Year-End Checkin On Crypto With Brady Dale of @coindesk

December 14, 2019·30 min·2 clips

The Ethereum developer arrested after flying to North Korea to give a blockchain-and-peace talk.

The episode is a year-end check-in. McCullough opens with Bitcoin because their last conversation came during crypto spring, when the price had climbed back above $10,000. That story has cooled off. Dale says no one really knows why the price is what it is, which is blunt and more useful than dressing up guesses as certainty. Then Libra takes over. McCullough pushes on whether Facebook could actually launch something in 2020, and Dale puts the odds at 15%. The number matters because it keeps the conversation grounded. Dale sees the problem as a regulatory mess that will take time to unwind. Facebook still has ways to move. He can imagine the company eventually going somewhere else, falling back on its old move-fast posture, and wrapping the launch in lawyers. Just not right away. A huge profitable company has room to wait, so it does not need to sprint straight into the wall. Sovereign crypto becomes the hinge. China and the Marshall Islands come up as examples of sovereign cryptocurrency projects that could shift the backdrop around Libra. Put simply, Facebook benefits if someone else makes the category feel normal first. A serious sovereign coin would do many of the things regulators worry Libra might do, which could make Facebook's case easier to argue. The ending gets smaller and a little weirder. They talk through Brave browser, whether its token can leave the browser, and whether holding it makes much sense. The chart is not exactly triumphant. With a $250 million market cap, an all-time high of 98 cents, and a current price of 18 cents, the use case sounds less like moon math and more like sending value to sites the host already likes.

As heard by us

A sober 2019 crypto check-in that treats Libra as a regulatory grind, not hype.

Brian McCullough uses this weekend bonus episode to take a hard look at crypto at the end of 2019, with Brady Dale of CoinDesk bringing useful perspective.

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Get a sober crypto check-in before 2019 closes.

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