The following is a conversation with Brian Armstrong, cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform with 98 million users in 100 countries, listing Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and over 100 popular cryptocurrencies. I recorded this conversation with Brian before this week's SEC probe into whether some of the crypto listings are securities and thus need to be regulated as such. As always, with conversations that involve cryptocurrency, I try to make it timeless so that the price soaring high or crashing down low doesn't distract from the fundamental technological, economic, social, and philosophical ideas underlying this new form of money, energy, and information. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Bureaucracies resist change, for better and for worse. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I hope in the end, the interest of the individual wins. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And now, dear friends, here's Brian Armstrong. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And I remember I went home, and I tried to get this thing working. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I was like, I don't understand anything that's happening in this book. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It didn't have all this complexity around it. So then I got more into PHP, I started building like some simple websites, I think learned some HTML. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Which is quite interesting because Java is often at least for a long time was used as the primary programming language to teach people how to program, or at least about object oriented programming. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's easier to learn. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I love PHP and I feel like it's a dirty secret. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I could rapidly prototype products and using languages like Ruby. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| That's like somebody has to like, you go to library, you dust off the book, but Scheme a little bit. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I of course still use Emacs as the editor for most things that I do. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| That said, I should say sort of push back, PHP, I feel like it's still true that most of the web runs on PHP. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| The Stack Exchange surveys show JavaScript is the most popular language in the world, I think, right? Oh yeah, in terms of programmers and numbers of, I wonder. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Yeah, I feel like the amount of Java out there just running industrial systems has gotta be enormous. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Like power systems and infrastructure systems, which is fascinating, and ATMs and stuff like that. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Get the stuff that's like tech that was invented 40, 50 years ago, but still is being used widely. I mean Emacs is an example of that. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So yeah, we want to be the way that a billion people hopefully access the open financial system globally. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| That's kind of how an exchange works underneath. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| We have to integrate with the blockchains themselves, which are periodically getting updated and having various airdrops and all kinds of things. So we're integrated with lots of different blockchains.

... SIGN IN TO VIEW REMAINDER ...