Welcome to the Number State podcast. And so, Arjun, you are 22. 19. You're 19. OK, so 19 means you were born in 2006. So you were born five years after 911, the financial crisis. You were only like 2 years old, right? So, you know, with video games, people spawn into the battlefield in the middle of, you know, like a MOBA. You know, everybody's shooting at each other, and there's like this giant thing and someone spawns into the middle.
And so I think of you kind of people, the Gen. Z types as spawning into the middle of this totally chaotic situation. And I just want to tell you, it wasn't like that in the 90s and the 2000s. I don't know what your perception is. Or maybe you perceive this chaos as normal. I mean, I was born with a lot of things that I take for granted, right? Which what is the US?
Where are you in India? So, you know, I've like for as long as I remember, I know like having a computer smartphone kind of after a while, so. What's your spiel? Give your life story? You're AZ cash guy now but what's your give your spiel? Sure. So, you know, I, I was a pretty normal kid, I would say when I was up to like. 13, you're still a kid, but go ahead.
Yes, fine, fine. Go. Ahead until I'm on COVID when I was like, you know, doing whatever teenagers would do, play Fortnite, you know, and then COVID hit and then I just like. Where were you then? In India. In India, OK, how come you have an American accent? You have a global accent. International idea just talking to a lot of people. So I anyway, COVID hit and then I just started reading a lot of books, like the beginning of Infinity Naval's book naval, the Navalman Act.
And then I just started questioning a lot of things that taken for granted and just like started questioning the meaning of it. All right, like one of my in school, like I don't want to be just growing up studying engineering like everybody else. And you know, you know how the Indian, there's nothing wrong. With studying engineering, but I understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but you know if it's. Like if it's only a canalized path, you want to have some options of course.
Yeah. So anyway, I got completely radicalized, I guess I'd say. And then you. You got woke? No, exactly. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. You, you got well, you got enlightened. Enlightened. Right. Go ahead. Yep. And then I, you know, when I was time to go back to school, because when I was online school, I would just like mute the site and then, you know, write from my blog, write on Twitter. But then when I had to go back to school, I was like, this sucks. I'm out of here, right?
So dropped out of high school, worked on air chat for a while in the ball and we sunseted that, you know, I guess a couple years ago now and then sort of got involved with Z Cash. Great. OK, so let's talk Z cash, right, So the Z cash never see. OK, So my view is there's many problems that Z cash solves. Some of them are obviously privacy, simplicity, quantum, you know, like a quantum resistance, quantum resiliency, let's say, up to some, up to
some certain point, right? And and it has at least a road map for resiliency, right? And like Sean Bow has a good post on this. And then scalability with Tachyon, right? And then it's also got some degree of lindiness or what have you, given that it's been around for 10 years, got a good security track record, it's got a good exchange integration community, all that kind of
stuff. And Z Cash is interesting because Solana guys like it, Vitalik likes it, I like it, Novel likes it. And you know, it's it's something where I think we can build a coalition around privacy. And you've certainly experienced this yourself. It's funny to say, like, how does the youth think about privacy and so and so forth, right? I'd love to hear your thoughts and I'll give a thought. I, I would say I'm like I, I don't hang out with a lot of people my age, right?
So I don't know the like, what like regular people my age think, but for me, I think privacy is super important. Like I don't docks my location anymore, you know, I used to when I was a kid, didn't really realize. The downside of it? Yeah. But then now you know, you especially with AI being able to recognize where you are exactly. And you need that on chain, I think because you can't have freedom without privacy.
And if it's like every transaction you make is just broadcasting your entire world to the public or you know where you are, what you're doing, I don't think that's the world that I want to live in. So. Yeah. And I think a lot of people don't fully understand that point. If you're under surveillance, you're not sovereign.
And one way of putting it is if every move is being tracked, for example, you don't have the advantage of surprise, you can never launch something, you can never have private deliberations, you don't have the room to make mistakes. Anything you do can and will be used against you and so and so forth, right? And you know, there's, I know we're putting it as what does privacy mean? Say arguably means local files and local data. So that's also the same as what sovereignty means.
It means privacy is private keys is private property is not online like almost decentralized and local and individual as opposed to communal and shared and public and whatnot, right. So that's the sense in which sovereignty is privacy, is locality is security. It's creativity, right? Like I'm not going to be creative. I'm not going to be myself, my authentic self, if I'm always
being watched. And like I would think that knowledge creation and wealth creation just comes to a stall if all everything is so well all the time. Yeah, it's funny. You know, like one thing I used to say, sometimes people would tell me, oh, biology, you know, China is going to just be the same as Japan and it's going to like run into a ditch like Japan did.
But the way I point them to something is actually in the early in 2017 actually, Sulzberger's paper and NYT published something that said that China killed a bunch of American spies in 2010. Japan could never do that. So that's why China, that's another way of looking at it. So, you know, I'd say very different national security sense. But China's sovereign in the way that Japan isn't because it could kill the spies, because it
stopped the spies. Obviously, I'm sure America's killed Chinese spies as well, but Japan would never be able to kill American spies, never, you know. So Japan is under surveillance and wasn't sovereign, but China wasn't under surveillance and was sovereign, right? So the ability to actually be free of surveillance is actually
in a sense to be sovereign. And the alternative way of doing it is to encrypt, not through violence like the Chinese way, but through decentralization encryption, which is the Internet. Yeah, he recently tweeted Z cash must scale. Why is scaling Z cash a moral imperative? Well, it's because, look, I love Bitcoin because it's amazing. I don't never have a negative word to say about Bitcoin or what. So she did and so on. But he developed it in 2009,
right? 2009 was many generations ago technologically you'd make different trade-offs potentially. Today, especially Quantum has improved a lot. We know a lot more about blockchain scalability. Obviously we know about smart contracts, you know, obviously AI is out there, blah blah.
So the Z cash must scale just means right now how does Bitcoin scale off chain and other chains that say off chain, which say you load Bitcoin into Coinbase or Binance and then within the internal Binance or Coinbase economy, you have a debit and a credit and you can just send and receive at 0 fees. And only when it's recorded out as a transfer out is there an on chain transaction, right? So off chain is basically
database entries. And then other chains means you swap Bitcoin into something else and then you send it on that chain. Solana or Etherium or something like that, or USDC on Etherium or Solana. And that's fine. You know, that does work. But many of my, you know, friends who are still, you know, like Bitcoin maximalist or what have you, I'm sympathetic to them, but they've basically been saying, oh, lightning, Lightning is going to be there any day now for 10 years, literally 10 years
of lightning. And the thing about it is when you press them, they're like, Oh well, Lightning, you know, there's no public database of it because it's supposed to be payment channels between two nodes. And you go and you look into the details of it. Basically the thing about Bitcoin is any address can send any other address at any time, any amount without any set up at basically, let's say standard fees, minimal fees, right, that anybody can pay anybody anytime, anywhere.
Any amount without any set up is a set of things that is all broken with Lightning. Any node cannot pay any other node with lightning unless there's a channel or a route between them. They can't pay any amount because it's constrained in a complex way by how much of the deposits are there. They can't do it necessarily at any time because you have to have like a channel open and channel close. And then the amount of money is like, it's like bound in a complicated way by like the
deposits on the channels. And then what do you get out of all of this? What you get is something where like, you know, maybe if one party, other party breaks a payment channel, then you can you could get like the last transaction out or something like that.
But the transactions are being recorded off chain, which is why it's quote scalable to make lightning work and apps like moon and so on and so forth that try to make like MUUN and wallet of Satoshi. So they're fine like like these guys, but basically they end up essentially setting up a hub and spoke topology where it looks a lot like here's Coinbase, here's Binance. And they've got a ring of customers around them and they have a channel between them
where they can do quick Coinbase to Binance settlement. So that if you send within Coinbase from their Coinbase customer or within Coinbase to a Binance customer, maybe Coinbase to Binance is it could be off chain or it could be at a very quick Coinbase finance like, you know, daily or nightly or whatever hourly settlement, however they decide to do it. But if they have an agreement, they have a peering relationship, they can move it fast. This is very similar to how banks work, right?
Banks essentially mean within a bank it's fast. It's just a debit or credit in their system. And between banks, they use Fedwire or something, they do settlement and they have a true up where it's like the net credit, the net debit and they just true it up like this,
right? And so the hub and spoke implementation of Lightning is really not in my view, doesn't get you much or just loading in the Bitcoin and doing off chain transactions and having a peering relationship between moon and wallet of Satoshi and Noster and whatever, right, Damus. And and that's all fine. And and there's a bunch of people who will basically give me some kind of argument like, no, it works, whatever.
And then whenever I poke on it, it's always some hub and spoke thing under under the under the hood. And it's not it's not like truly decentralized in the sense of you. It's not like Bitcoin where you can see it on chain. Anybody can pay anybody anytime, any amount without any set up, blah, blah, Right, OK, So what you really want is on chain scaling, right? Just blast the transactions on chain. What's funny is Etherium actually learned the same lesson in a sense as Bitcoin. Why?
Like, you know, and to be clear again, I'm pro Bitcoin, pro Etherium like Vitalic posted that L twos kind of didn't work. And to be clear, a lot of the L twos are smart people. I think they will adapt and pivot. I've actually got a post coming out on this from L2 to app two, you can turn those L twos into app chains and you have a theorem for global state. You have your computer for local
state. And then if you have like a decentralized notion like an Obsidian is the L twos for app state that you're syncing across computers. Like, you know, like your username of Arjun dot ETH or biologist dot ETH is global, but the state that you're moving if you're doing a file share request or something that doesn't need to be global state. It could be L2 state and then you have local apps state fine. So leaving that though, The thing is, L2's were fine as a hack.
They were more successful on a theorem than they were in in Bitcoin. Like base and Polygon were actually quite important, are important, but really the Solana model of just blasting it, you know, events on chain worked, right? Because it's easier conceptually easier. You don't have to think about. I mean, block chains are complicated enough without having to worry about like, oh, where's my coin? What chain is it on? It's easy to make mistakes on that. It's easier for users to make
mistakes. You're forcing them to be aware of a detail that they really shouldn't be aware of or have to be aware of. And so Salon is model of just blasted on chain and have beefier hardware worked. And that was, it was maybe not obvious a few years ago, but that model worked. And it became also very clear that the value accrual is going to Solana and then an app on Salon is doing something Solana isn't doing. And and so that worked, right. So now we have basically 3
levels. So it's Bitcoin Etherium salon in terms of scalability on chain, right. And so now the question is, can we go further still the ZK, obviously there's ZK roll ups, there's optimistic roll ups. You know, ZK is not simply a a privacy technology. It's also a compression technology. It's a performance technology. And in fact, arguably, even though Z cash came up with the concept of ZK, the utility of ZK saw use more in scalability than it did privacy at first.
This is good because scalability was immediately commercially important. You know that saying vitamin versus painkiller? No, no, like you know, a painkiller is it's maybe immediately. Obviously, Yeah, yeah, OK. Yeah, you got you got a meat problem and you want to take care of it, right. And then vitamin is like possible upside, right?
And you can argue, but basically I know where you're putting it is like a painkiller is a must and a vitamin is a nice to have, right, Like a like a, like a, you know, a want as opposed to a need, right. So making more money required scalability. So I was a must, right? And it seemed for a long time like people could do without privacy or or rather it wasn't like it wasn't as important as
scalable, so people thought. But now we have all of these attacks on people for like, you know, doxing locations, so and so forth. Where if you're now, if you're in Dubai or you're in a low crime jurisdiction, Singapore, if you're in El Salvador perhaps and so on and so forth, you're fine, right? Those are going to be 3 very
important places on the earth. In my view, Singapore, Dubai, El Salvador are the new like Tokyo, London, New York, like even Miami is maybe I think El Salvador has more upside than Miami because it's a start up seat. Like I actually like Francis Suarez a lot. Miami and El Salvador will probably have an important relationship. But El Salvador is like a full sovereign, right? It can do a lot. It did deal with Elon recently. It has tether there.
These are big moves, right? So Bekelly is like Bekelly Kwanieu. Those get you the Americas, EMEA and APAC, right? It gives you all three times it's El Salvador, Dubai, Singapore and those if you're doing, if you're saying of anything in crypto, I think you or anything in tech crypto, those are going to be the three
nodes. One thing we need to do I should post this afterwards like President Bikelli should set up direct flights between Dubai, El Salvador and Singapore El Salvador and build an International Airport. We all have them. Already I don't think we have
them. Partly it's because South America, Latin America has been sort of locked off from the rest of the world, especially Asia. And lots of flights have to route through America. And to route through America, if you're not AUS citizen, you have to get a so-called, like I think AC visa, transit visa. So many people who wanted to go to Crushamento and Argentina and they're Asian, they don't have
AUS visa or something. You have to like go to the embassy, the US embassy to get AC visa for just a like it's a huge tax. You want to just fly from let's say India to Argentina. You have to stop through the US but to even stop through the US you need like AC Transit visa, which means you need to go to the US embassy and apply for a visa months in advance to jump on a flight. So I mean, it takes away all spur of the moment. It's like this enormous tax of time and energy.
You can get rejected for that visa. It's often not awarded. So having someone like El Salvador which can just route around that will be very important. Like an enormous amount of traffic will go there because Dubai and Singapore are these huge, huge points anyway coming back. So, so on chain, just being able to blast private transactions on chain. Solana likes scalability, but Z Cash is what I think Sean Boe may have with Tachyon. That seems simple, scalable, easy to understand.
It's what a lot of people wanted Bitcoin to be, you know, So, yeah. So that's how I think about that. What? What else will it take to be the official currency of the network state? There's no official currency of the network state. I think because there's, there's going to be 1000 network sheets, right? It's like there's going to be like 1000 cities, startup societies, 1000 startup cities, thousand network states.
But I think there will be just like there'll be a salon in network state, Ethereum network state, don't die network state, coin based network state, Binance network state. All these people have talked about Telegram network state, etcetera, etcetera. There will be a AZ cash network state. The only thing about Z cash historically has been that the Zcash people were so into privacy they never talked about it. And also Zcash itself for a variety of reasons.
Just you know, most crypto things have a failure mode of being way too commercial and like too much, get money now too much. You know, like when AirDrop, meme coin, blah blah type of stuff. Once in a while you have a project which has the opposite failure mode, or if not failure mode, because I don't think Zcash has failed at all, but rather the reason that they haven't like they're being sort of shadowed by other projects is
they were so academic, right? They were so academic like you can overreact and be too non commercial also, right. And there was, there was good in a lot of ways in all the cryptography. They're very smart. They were playing the long game, all that kind of stuff. But you need the right equilibrium, right? You don't want to be too phd.com. You don't want to be too phdortwo.com. You want to have the right synthesis. You're going to change that. Yeah, I think we're changing
that, right? You guys have Gen. Z cash? Yes, that's right. Tell me about that. Yeah. So I just thought it was a cool. Little it's fun word, yeah. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. Plan words. So it it's yeah. I think the idea is like, you know, a lot of things start from young people and then the older generations just like catch up. Right. What are the five best Gen. Z cash videos? Or what are the best ones? Which ones are about? Well, do you remember?
We did one with you. That's true, you know. We had the Z Cash Network state event here. Yeah, Yeah. We did one with Hasib, did a couple with Hasib. The first one with Z cash was a $30.00. The second one was a $700.00. Nice. That's good. That's good, right. Didn't buy, so yeah. Well, I mean, I love Hasib, obviously, because keep going. I'm listening. Yeah, yeah.
There's a few more interesting ones, but yeah, I think we want to ramp up starting more, OK. So what is What are the themes of Gen. Z Cash the Feed? Fun for sure. You know, we want to make it fun. Make privacy fun, make it sexy, make it cool. And I think, yeah, educating like, you know, you don't want to be like, you just want the user to know as much as they need to know. Like that's why I love Zashi, right?
Because Zashi, there's all these different shielded pools with D cash that, you know, if you really wanted to dig deep, you could like learn all about them and the other apps kind of force you to learn them. But Zashi, it's all just default into the shielded orchard pool, right? So as little information you need, but to use it properly, obviously like, you know, you're not leaking information anywhere. So I think, you know, educating
about that, that'd be great. But yeah, one more question I had about, you know, you're talking about lightning in Bitcoin. Do you see a world where you know Z cash is sort of a compliment to Bitcoin where it's. Actually, question, Yeah. So The thing is, I mean, one thing to not underestimate is like Bitcoin has like an insane brand, right?
It has been. I mean, one way of putting it is there's a lot of people who are just now thinking about Bitcoin or whatever, and what they'll say is something like, Arjun, what kind of Bitcoin should I buy, right? Yeah, I'm probably, you heard something like that, right? So that is, I know where you're putting it As, for example, how many drone manufacturers can you need. I know mock Industries, which is a small one, yeah. But what are the big ones? Most people can name DJI, maybe
they can name Andrew, right? So you have to be really into it to be able to name like small ones. That's just probably a friend of yours. Exactly. So, but like to be able to go down the list of all the very strong manufacturers. It's like DJI is like Bitcoin. Maybe Andrew is like Ethereum. It's a military drone, very different, but it's a drone manufacturer. And then like to know more than that, you really have to be in the space, right?
So if you think about it that way, right, like again, like most people, they name an AI, they'll name ChatGPT, right? And to be in the space to know Gemini and Claude and you have to be really in the space to know like, I don't know, sea dance that just came out, this open model or the Chinese cling and whatever, you know, Quan blah, blah, DeepSeek. And so you have to that's a useful way of modeling. Another example is like how many Chinese politicians do you know
exactly, right? Can you name Lee Chang and all the other people in the Britain? Most people can't, right? So that's a good way of thinking about how people from the outside think about crypto. They just know Bitcoin. They just know like the one name in crypto is Bitcoin, right? That's so like insane, like the there's a power law and brand, right? So don't underestimate that. That's like a huge, huge, huge, huge thing.
So because of that number one, and Bitcoin is just insane ubiquity and you know, like all the kind of stuff I think Bitcoin will be around and do well for a long time. Also, there's an aspect to being public on chain, like transparency and privacy are actually both useful things, right? And for, but Kelly to be able to prove that he has this amount of Bitcoin reserves is actually
useful for him at times, right? If he can secure the private keys, there's a sense in which Bitcoin literally does become digital gold, right? It's something where if you, you, you used to actually show you'd have proven reserves, you know, and then you need proof of reserves and liabilities in general, because you know, you know, it's not just that you have 100,000 Bitcoin or 10,000 Bitcoin, but rather all the claims in them add up to this, right?
That's like another level of it. But at least proof of reserve shows you, you have something. And so there's a sense in which it's possible because transparency and privacy are both useful features. It's kind of like immutability and programmability are both useful features. So Bitcoin is immutable and Etherium and Solana are programmable mutability, like in the sense of if you Google mutable state, that's like a core concept in programming.
That's like the thing that Bitcoin doesn't want to do that Etherium and Solana must do. But it's like, these are both valuable things, immutability and programmability, but you can't have them in the same package. It's like, you know, I want to drink water, I want to warm fire. I don't want fire plus water because they and I leave each other, right? So you need to have them separate as things, right?
So it's possible that Bitcoin, just like Bitcoin and Etherium coexist because Bitcoin is immutable and Etherium is programmable. Bitcoin and Zcash coexist because Bitcoin is transparent and Zcash is private. And you may want to have proof of reserves, right? Zcash has T addresses. It does have T addresses, that's true. That's true, You can do that. But so there's something also where the total sum of Z cash can't be proven as easily as the total sum of Bitcoin, right?
Maybe there'll be some cryptographic technique that does that, which is probably possible, but it's not quite as simple as with Bitcoin where you just download blockchain, run a verifier, sum all the chain tips and you get this. How many Bitcoin there are, right? That was a troll that people used to run on Ethereum. They'd say how many ETH are there, right? And they could show a strip that just simple just showed how many BTC there were. You can't say how many eat there
are, right. You can say how many transparent sect there are, and certainly that's an upper bound. Like you can also say how many Shields there are. You can see how many Shields there are schools. That's true, that's true, but it's a little bit less anyway people can make these arguments and so it's it's like a little bit less trackable yeah than than Bitcoin is and sometimes it's a feature. So anyway, that's those are the, the benefits of an older technology are ubiquity, brand
and perhaps transparency. And we wouldn't, we shouldn't underestimate that. I mean, one thing that's interesting is, you know, when Facebook was in its early days, Twitter was and Twitter was in its early days. People said, oh, Twitter is just Facebook's status updates, right? Because Facebook there was a there's a time when it said like Arjun is and then you can type in a box. I don't know if you remember that it actually is before your time.
You it was like 5 years before you're born or something like 3 years. But 2004 to 2007 you had that like biology is and you type something in and then eventually the biology is went away. You just type something in. Those tests would be similar to a tweet, but it'd be like biology is. It was, it was an update of AOL Instant Messenger. AOL Instant Messenger, you'd say John is asleep and that was like your away message or John is at
the office. So you tell people where you are, almost like an answering machine message. So answering these machine message became an ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger away message became a Facebook status update, became a Twitter tweet. And so that's it. That's the evolution of it, right? So the answering machine became the tweet. That's not the only lineage, but part of it. Point is people thought Facebook can do all these things.
Twitter can do only one thing. Therefore, Facebook will just crush Twitter. It turned out that the simplicity of Twitter meant to just build a community around it, right? That's the other thing that Bitcoin has just says gigantic community, right? Hundreds of millions of people, right, are part of Bitcoin. And like you could say, for example, that I don't know what's a good version of this. Like, I don't know, maybe El Salvador is a better Mexico, but how many people are going to
move from Mexico to El Salvador? Community has a stickiness. Also, of course, you know, that's not exactly right. You know what I'm saying right? So yeah, I I, I don't know what the future holds, but I'm pro Bitcoin, pro Ethereum, pro salon and pro Z cash because it's we're still in this very non 0 sum mode for a long time. All this all the intra coin fights. I think there's a healthy competition and so on. But but I think this could be Z cash at the moment. Let's see.
Awesome. Cool, thanks. Thank you. Sir. Great. Thank you, Sir.