The Context Podcast - David Orban David Orban

Does Bitcoin matter? Does Bitcoin care? What do you think about it?
The President of the United States believes that Bitcoin indeed matters. He labeled it a potential threat to the national security of the United States of America.
I don't think that Bitcoin cares about what the President of the United States thinks about Bitcoin, which is kind of the point; for 1000s of years, the way that we designed the money was such that what people thought about that particular kind of money influenced the money, and the behavior of that money and the rules under which that money would be able to exist.
What will be the next step? The next step is that Bitcoin will still not care. Bitcoin will still do its own thing, the network that will enable anyone to transfer value in an unfettered manner and without any possibility of nation states stopping it or organizations interfering. The European Union, for example, is the latest to delude themselves that they will be able to stop Bitcoin. The European Parliament voted a few weeks ago a resolution that will be implemented in all the member states that will impose reporting requirements on Bitcoin exchanges that are stricter than not those imposed on any bank. A bank is required to report on the source and the destination of a transaction when it is larger than the equivalent of $10,000 or 10,000. Euro. The rule that is now going to be imposed in Europe is for this reporting to apply at any amount being transferred; it is frankly, ridiculous, and it is not going to achieve whatever supposed desired effect the legislators felt they would need to act in order to achieve because Bitcoin doesn't care.
You should care about what the nation states are doing, and I am looking forward to understanding that you are caring, but you should also care for yourself and be fine with the fact and recognize your ability to let go of the feelings that you have towards Bitcoin, because Bitcoin doesn't care.
#finance #bitcoin #money

What is going to take to move Bitcoin and Blockchain and crypto from 10s of millions, maybe 100 million to billions of people adopting it and using it daily.
I'm here back in Dubai, where I will be speaking at conferences, talking about the various crypto technologies that are certainly very important. However, often, the teams that are analyzing how to improve these technologies, neglect other fundamental barriers to adoption.
So many wonderful technology solutions require dozens of difficult steps until you can do something, while others have a promise of providing you with great financial returns. However, they require a commitment and the ability to manage the risk that not a lot of people have. Finally, even though we speak English, and many of the people follow us as well, the vast majority of the people on the planet do not. It is crucially important to overcome these barriers if we want to scale crypto solutions to billions of people.
For the past few months, I have been working with a talented and passionate team that is building exactly that: CheetaX is focusing on India's 1.3 billion people, which is a huge market opportunity. Their current solutions for savings provide abysmal returns, and the population is ready to adopt something new. It has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, and smartphone distribution is huge: an estimated 800 million people have smartphones.
Now CheetahX wants to provide a very simple solution with easy onboarding, and the one-click decision for a bridge towards what we call DeFi Yield Opportunities, really simplifying what can be done. Not everyone in India speaks English or Hindi, and as a matter of fact, hundreds of millions of people speak neither of those two languages, but their local language.
CheetahX plans to release its application in seven languages to provide a necessary gateway to crypto adoption to these hundreds of millions of people, and the time is now because the infrastructure is here. The people are ready. We need to provide them with smart solutions. And we need to enable them to learn so that they can adopt crypto and its advantages. CheetahX is already providing the waitlist for signing up in their application, and they also have a native token that will be used as a reward token in their learning platform, and so many other ways.
On cheetahx.com people can already start understanding how they are aiming to approach this incredibly rich and promising market. Will India be only the first step? Will CheetahX go on to conquer Southeast Asia or Africa or other important markets? Well, we will see but the billions of people who haven't been using Blockchain and crypto solutions until now certainly have a new player that they can leverage If they want to make their first steps in this exciting world.
#india #crypto #startup

“The Cult of Done Manifesto” by Bre Pettis and Kyo Stark states that there are three stages of being: not knowing, action, completion.
There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.There is no editing stage.Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.Once you’re done you can throw it away.Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.Destruction is a variant of done.If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.Done is the engine of more.
Bre Pettis wrote, together with Kio Stark, “The Cult of Done Manifesto” in 2009. He then went on to found MakerBot, and I'm sure he is doing exciting things today. At the time, when I read “The Cult of Done Manifesto”, it very strongly resonated with me; if you follow the context, you can still hear echoes in so many things that I keep often repeating in many of the subjects that I talked about. How important it is to test things out, how important it is to try new things, how natural it is to make mistakes. I am sure that there are dozens of more concepts that are smartly buried, and can take seeds from within this manifesto.
I recently had the chance to remember it because I am working with a very smart and passionate startup that is now coming out of their “stealth mode”. When you’re in this stage, no one knows what you're doing, and you are not ready to confront the crude reality of the world. But you must come out of your comfort zone, and face reality to receive both good and bad reception. Maybe you’re sharing your documentation, and people are trying passionately to poke holes in them, which is perfectly fine. If people just say “Oh, wow, this document is great. It is so inspiring, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it”, what could you learn? How could you improve?
It’s better to hear this criticism and try to improve your idea and mentality: How much do you believe in what you are doing on one hand and on the other? How smartly Can you listen and incorporate what actually of the criticism makes sense? How can you distinguish between what you can safely discard and what instead matters to you? Of course, rather than discarding, you have answers that you are able to rapidly develop or memorize as needed and provide the answer to that criticism without trying to deflect it and acknowledging it, but also letting the other person understand that you actually thought about what they are saying.
Make mistakes, because now is the time. Look at Elon Musk, for example: he has 17 million followers, yet he still makes plenty of mistakes. Don't treat your social media with gloved hands, instead just post stuff that you can always delete. Just reach out. Just make it done.
#procrastination #motivation #doing

Russia's attack against Ukraine is the largest conflict in Europe since World War Two. There are countries that believe to be far enough to be able to ignore it, or to take a balanced stance without taking sides: they are wrong. In today's globally interconnected world, these conflicts have repercussions, the geopolitics of war in the 21st century leaves no one untouched.
Over the next weeks and months, missile attacks will continue, bombarding and destroying Ukrainian cities. The determination of the population will be crucial. If Russia is able to eliminate the democratically elected Ukrainian government, they will install a new one who will be friendly to Russia. But even if they were to declare victory with this government in place, that will not mean that they will have conquered Ukraine as a country. Putin's decision has fundamentally undermined his own rule, and has inflicted lasting damage to the political, economic future of Russia. The consequences are far reaching.
China is saying cynically: “Well, if we cannot trade in dollars, because unfortunately Russia is under sanctions, maybe we can trade in Chinese currency. By the way, we just introduced the digital Yuan. Wouldn't this be a convenient way of modernizing our economic ties?” India imports almost all of its weapons from Russia. And as the United States strengthened its ties with Pakistan in its fight against Afghanistan and the Taliban, India, the largest democracy on the planet, decided that cozying up to the Russian dictator was a good choice. During the Ukraine-Russia conflict they are pretending that they can afford not to take sides. That democracy and the democratically elected government is not worth supporting and defending, even with just a declaration of principle.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we will see a lot more people dying. And we will see conflict going on. The people of Ukraine and the country of Ukraine will come out of it winning and that the aggression that they are suffering currently will cease.
#ukraine #russia #ukrainewar

I am recording this episode of “The Context” on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. I don't know what will happen in the next few days, but it’s guaranteed that there will be a lot of confusion, and our ability to make sense of the world will also depend on the kind of tools that we use to interpret the information that we receive.
We receive information from a wide variety of sources to a degree that hasn't happened before. We have television, YouTube, and other video content online. We have journalistic sources, as well as crowdsourced intelligence information that is coming from people on the ground. Most of us are not equipped with the tools that enable the correct aggregation and synthesis of these pieces of information.
In the past, we would rely on professional journalists to complete this task. Over the past 10 years or so, many people have started to look at the work of journalists as not only chronicling what is happening objectively, but giving a slant by expressing their point of view, or the point of view of their editorial board. There are many reasons, but this is a paradox; drinking from the firehose of information is beyond our human individual capacity, and we don't trust the interpretation and aggregation of the news by professionals.
Understanding that we are individually biased, and that our various sources are also unavoidably biased, should not reduce us to a paralyzed position of cynicism. Instead, it can be substituted by a more proactive stance with the help of innovative tools, like Improve the News.
Developed by MIT professor and researcher Max Tegmark and his group, Improve the News allows you to explore different points of view, and understand their merit, being exposed to them in a controlled fashion. Even if you end up confirming that you keep disagreeing with the alternative points of view, you can incorporate your knowledge of them in your worldview, to improve your future decisions.
#news #fakenews #information

Have you ever looked into the socks drawer of a horse? It's full of socks in ones, twos and threes, completely useless. Did you laugh? Didn't you? Well, that is the point. Either of those outcomes is fine.
I want to be a comedian. Do I want to be a comedian? My father was an actor, and he kind of made sure that I wouldn't actually go on the path of performing as an actor. But as a public speaker, I can feel that at least to some degree I would enjoy it, and maybe would be good at it. Telling a story, hearing the feedback from the audience, being able to read how they react, who are attuned to your speaking, who is maybe even riveted. And then, when I deliver a keynote, after I'm done opening the Q&A, I actually understand that people have been provoked into thinking, into asking themselves questions. These are indicators that possibly I could attempt to act as well.
Even seasoned professionals, comedians you admire, need the experience of developing the jokes, testing them and improving them until they work. And of course, during the process, they feel silly, they feel bad, they feel the hurt of the audience not laughing at the joke that doesn't work. So this is the same iterative process that I talk about so often, where you want to go somewhere, and you want to know what is needed in order to get there, but not exactly how it is going to play out. And as long as you are able to measure the outcome of a given step, you are able to improve, to try variants, until you achieve what you want.
The opportunity of going out on a limb, of getting your hands dirty, of making mistakes, of understanding how and when these things can work is part of the effort that makes the result valuable. The effort that distinguishes those who actually invest in the process, and those who do not. Knowing that we have put in the effort that we have made, the mistakes and that we have achieved our goal of making people laugh.
Watch the video until the end to hear my favorite joke.
#comedy #jokes #experiment