On Episode 20 of The Agenda, hosts Ray Salmond and Jonathan DeYoung interview each other about their blockchain journeys, the future of crypto and more.
Podcast
Cointelegraph’s podcast The Agenda first launched back in December 2022, with the first episode exploring the ways crypto can help sex workers bypass bank censorship. Since then, the show has explored myriad topics, ranging from hacktivism and blockchain-powered mutual aid to the ways blockchain can be used to fight climate change and combat artificial intelligence misinformation.
On Oct. 4, The Agenda released its 20th episode — and to celebrate, co-hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond decided to interview each other to learn more about one another’s experience hosting the podcast, their blockchain journeys, their predictions for the future of Bitcoin
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Takeaways and lessons learned
To kick things off, DeYoung asked Salmond if he had learned anything new from hosting The Agenda. Salmond shared that from an investment standpoint, the show emphasizes the importance of focusing less on short-term token prices and more on a project’s long-term fundamentals — aka, “adjusting one’s horizons.”
“I think what a lot of these builders and founders and projects demonstrate to us on the podcast is that their primary concern is not the token price,” Salmond said. “And for people that support the project, perhaps they should look beyond the token price too and see what sort of progress the project is making in its mission statement.”
Related: How blockchain takes the electronic music industry to a whole new level
In return, Salmond asked DeYoung what first got him hooked on blockchain technology. DeYoung shared that after starting at Cointelegraph, he realized that the significance of decentralization of crypto was a broader extension of the principles he learned to be true while working in the area of community disaster resilience.
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“When you bring control to the community level and communities organize locally, people are more prepared for disasters, more resilient for disasters, and are able to respond and recover better from disasters,” DeYoung shared, adding:
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“When I started to think about that from the lens of decentralization, then it sort of started to click as to the whole crypto ethos is a much broader way of looking at this specific issue of community resilience and applying it just on a much larger scale, or applying it to different things instead.”
The future of crypto
Both Salmond and DeYoung were curious about each other’s vision for what the future of crypto will hold. DeYoung believes that mass adoption is inevitable, given that all the signs have been pointing in that direction for a while now. However, he cautioned that crypto is at risk of being co-opted by powerful interests, as often happens with new technologies.
“A realistic, maybe long-term vision for crypto would be something akin to how the internet is operated now, where there are a few centralized infrastructure providers, where everybody is using it or a lot of people are using it in some form or another without even realizing or without understanding how the back-end technology works,” said DeYoung. “I think there will always be radical implementations of blockchain, just as there is of the internet, but I feel like it might get sort of sanitized as time goes on.”
Salmond, for his part, agreed that crypto would go mainstream and challenged the idea that another crypto “bubble” would pop anytime soon. “We are not in a bubble in crypto right now, not even close,” he argued. “The wand has not even been dipped into the soapy solution that someone would then hold and blow in to create a bubble.”
He added that while he doesn’t believe Bitcoin will replace the dollar as an international reserve currency, corporations and governments around the world are still likely to adopt it:
“I do think that you will continue to see Bitcoin come onto corporate balance sheets and that you’ll see sovereigns also begin to put Bitcoin into their sovereign wealth funds or into their treasuries.”
To hear more from DeYoung and Salmond’s conversation— including their perspectives on how the crypto space has evolved, their dream blockchain projects and more — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!