@EKorhaliller I'm not going to lie -- I get so many pitches, I mostly skim. Also, now that I'm out of the daily news cycle, I will probably now rarely do a story (or podcast) that's tied to the news. However, pitches that catch my eye usually have quality people involved. But honestly, I'm more likely to hear about the good projects from sources I trust and not from PR people.

[DELETED]

@NeilDeramchi I came out with a podcast on stablecoins yesterday, and that was a really interesting topic. I'd like to get some of the other stablecoin teams on. I don't want to reveal too much about what else I'd like to cover because one time I tweeted, "are you interested in a podcast on crypto and taxes" and then before I could actually release it, another podcast came out with one on that topic! So ... not doing that again.

@bentossell Brian Armstrong, Brad Garlinghouse, and I'd like to get Sandra Ro, formerly of CME, back now that she no longer has a PR person watching her like a hawk. ;)

@soonaorlater I have mixed feelings about the growing popularity because a lot of that popularity stems from a get-rich-quick mentality that I think is not only unhealthy and dangerous but flat-out wrong. By the same token (I'm not sure if that pun is intended or not), a lot of scammers or people with ill intentions who feel no scruples about taking money from everyday people to go buy a lambo or just live a cushy life without any intention to actually build anything are coming into the space.

On the flip side, what's been great to see is that a lot of well-intentioned people are getting excited about the possibilities of this technology and working on helping to build new things with it. I know of people in other fields now who are looking to transition in, or who have only recently done so and are fired up about creating a better future. I hope that this latter group will prevail and the former group will eventually wither away.

@bentossell I really don't have a favorite. They're all great in so many different ways. I think one that sticks out for me simply because of how different it was was the episode with Roya Mahboob, Afghanistan's youngest female tech entrepreneur. She's a serial entrepreneur, and one of her ventures was a blogging platform that paid the users based on how many views their blog posts would get. A lot of women don't have bank accounts in Afghanistan and for the women that did, oftentimes their families would take the money they had earned, so they had difficulty paying their users. They eventually turned to Bitcoin. Although this story didn't make it into my podcast, she told it at a conference I was at: One of the bloggers had an abusive husband, but after she began earning in bitcoins, she was able to save her bitcoins and then divorce him.

One of my listeners wrote a comment that I shouldn't have interviewed her because she wasn't a "real" Bitcoin entrepreneur. I was like, wait -- this is someone whose business using Bitcoin actually had a real life-changing impact on their contractors' lives and isn't the kind of business that is making already wealthy people wealthier, and he thinks this isn't a real bitcoin business? It's arguably more significant than anything he might consider more "real."

@mzcoffman The biggest takeaway is just that everyone in this space (except Adam Back, Nick Szabo, etc.) was doing something different before. Everyone in crypto (well, the serious people/my podcast guests) is building some new future that exists in their imaginations and that I think they believe is better than our world today. There are no rules, we are making up the rules, and so if you are in the space or want to get involved, just show up, bring your best ideas, and start building.

@valdean It's actually the opposite -- not every media company has the same policy as Forbes, so I realized once I left that as I began to freelance for other outlets, I would probably need to sell my coins. My intention after I left was to focus on some bigger writing goals, but a couple freelance assignments came up earlier than I expected, so I'll actually be selling/donating/giving away my holdings shortly. What I'll likely have to do eventually, for reporting purposes, is have the company I started buy small amounts that I can use for research. But for me to able to write for any publication I want to, I shouldn't hold any personally.

@sassal0x This is easily one of the most endlessly fascinating questions in the crypto space to me. I would say that it's probably the big question we're going to see play out over at least the next five years, if not the next 10. So far, we've seen what a completely decentralized, off-chain approach can be with Bitcoin. Some people think that works, others think it doesn't. We're seeing now that Ethereum, which is a slightly more centralized approach with off-chain governance (and Vitalik might say it's somewhat transparent but I think given the various changes at the top of the foundation that happened in a closed process, to the point where insiders weren't even aware of how Aya was chosen to the head the foundation, that's debatable), is still facing major governance questions. I used to think that the ETH/ETC split separated groups that weren't naturally aligned -- the people who believe in immutability vs. those who don't -- but apparently, there now a new group who felt the fork after the DAO was OK but are now objecting to any further forks. So, how well the Ethereum model works is still being tested. Then, with on-chain governance, we don't have much in the wild to point to yet -- at least nothing that's been tested in a major way. I had an interesting conversation with Olaf where I said I wondered if on-chain governance would just continually divide communities as they get entrenched in their point of view and lead to many, many forks, but he said as long as they believe in the legitimacy of the process, he doesn't think that will happen. Time will tell.

@laurashin Agreed! Governance is literally the rabbit hole within the crypto rabbit hole and I'm sure it's going to be one of the biggest themes for blockchains over a longer period of time. It always reminds me of how a religion will 'fork' into different denominations - it's just human nature!

@Dogetoshi The crypto space moves extremely quickly. While I've been obsessed with this topic for almost three years now, it's taken me a while to realize that not only is the wider world so much more interested, but I now face a lot more competition than I used to. (I attribute my delayed realization to the fact that I don't watch TV.) I realized if I wanted to maintain my lead, I needed to do some things quickly during this window when my three year advantage will still mean something. Right around the time that I realized in a big way that I had a lot more competition, I also realized that because the downloads on my podcast has grown such a crazy amount, I could basically support myself with that with fewer hours of work a week than I was doing with my full-time job. That would free up time for my other writing goals. Because I started the podcast when I was a freelancer for Forbes, I owned the podcast from the start. That meant I didn't have to convince Forbes to let me keep the name or anything -- it was all mine from the beginning.

@Jon_Grinnell Its democratizing potential, although it's not clear if that will come to fruition or not.

@Cnoopy__ Maybe, but I've already sold ads for the middle, so not yet.

@Cnoopy__ I am Korean-American and proud of it, but unfortunately, I do not understand what you wrote except I see my last name in Korean letters! Ha.