Code Is Law

- There is an absolute crime epidemic

in the cryptocurrency space.

If a founder just calls the police when a hack occurs,

they're really just wasting valuable time by doing so.

They call me in to get that money back.

It's best that I remain anonymous.

You don't always know who's doing the attacking out there.

It is incredible that if you do turn on the news,

you see breaking news,

someone stole $450 from the cash register

of the local 7-Eleven,

and on the same day,

someone stole $25 million from a protocol

and you'll never hear about it.

When someone steals money,

there is a time sensitivity to figuring out who did that.

Time really matters in this case.

They're gonna hide, they're gonna disappear.

People think it's not really real

because it's internet money or whatever.

This is real money.

It's real theft, it's real criminals.

It becomes, catch me if you can.

My guest today is Griff Green.

Who's the-

actually I can call you

the representative of the DAO, right?

- I mean, since it's a decentralised organisation,

I guess anybody's a representative of it.

I'm definitely in it and I know it pretty well.

Honestly, we were not prepared

to be the largest crowd-fund ever.

I see $160 million in this thing as a huge honey pot,

and I don't want it to get attacked.

I was originally a chemical engineer,

and I didn't really like that profession.

When 2009 came around

and layoffs came, I was like, pick me, pick me.

I really wanted to live my ultimate truth,

and discover what the truth is in the world.

And it's just feels like we're controlled

by so many stories.

How you're supposed to live, put your money in the bank.

I didn't trust the banks,

and I just felt that like

there's so much to see in the world.

I can explore other areas and see what I like.

This is the last time

I will be seeing Seattle skyline at sunset.

Goodbye Seattle.

I just lived in a van for a while and it's great.

I went full on hippie, right?

I'm rejecting society, I'm selling everything I own.

You go to a vegetarian like, yoga camp,

and you're gonna meet people that are like me.

I was living off physical gold and silver,

and my buddy was storing it under his bed

and he would cash it out,

and then wire money to me wherever I was in the world.

Because I didn't want to contribute to the banking system

that was causing so much pain in the world.

Especially post 2008,

there was just bad vibes, real bad vibes.

When I went to Thailand and had a Thai massage,

oh my god, I was blown away.

I loved it,

I loved it.

So, I became a massage therapist.

I actually had really nice clientele.

It's like $200 a massage,

but my wrists were starting to hurt (laughs)

and also I was not making that much money.

I saw a Trace Mayer video in 2011,

and I think Bitcoin was around $5

and I was like, this stuff is so cool,

it's like super cheap to transact.

And then it had with it, this like, anarchist vibe,

and so I traded $1,500 worth of gold,

and $1,500 worth of silver for $3,000 in Bitcoin.

Then Bitcoin was going up like 200%, 300%.

Just like, what is this stuff?

This is crazy.

And I ended up with 24K

and I was like, my God, I could live off this for two years.

And the more I read, the more value aligned I was.

The biggest problem with banks is the top-down control.

They can freeze my accounts,

they can take the money that's in there.

You know, it's not really my money.

If I send a Bitcoin transaction to someone,

they're gonna get it.

No one can stop it, it's decentralised.

There's no one person or one group that you can go to

and say, turn off your computers,

and the Bitcoin will go away.

I was obsessed.

Bitcoin hijacked my brain,

and I just couldn't think about anything else.

So, I ended up breaking up with my girlfriend,

because she was always wanting my attention

and all I wanted to do was learn more about crypto.

- Bitcoin is definitely the original currency,

you can send and receive money, that's it.

And then Ethereum is very much seen as its main competitor.

Ethereum was created

so that we could build smart contracts.

A lot of smart contracts work like a vending machine.

You send money in and you get something out,

and they have certain rules.

You'd have to use Ether, the currency of Ethereum,

to make a smart contract do something,

whatever it's programmed to do, like a vending machine,

but a vending machine for anything.

- And once they're on Ethereum, what makes them unique,

is that they're no longer

under the control of the developer.

- I was looking into companies in crypto,

who was very tight in the Ethereum space,

with a lot of legitimacy,

Christoph Jentzsch.

Hi, my name is Christoph.

- I was sending countless emails

Griff Green contacted us.

He said, I love what you're doing, I would like to join.

For me, he looked like a funny hippie

who loves life and enjoys it.

And eventually he replied,

he was like, sure, you can come work with us.

I was like, oh my God, it's so cool.

or to Slock something with like the new wallet.

That means, to lock something up,

which you could open by a payment.

With Ether or an Ethereum channel,

I could give the machine something like a bank account,

so it could receive payments completely independently.

The humble lock or Slock.

A Slock can be used with an Ethereum contract

to open anything.

For example, this Slock powered door,

can provide access to an office or rental apartment.

I founded it together with my brother and Stefan Tual,

at the end of 2015.

- And in the beginning we just had the idea.

- As any startup, you need money.

I tried to look at the phone book,

called every VC I could find there.

Some of them gave me an appointment to pitch it,

everybody hated it.

Like there are other smart door locks out there,

what's better with yours?

Well, we are decentralised.

Okay, what benefit does this have for the customer?

Well, it works without us.

Okay, it was like, they didn't get it at all.

Like the VCs, no interest, didn't get it.

Only the ecosystem around Ethereum

could understand the value of such a thing.

So, maybe let's go into

raising from the ecosystem.

They're not VCs, so how to do it?

So, this is how it started.

- So, that's why we created the DAO.

DAO is a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.

- The DAO was a venture capital fund, more or less.

- Simply a smart contract on Ethereum,

where you could send Ether to it,

and then you would get a token, just like a vending machine.

The more tokens you have, the more voting rights you have.

And all of the money that was sent to create those tokens,

stayed in that DAO,

in the smart contracts of the DAO,

it didn't go anywhere else,

and the token holders had control of it.

The most important key

and that's the name of

Decentralised Autonomous Organisation is,

there is no hierarchy.

And this decentralised approach

means all decisions have to be made by all the token holders.

- This was the decision to note this global DAO.

This was aligned with the spirit and the ecosystem.

Nothing like this has happened before.