communities, because they’re natural allies at the places where a lot of those musicians hang out. I’m sure you’ve seen this Greg because I suspect you go to those festivals too.

Greg: That’s a way of bringing it home. I like that kind of argumentation, as it brings people back to a sort of an experiential basis for what we’re talking about. A lot of what I’m talking about is really just arithmetic. If we’re going to get to certain numbers, how do we get there with the least amount of spend and the least amount of effort.? And you’re sort of adding that sort of felt dimension to it in terms of, where do you see this? And that’s exactly right.

One really good example, to bring it home to technologists who might not be musicians, is when Larry and Sergey from Google were told to get a CEO. The board said, “No, you guys just can’t be CEOs anymore. You’ve got to get a CEO.” And so they did like a year-long search for a CEO for Google, and they just couldn’t make a decision based upon the data alone. They had all these great candidates for CEO. What ended up being a differentiating thing was Burning Man. Eric Schmidt had been to Burning Man. Burning Man is considered to be the thought leadership Mecca for Silicon Valley. So what you’re saying is not a far-fetched, hippie-dippie thing. It’s right in the center of the evolution of one of the largest tech companies ever.

So you are spot on, as usual, Steve. I just love it. The other point I want to make is again, it comes down to using small network effects to generate large network effects. When we’re talking about, how do we bring these thought leaders to the table? How would we get musical artists who have followers or audiences in the millions? How would we get them to the table? We’ve done lots and lots of analysis on this at RChain. It turns out that despite the fact that Spotify and Google and Amazon are currently suing songwriters for a long, long-delayed jump in royalties, despite the fact that the distribution mechanisms are literally going after artists. And these artists are basically just asking for economic participation that is fair, that will keep them in the game.

When you have world-class artists like David Torn getting a check for $8 for hundreds of thousands if not millions of plays of one of their tunes, basically what you’re saying is, “We don’t want the creative classes.” There’s no way someone can develop and maintain a craft at the world-class level if their craft doesn’t support them. We all know this is true not just in music, but even in Olympic-scale athletes. We know that despite the fact that they’re so-called amateur, they’re really being supported by all kinds of sponsors and advertisements. When you’re at a world-class level, it’s not a hobby. It’s an all-consuming, full-time gig. If you don’t have some kind of economic support for that, you’re just not going to be able to do it.

The best of the best are making pennies for their efforts. We’re just simply talking about wiping out the creative classes. Even in those economic conditions, a fair reporting and accounting system that puts the artists in direct contact with their supporters are still not sufficient to move the artists. Now, it’s strange; it’s an unusual situation. But when we’ve done the market analysis, that’s just the way of it. It’s not enough to say, “You know what, we’ll eliminate all this weird hidden royalty reporting and accounting; we’re going to put you in a blockchain-based setting where there’s an immutable record of the royalties, and there’s no way that someone’s going to obscure the path of the use of the content and how that relates to getting paid.” That’s still not enough to move the artist.

There’s some irony there, and probably an explanation for why artists are not making the kinds of money that they should be making. But that’s a fact. And so there has to be some other piece of an offering that makes it work for the artist. At least in the case of RChain, what we said was, “What if you gave the artists an audio capability that was the world of audio experience? It was like the next dimension in audio experience.” We tested that out with hundreds of artists, and that was enough to move the dial.

The argument is really straightforward. We know that we have to get to transaction volumes; we want to minimize the user acquisitions spend; we’d like to drop the user acquisition spend by at least in order of magnitude, if not more. And so we look to markets which are high-volume, low-risk that have key influencers, influencers that move millions of people at a time.

Then we say, what’s going to attract those key influencers to come to the platform? Then we do the analysis and we say, “Okay, the blockchain piece of it is not sufficient. It’s necessary, but it’s not enough to get them to jump.” And then we asked, “What is going to get them to jump?” Based upon our market testing, what gets them to jump is this next generation audio technology. Then we just do a really, really simple back of the envelope comparison. What would you spend on that, that would still knock off an order of magnitude in terms of your user acquisition spend? So we know what the user acquisitions was for Whatsapp and Facebook. And that’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So if you drop it down to even tens of millions of dollars, then you have met your goal. That’s the basic idea.

It’s the kind of business analysis that might escape certain people. One of the things that I’ve seen when I talk to people who are more socially active and in the platform for socially active reasons when I make these kinds of business arguments, they feel like I’ve left the heart behind. That I’ve turned into a bean counter, and they wonder what I’m talking about. With respect to RChain, it works the other way around. We look at everything both from this socially active and heartfelt perspective and also from this hyper-rational, business-oriented perspective. We’re looking for those solutions which are right down the middle, that satisfied both goals. If you’re just cold-hearted, looking at the numbers, what’s the path to take, and if you’re also like all heart and looking at what’s going to save the planet, it satisfies those constraints. This argument does both. That’s the thing that’s hard to get your head around. It’s an approach that embraces both worlds at the same time.

We’ve gone through the validator economics and said, for proof of stake, what do we have to do when we arrive at certain transaction volumes? Then we say, to get those transaction volumes, what kind of risk profile does it have to match that identifies particular markets? When we look at the approach to each of those markets, we say, we need to go to the influencers to minimize our acquisition spend. We analyze what’s going to attract those influencers. Then we check and see if the cost of that attractor is less than the cost of going directly to the end users. That’s what lands you. A dApp like RSong, or a dApp like Arterial, or even a dApp like Proof. That’s the kind of analysis that goes into selecting for those kinds of dApps.

While you were talking I had this sort of vision, what would I really like to do this summer? The Brighton Festival is coming up and my wife has signed me up to a silent disco tour of Brighton, where you walk around Brighton with headphones on and dance around. Nobody knows what you’re listening to, and you do it in a group. If I was Ed Sheeran or somebody like that, and somebody demonstrated to me the richness of the sound from the codec, and also told me about the ethos of RChain, I’d probably be quite excited is if somebody could get to him. I would imagine he’d be excited. If then you said, hey, “You know, we’re going a bit Glastonbury and we’re going to do a silent disco,” the challenge is whether we can get the same impact with wireless headphones. It might mean that you need wired.

But let’s say they were wired, and you did that silent disco, and you’ve got some major musicians to say, “Hey, you should go to the site just to attend the Glastonbury on this day.” Can you imagine what it would be like for those people walking out after that? They’d have just gone through a much more immersive experience in the silent disco. And then if you’ve got that backed up with some press coverage, you start building that movement really quickly.

Greg: I love it. When we talk about network effects, it really is a butterfly flapping its wings and starting a hurricane. This was the point I was trying to make about Eric Schmidt and Google and Burning Man. What you’re talking about is that kind of phenomenon where you just have to learn how to pay attention. What are the tiny acts you can make locally that have this small-scale network feeding into a large-scale network? What you’re talking about is exactly that phenomenon. That’s really the same thing that we’ve been talking about the whole time. What are the small scale network acts that we can do, attracting the right kind of independent artists, to build out the large-scale network effects?

With Ethereum, a lot of it was attracting the developer. RChain is still 110% committed to attracting the developer. But we also know that the developer is only going to follow this market if they actually see that there’s a bang for buck. When they apply their mad skill to the space that they’re going to see a big 10 x return on their efforts. That was the whole ICO craze. But that’s gone. It’s over. It’s done. In the next wave, we have to attract the developer in a different way, and you have to start going from the developer to other kinds of communities. That’s essentially what this has been about: what are the next communities? In some ways, coders or the creative class of tech, and then artists are the creative class of music and other kinds of content. And so they’re the next natural step. I love your ideas. It’s spot on with what we’re trying to talk about. Isaac, you want to take us out with any thoughts or comments?

Isaac: You were saying that the RChain approach caters to both sides. People who strictly care about the numbers and maybe people who strictly care about doing what’s right or their morality. Quite honestly, I think now that you’ve said it, it’s almost obvious. You want to appeal to the most people possible, and if we can appeal to everybody from one end to the spectrum to the other, that seems like the best approach. It just makes a lot of sense.

Steve: This is kind of the world we’re in, right? I mean these next twelve to eighteen months will be quite critical. Greta Thunberg. I hope you all know who she is. If you don’t, you should. She started by deciding to go on a strike herself. And now tomorrow I’m going down to Brighton to support students who are leaving school once a month in the UK across 60 different locations. They have self-organized. What they lack is a trusted platform in which to continue to do that. That’s what I want to give him.