I'm David Johnston. Managing Director of the Decentralized Applications Venture Fund. Ask Me Anything.

[LISAM]

Which digital currency (litecoin,dogecoin, peercoin etc) do you think will be the biggest competitor to bitcoin in 5 years

[rogerver]

Hi David,

Thank you for all your wonderful contributions to this space!

1. What authors or books had the biggest impact on your world view?

2. Can you ever imagine yourself working on anything other than the crypto-currency / smart contract space, and if so, what would that be?

[DJohnston]

Which digital currency (litecoin,dogecoin, peercoin etc) do you think will be the biggest competitor to bitcoin in 5 years

I know Charlie Lee from the conferences and meetings over the past few years so I'll say litecoin : )

Dogecoin is interesting because it offered the first good tipping application for digital currency and did a good job of handling micro payments. Though I believe Change Tip has largely ported this advantage to the bitcoin blockchain ecosystem. https://www.changetip.com/ I expect this to be a larger trend. That is experimentation in other blockchains, side chains, higher layers and when possible that advance will be ported in one way or another back to the bitcoin blockchain or at least anchored into its strong security model.

Peercoin is interesting because it was one of the first digital tokens to popularize the proof of stake consensus model. https://www.peercoin.net/ Many others are now building on this earlier work to develop more robust proof of stake systems, this will certainly be an area of long term interest.

Though again its clear to me that bitcoin has won the network effect when it comes the payments / currency use case, the fact that these other tokens developed strong community followings is due to their differences on confirmation times, tipping, or consensus that makes them interesting, not necessarily that they do or will ever "compete" with bitcoin as a payment / currency network.

Though I suppose its possible if bitcoin developers made enough poor decisions in its technology development over time, as to severely limit its use as a peer to peer cash system, then naturally another system that had not placed such limitations on its own development would over time be preferred by users. In other words its bitcoin's use case to lose when it comes to payments, digital cash, and trustless global value transfer.

[DJohnston]

Hi David,

Thank you for all your wonderful contributions to this space!

1. What authors or books had the biggest impact on your world view?

2. Can you ever imagine yourself working on anything other than the crypto-currency / smart contract space, and if so, what would that be?

Roger,

Thanks for the kind words and the great quality questions.

1. When I was young, reading 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 had a strong impact on my world view around the dangers of centralized institutions, censorship, and the effects of group think.

As I grew older I began delving into the writings and talks by those including, Murray Rothbard regarding Libertarian thought, Ron Paul regarding the corruption inherent in the fractional reserve fiat based monetary system, and Stefan Molyneux regarding the cancerous effects of creating monopolies on force and courts.

Above all else for me David Friedman's classic 1989 book "The Machinery of Freedom" http://www.amazon.com/The-Machinery-Fre ... 0812690699 stands out as the seminal book that convinced me there were no areas of human endeavor that could not be improved and historically had been improved by competition, including courts, jurisdictions, laws, policing, defense and any other type of service or product. There for the ultimate conclusion to the question of politics was to allow for over lapping intra-jurisdictional competition for all services and products including education, health care, roads, arbitration, protection, emergency response, and defense.

2. I foresee myself spending a lot of years in the blockchain, smart contract, and immutable record space. This area combines so many of my interests in human ethics, emerging technology, financial reform, and I believe this industry will grow as the technology is ever more widely adopted to encompass virtually every field, from internet identity / security to the world's vast systems of public and private records. Anywhere an application can benefit from mathematically enforced honesty, real time auditing, and global interoperability, the blockchain will be of great use in improving that system. That's a massive opportunity which will take the better part of the next decade or two to play out around the world.

With that said, through out my career I have pursued the technology trends where I thought I could make the greatest difference and contribution. From 1997 to 2006 that was the early internet, from 2006 to 2012 that was renewable energy and biotechnology, from 2012 to 2015 that has been bitcoin and blockchain technology. So if in 5 or 10 years I feel I've made every contribution I can to the blockchain space and it has become entirely common place, universal and ubiquitous as the internet has today, than I'm sure I'll seek to make a difference in other long term meaningful fields of technology.

For example I've long carried an interest in artificial intelligence, but my attempts to enter the field have been too early or it has become clear much larger players such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon are making substantial advances, and thus it isn't clear where I can add substantial novel value. Or for example I have had a life long passion for space commercialization and colonization, however when I've crunched the numbers it was clear the massive capital costs involved really limit the possibilities of innovation in that field, making it too early for me to make a real contribution. Though Elon Musk's work with Space X has done amazingly well at reducing the cost to low earth orbit by almost an order of magnitude from 15 years ago ($1,500 USD per pound, from $10,000 USD per pound). If he is able to further reduce the cost to orbit another order of magnitude, say $100 per pound to low earth orbit, than a new window will open for real innovation in that field. I also follow genetics and robotics, but I have not seen an obvious path to making contributions in those fields.

[TonySwish]

David,

First of all, thank you so much for the very kind words about Augur, they are well appreciated and our team is absolutely ecstatic by the reception we have had.

For those who aren't aware, I am involved in Marketing and have been with Augur throughout 2015 in managing the crowdsale campaign and other marketing duties, in addition to working with BitPay as a digital marketing manager in 2014 and being responsible for some cool firsts and landmark campaigns. In this space, I see the marketing efforts by many projects to be severely lacking and I'm attempting to do everything I can to share the wisdom I have gained in the past few years.

Now that the long intro is out of the way, what other areas do you feel Blockchain-based startups are lacking in? Additionally, what resources would you recommended to help remedy these areas of weakness?

Thanks again!