12: Vitalik Buterin - The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine
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Grammarly. Easier said, done. Hello, you've found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm sitting here today with Vitalik Buterin, the leader and founder of the Ethereum world of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. Welcome to the portal. Thank you. It's good to be here, Eric. It's terrific to have you. Now, in general, when I see you interviewed, immediately everybody goes straight to cryptocurrencies and Ethereum.

But one of the things that I found fascinating about your story is that in order to be a good steward of this new and emerging economics, you've actually applied yourself a great deal to standard and regular economic theory. And I was curious...

If I understand correctly, you dropped out of college after a year. You're self-taught in economics, but you've taken a real interest in understanding how markets and economic theory work. Is that a fair description? Yeah, I think so. And economics has been of interest for me since...

Definitely for a long time. I mean, when I discovered Bitcoin back in 2011 and I was still in high school, it was this kind of interesting confluence of...

ideas that I was already pretty attracted to. So of open source culture, that was something that a good friend from high school, Christopher Ola, had already indoctrinated me with really well. The mathematical and cryptographic aspects also

libertarianism in Austrian economics was kind of the zeitgeist of the Bitcoin space at the day. And those were ideas that I definitely found philosophically quite attractive at that time. And I was definitely curious and I read a bunch of books and read the Austrian economics canon because that's what the Bitcoin people were talking about all day. I

read some kind of behavioral economics literature, Ariely Kahneman and Chia Dini and all of those people just because I knew that I had to read other stuff for balance. And

And also economics itself is a pretty mathematical kind of subject. Well, kind of, right? It's on the borderline because it's kind of both mathematical and you got your curves and your derivatives and your intersections, but also humanities, right? It's really at this intersection of both...

figuring out how to apply these models to specific cases and also trying to figure out which models are really correct in the first place. The first question you can't answer with math, but the second question you really can't and you need

other kinds of thinking as well. This is an area of my own interest because the way I see it, economics is odd in a way that very few people I think have appreciated in that if we take what could be argued to be our two greatest ideas in scientific, uh, scientific man, let's say one would be sort of the geometric dynamics of, um,

Physics and economics has been constructed to be an as-if physics if you will and on the other hand it inherits from The theory of selection you could say that markets are the continuation of systems of selective pressures by other means and so what happens when our two greatest ideas Touch each other and they do it in a place which

has very bizarre properties by my way of thinking. That is that economists are on the one hand very rigorous thinkers and are also very susceptible to what we might call political economy and distorted thinking. Does that ring true to you? Yeah, definitely. There's...

definitely this kind of combination of... On the one hand, you have these mathematical formulas, and on the other hand, these assumptions. And often, the assumptions can be pretty well hidden, and they're kind of difficult to see at first glance. And it really can be subtle, right? So one of the arguments that...

economists tend to put forward is basically like mutually beneficial transactions are beneficial and so like we should not interfere with them right like if I have a Klein bottle and I want to sell you the Klein bottle you're willing to pay five dollars then I clearly value it at less than five dollars you value it at more than five dollars therefore the transaction's on net good and like I therefore I should give you the bottle and you should give me the money and that's what we would do but at the

The reasons why that sometimes breaks down are in many ways more subtle. First, you have monopoly issues. If I'm the only person selling Klein bottles, then I might want to sell them at a higher price than you'd be willing to accept because I want to extract more value. And

Sometimes the things that matter most to society aren't things that we can transfer between people from one person to another, like wine bottles, but public goods. And the biggest public good of all is the idea. And an idea, well, if I have an idea and I give you the idea, I still have the idea. So it's...

that once you release it, it's out there and there isn't this kind of property that, you know, should we just pause just briefly to talk about what a public good is for the audience? Yeah. Um, so public good is technically defined within economics. Many people have an intuitive idea as something which is, as you're stating, has this property of inexhaustibility, uh, uh,

And then the other attribute would be excludability, which is... Non-excludability for public goods. Sorry, non-excludability. Sorry, the attribute of excludability is used to define a public good. So if something is...

inexhaustible and Inexcludable then it has this weird property that even hardline economists Would agree that the market may fail to price in fact will fail to price the value to society of that object So there is an admission within economics that there are zones of failure, right? Well, I guess the kind of

the big kind of rethinking that needs to happen is that like there's a long been this kind of zeitgeist that private goods like things that i have and if i give it to you i don't have it and you have it are the norm and public goods are a rare exception but like really public goods are pretty darn important right like if we didn't have public goods then we'd be trading sticks and bear pelts and we'd basically still be cavemen like they're basically a

Well, like an army would be a public good. Yeah, yeah. Well, armies are interesting because they're kind of, to us, in a medium scale context, they're a public good. And in a large scale context, they're a public bad because if everyone's armies were forced to be cut down by a factor of 10, we'd all be better off. So economics is really subtle that way, especially once you have kind of two layers of scale at play.

Sure. Now, one thing that I worry a lot about that almost nobody seems to join me in is that in our mutual world, I don't know what to call it, of people who are experimenting with what

I would say the mainstream would consider far out ideas like radical life extension, cryptocurrencies as potentially being rivalrous with sovereign currencies. But in our world, we talk a lot about the abundance economy and a world of abundance. And I'm terrified of a world of abundance because

One of the properties that software has had is that it has replaced physical goods and services, which have these attributes, they are not public, with small files. And when a small file is not encrypted, it has the attributes of a public good and therefore value and price can chasm.

That's terrifying because then this weird thing of markets, which allows us respite from dictatorship and somebody directing our activities and allows us to self-direct goes away because things can't be priced accurately.

Does that have any purchase on your thinking? Yeah. So I think you've definitely kind of struck at a very important point. So I think my own framing of the point is slightly different. So I think, first of all, start off by realizing that private property and things is not something that fell out of the sky. It's a social technology. It's that we have...

we have these norms that basically say, "Oh, we will create this kind of mapping from objects to people, and if an object is mapped to you, then you're allowed to do basically whatever the hell you want with it, and other people cannot do anything with it without your permission." And if that concept did not exist, then physical objects would be public goods, right? Because, like,

If there's a Klein bottle over here, the Klein bottle would be there, but like really anyone could take it. And if you produce Klein bottles, then like you're not producing something for yourself, you're producing something for pretty much the first person who comes along and grabs it.

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Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash insightful. oracle.com slash insightful. So property rights, right, are this kind of social technology that helps make private good economies tractable. And we could consider making social technologies to make public good economies tractable, right? Like the existence of public goods by itself is...

And it's not good or bad, like arguably it's even good because it means that people can cooperate with each other on such large scales. The bad thing is that we don't really have good tools for handling it, and specifically don't have good tools for handling it that manage to simultaneously avoid both not giving good results and basically being centralized and dictatorial. And so this is where...

My interest in radical exchange comes in. So this was this movement that was started by Glenn Weil a couple of years ago when he wrote this radical markets book. And he advanced some of his proposals like Harberger taxes and quadratic voting were the ones that are kind of the most popular. And...

The core idea behind the idea is basically is like let's create structures of norms and incentives that

Try to have the best properties that we can get out of markets, but do so without basically economically breaking in the way that we know existing property rights systems do once you enter a world where everything that you build just inherently affects millions of people.

Well, this is, this is an interesting perspective. You of course are famous for implementing this Ethereum protocol, but before we ever get to computer protocols, there are sort of legal and structural protocols that we impose upon ourselves in the form of government and markets that are subordinate to government. And there's a weird way in which you may start a process by which you write down rules,

uh for how a society should function but once those rules are written down you may discover all sorts of unintended properties of that rule set and there's a real question can we actually unhook ourselves from the killer app that is capitalism or american democracy and uh if we start to realize that that app is running out of control

I guess for myself as a social technologist, and I definitely don't think that we should be overturning entire countries with the new mechanisms overnight. I think... And I wasn't insinuating... Oh, definitely. I think that's...

figuring out how to kind of solve grand problems of humanity is a long-term goal, but I mean, short-term goals are there's little things that we can make better, right? So...

And this is actually part of why I find cryptocurrency and blockchains interesting, because they are, in a lot of ways, this ideal ground for economic experimentation of different types. So to give one concrete example, so one of the ideas that Glenn Weil and myself have come up with and are pushing forward is something called quadratic funding. And

The way that quadratic funding works is roughly this, right? So you have a central pool of funding and you could imagine this coming from a government, you could imagine this coming from wealthy donors, you could imagine it just being put together by some crypto economic protocol, it could come from anywhere.

And then you allow people to basically set up projects and you let people say, I have a project. Here is something that I'm doing. And if you like this, then you can donate to me.

and you let people donate to the project. And then the core of the mechanism is basically that if there's a project that multiple people donate to, so there's some project you donate to it and someone else donates to it as well, then your donation doesn't just benefit you, it also benefits the other person. And the other person's donation doesn't just benefit them, it also benefits you.

And so to kind of counteract that kind of market failure, the mechanism basically says, well, we're going to multiply the effect of your donation by two and multiply the effect of the other person's donation by two. And so now both of your incentives are kind of aligned with the whole.

And you extend this mechanism so instead of supporting two people, it supports an arbitrary number of people. And you kind of calculate these subsidies across all possible pairs of people. And what you get is this formula that basically says you let people donate to different projects. You look at how many people donated and how much money you've donated. And based on this, from the central pool of funding, you give this extra subsidy. And so it basically is like a market for public goods.

Right. And in the Ethereum ecosystem, there is something called a Gitcoin grants where we've basically started trying to use this mechanism to fund public goods inside the Ethereum ecosystem. Right. So this could be implementations of the Ethereum protocol. It could be scaling solutions. It could be wallets. It could be educational resources.

And we've had a test around recently with about $200,000 in this central matching pool, and it recently finished. You can go to getcoin.co/grants to see the results. We got contributions from hundreds of people, and the results it gave were actually pretty reasonable.

So I think Ethereum could have a lot of value in just being a test bed for decentralized governance and decentralized public good funding infrastructure of this kind. Well, I think that that's fascinating. I guess one of the ways in which I would understand that is...

you know when my wife who's an economist and i talk about this stuff we often talk about a market democracy has these two voting systems one is one dollar one vote and the other is one person theoretically anyway even if that's on it only in the bridge yeah and like

liberal democracy does this horrible thing of like treating these as opposite poles where something is either one or the other and they're, and they're often fighting each other when really everything's a spectrum. And I like that a lot. I mean, another thing that we've been discussing recently, um, and this again is sort of joint with, with Pia Milani is, um,

thinking about the Chicago approximation where you've got some reality that's incredibly nonlinear and complicated. And then weirdly, you know, one of these famous instances where the map is not the territory, you take this incredibly simplified world where agents have this properties. You can't even believe you would ascribe to a human being where you call it homo economicus and you, it's perfectly rational and it,

It has all of these characteristics like an automaton that only makes rational decisions. And then you impose that like through law and economics programs and suddenly you've distorted your society by taking the map as the territory so seriously that you don't realize that you're destroying something and distorting it. Yeah. No, that's definitely a...

Like, it's one approximation, and...

I mean, we're never going to have approximations that are perfect because the world is just so... I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, and the world is just so complicated and so even rapidly changing in the 21st century. Like, all approximations are bullshit, but you have to find a couple of good ones that work reasonably well and make progress for us. And I think that one of the things that's unfairly done to cryptocurrencies is that we expect them to solve all of the problems that already cropped up

Yes. In our forms of governance and our forms of currency and exchange and court systems. And that what we should be asking of them is to be improvements or to augment already existing systems. Now, one of the odd things about governance is we could view you as in some sense starting a rival virtual country that has a legal system because the Ethereum system

I don't know what to call it, network platform protocol. Yeah, it controls coins and it has the right to reassign those coins. And not only that, but it has a stand-in for the legal system in the form of what are called smart contracts. Mm-hmm.

Normally, we have this concept in governance, I guess it goes back to Weber, that a government is supposed to be a monopoly on violence, which is an odd definition that you recover the concept of government from monopolizing violence and then you sort of unbind

unearth and unpack all of the features of government from that one generating function. In some sense, a cryptocurrency and smart contracts derive from math rather than violence.

Well, they derive from math and social consensus, right? Well, I love the fact that I was going to get to that, but... Yeah, I know, because this is important, right? Because like, for example, you know, you have the Bitcoin blockchain, and then you have the Litecoin blockchain, which operates under almost exactly the same set of rules as the Bitcoin blockchain. And yet the Bitcoin blockchain has a $100 million market cap, and the Litecoin blockchain has a $3 billion market cap or something like that and much less usage. So...

Like blockchains are definitely not just math and technology. Math and technology are the substrate and maybe in the same way that the military is like the substrate of keeping a country together. But the extended military, including police forces. Exactly. But like they're the substrate, but they're not the country, right? The country is the community.

Well, and this goes to what I would love to get into with you, which is the way in which different utopian dreams collide in the space of cryptocurrencies. So, for example, there are some dreams that may sound more like what I assume you may be active in the effective altruism community. Is that a possibility? Yeah.

which tries to figure out how to do the most good, to do good efficiently rather than sanctimoniously. There are other people who have this idea of I just want a retreat from other human beings and I want to be left alone. I don't want to be taxed. I don't want to be told what to do. Very strong libertarian.

Sometimes those people are the same people. There's two kinds of libertarians. Well, there's many ways to split libertarians into two kinds. But there's the leave me alone type and then there's the kind of conquer the world type, right? The kind that kind of relishes seeing fiat currencies be destroyed and replaced by Bitcoin. And it's kind of...

you know, creating a thousand year kind of reign of sound money that, and I mean, I generally have this kind of instinct that like when someone says that like we should impose a lot of short-term disruption and harm on the entire world for the sake of some nebulous long-term gain, that's something to be skeptical of. But so I'm definitely-

You're using it in an extreme form of understatement. Yeah, yeah. And I guess... So I'm definitely not in the camp that kind of actively relishes fiat currencies being destroyed. But there's... And I definitely don't think that all Bitcoiners do. There's some that do see it as kind of...

something that's supposed to coexist and something that's supposed to provide a check and balance against the government's monopoly on issuing money without replacing it entirely. So there's definitely enough different visions within individual communities. There's different visions between different communities. And it's not just visions about what cryptocurrency should do to the world. It's also visions about

how cryptocurrencies should work internally and what they should do to each other. So in that sense, I guess, like,

Cryptocurrencies are interesting in blockchains, not just because of what they can do to the world, but also just as this kind of microcosm of the world all into themselves. We talk about virtual countries, but there's many virtual countries now. There's over 1,400 on CoinMarketCap, and they have some analog of... You do think of them as virtual countries. All models are bullshit, but some are useful.

Well, to the extent that a country is a sensible thing to claim. Yeah. So in that world where we're dealing with often very...

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Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash insightful. oracle.com slash insightful. Very radical individualism and a very strong sense that there is something wrong with the coercive aspect of a government. Do you worry that something that you have given birth to may start to behave in very...

Definitely. I mean, probably the closest that we've seen to things like this happening already would be the initial coin offering boom in 2017 and 2018.

And basically what happened there was that people saw that cryptocurrencies are something that could potentially hit a very high value. And so people started saying, oh, I'm raising money. Anyone come and give me $50 million and I'm going to build a cryptocurrency and I'm going to make it great and I'll turn your $50 million into $50 billion guaranteed. And

It's complicated, right? Because on the one hand, the possibility of raising money and using it to fund cryptocurrency development, it did a lot of good, right? And in general, the open source community, it kind of acutely suffers from this kind of public goods challenge that we talked about because open source software is...

a very public good. And we saw some very public kind of splats involving open source software being under-maintained, like the Cloudflare issues a couple years back when it turned out that an open SSL library was really, really under-maintained despite billions of dollars of value depending on it.

And with cryptocurrency, suddenly you can make things that are completely open source that through coins do have a funding mechanism. And this has massively accelerated the development of many kinds of cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and peer-to-peer networking, a lot of other things. But on the other hand, it's also given rise to this kind of speculation and

in many cases, the projects turn out to be outright fraudulent, right? But it's a really delicious and weird situation. I haven't asked you about it yet, but I presume that your net worth crashed a great deal, got run up, and then came back down. It did, yeah. And were you happy in any way about that? Relieved. Relieved. Yeah. So...

When right at the top of the big bubble, like in December 2017, when Bitcoin was hitting 20,000, ETH was hitting 1,400, I made this series of tweets that became somewhat famous within the space where I basically said,

The cryptocurrency space has reached half a trillion dollars. Does it deserve it? Do the things that it's actually accomplished hold a candle to the promises that the market is ascribing to it? And I mean, the subtext of my answer is not yet. And that was proven very right fairly quickly. But you didn't short it, did you? So...

I did get the Ethereum Foundation to sell about 70,000 ETH basically at the top, and that's doubled our runway now. And it was one good decision that had a lot of impact, but it did not short. I should say that I was weirdly somewhat relieved as well. I view that...

the innovation of decentralized transactions and the bit, you know, it's hard for me to say because I actually, I'm convinced that the blockchain should be an intermediate state and should not be the permanent version of decentralized computing. I agree. Okay. Um, but I thought that that was such an amazing innovation that you could have a locally enforced, uh,

without a centralized authority, but with a global ledger, which I see of it as a point of intellectual failure, that in some sense you're mirroring the transactions of the physical world. So for example, for those listening at home who don't have a visual here, Vitalik...

has several glass bottles next to him. Were he to give one to me, which he shouldn't do right now, but the idea would be that it would no longer be in his space and it would be in mine. And that property of Adams has been somewhat lost.

in Bitcoin and blockchain and Ethereum transactions. And this is like the concept of like money as a thing, right? The kind of scarcity, the 21 million limit. If I give you five coins, I have five less and you have five more. Right. And so the idea is that it's a, what you're doing is you're porting conservation laws into, from the physical layer into the logical layer. Right. And, and,

Yeah, and this, to some extent, reflects very deeply Austrian economic libertarian origins of the space way back in the end of 2009 to 2013 days. And creating digital gold was pretty much the...

And a digital payment system was the first use case. But I definitely think that we can and should be thinking about point systems that work in ways other than money. Well, I agree with that. And I also think that it isn't digital gold because...

As the saying goes, you know, gold or money has no stench and that the blockchain is this bizarre difference with the physical world in that it is a distributed ledger that may be somewhat anonymous, but it still gives the history. Like if I hand you a dollar and you don't have access to any particular ledger,

means of analyzing whose DNA is on that dollar, you have no idea where it's been. And that is violated by the current blockchain type implementations. So it isn't a complete port of the physical world into the digital, but it is an astounding one. And I guess I get very frustrated with the economics questions. Like, well, what's it good for? Where's the killer app? I mean, we have all of...

whatever's left of human civilization to figure out what this thing is meant to do. And I'm not very worried that we're not going to figure it out. I mean, we're going to figure it out sooner or later because a conservation law in digital space is just too valuable. Is that wrong? You worried at all about the search for...

Like, I just hate this question. You know, where's the killer app? And I'm thinking, chill out, man. This is an astounding intellectual achievement. Is that wrong?

Yeah, and I think there's definitely a long time to go. And I think the apps will come. The ones that are coming right now are basically kind of financial, but I think that's kind of true just in part because the existing financial system is just so ready and waiting there to be disrupted. But in the long term, there's...

Is disrupted a polite term for destroyed? You choose. Well, but I mean, there is something interesting here. You're 25 years old. Every bit of your adult life is post 2008. And to be 25 years old and in charge of a financial system

ecosystem to the extent that anyone is in charge of a theory. I mean, I don't want to claim that you are sitting there running and making all these decisions. That's an astounding thing that this has fallen to somebody whose adult life is post the crash. Do you think about that at all? That you don't have the same associations the rest of us do with markets when they were claimed to be working well.

Like during the era of the Great Moderation, supposedly, when volatility was banished. Yeah. You were what, 13? 12? Right. So one thing that I kind of only realized recently that I found interesting is that there aren't kind of two tribes here. There's three tribes, right? And what I mean by this is that there's...

The tribe that says markets are great. And there's the tribe that says markets are bad and we should move to more things that look like political mechanisms. But then if you look at kind of the zeitgeist that's kind of fairly popular in the cryptocurrency space, definitely even still now to a big extent, it's that markets are great, but

the thing that existed and exists like isn't markets. And so I guess like there's people who are pro market and who see kind of the existing financial system as being that. And there's people who are pro market and who see the existing financial system as being like yet another one of the perversions of that that needs to be overcome. Well, it's odd because I would love to fix our democracy. I'd love to fix our markets, but I'm,

I have to say, I believe that I have grown up in an approximately 50-year bubble, which the silent generation and then the boomers presided over. And my own read is that

because of their inability to figure out sufficient innovation to take over from the previously innovative system, that the world of human expertise has been almost completely contaminated by special pleading and political economy. So that many of us who don't have a particularly Austrian or libertarian bent, uh,

just sick to death of being lied to by people claimed to be Nobel laureates in economics. Yeah. Do you have any emotional connection to you? Hmm. Like, I feel like I'm lied to about almost, almost, you know, the doctors are lying. The lawyers are lying. The accountants are lying. The extraction companies are lying. And, and,

It's not because of a million different reasons. It's because growth ran out and our whole society is predicated on a need for economic growth. Yeah, no, there's definitely a lot of things that have changed in the system that's just not keeping up and doesn't understand that there is such a thing as keeping up. And it's like, hmm. So, like, one...

even Glenn talks about this, right? Like he talks about kind of the markets as social technology mentality versus the like basically end of history mentality. And I guess like the way that I, and I definitely saw this kind of zeitgeist 10 years ago that said kind of even more broadly than like markets versus other mechanisms. That's like,

things are 80% efficient and let's work to make them 95% efficient. Whereas the thing that's really going on is that things are 3% efficient and we should work hard on making them 6% efficient. Like if you kind of move away from the narrow context of like, I have something to sell and you have something to buy, which is pretty well optimized already, then there's

lots of these and a very big things that are happening that have just completely been missed and in technology and then of network effects and All and just generally kind of migrating from atoms to bits are definitely all a big part of it. Hmm. So Let's talk about something that's a little bit funny, which is if you start to replace Government as we were talking about it and you see it as a monopoly on violence You notice that very often there are

there's a very funny role played by organized crime. Now, of course, when we think about organized crime, we tend to get emotionally excited by it for whatever reason. We make lots of movies about it. It occupies the mind as something terrifying and alluring. And there's sort of two weird aspects to organized crime, one of which is

as a contract enforcement mechanism. In other words, you're gambling, so you don't have access to the regular court system. Now you have a gambling debt. And so just the way our government would put you in jail if you...

you know, started doing things, you couldn't fulfill all of your obligations and you were doing harm to lots of people and you couldn't be stopped. Um, organized crime has to do something. It can't maintain jails. Yeah. So it can put the hurt on somebody for means of contract enforcement. So it's, it's not looking to do violent things. It's looking to run illegal businesses for which there's demand. And then it has a problem of enforcement.

Then there's another part of it, which is violence as the product. So for example, extortion, it'd be a shame if anything were to happen to this lovely business that you're running.

is a veiled threat pay us or we're going to do harm to your business or you know contract killings and the like yeah are you worried that effectively by introducing parallel structures both in the form of currency and in the form of contracts smart contracts that are the sine qua non i guess of the difference between

Bitcoin and Ethereum. Right. That the killer app that is most likely to happen while the technology is still clunky and cumbersome and difficult is in the parallel space that either

You are going to replace organized crime as a place to do contractual business outside of the normal scope which could be a benefit because Organized crime still exists and is a bad thing because it uses violence and you would use math and in place of it or that it could actually be used to facilitate violence by you know using

Let's say prediction markets or something else to induce people to commit crimes where the committer, the committer of violence has unusual information about where the violence will be committed and therefore can profit from it.

It's definitely a worry that I and lots of people in the crypto space have had since the beginning. Though I do feel like at least so far I've been surprised. It feels like less of it has happened than we had expected. That's the thing. Now, what accounts for the idea that something that can be dreamt has mostly not occurred?

I definitely have a... Maybe it's a great thing about humans that we didn't realize that we're not nearly the horrible people we thought we were. Yeah, and I definitely have a couple of theories about this. So one of those theories is that, like, basically a lot...

a lot of things that people do and especially a lot of things that people do in the info sphere because like public goods are kind of chronically underfunded and all that rely really heavily on goodwill. And so, um,

You know, you have goodwill that if someone, if you pay someone to write some piece of software for your website, it's not going to include some bug. Yeah, some bug that'll steal people's money or tell the FBI where you are. If you create a system for enforcing agreements that they'll actually get enforced, then...

Even on internet forums, they depend on a lot of volunteer labor for things like moderation. And if you create a group that just goes fundamentally against the vast majority of people's values, then it's just going to be hard to find volunteer effort for that sort of thing. And...

This, so that's probably the big reason I think why so far we don't really see kind of, you know, complicated decentralized structures being created to facilitate like black markets for killing people and so forth. We'll start off with something more mundane, like a numbers racket. Right. So a numbers racket would probably be a much simpler application of

So what do you mean by numbers racket here? Well, something that takes the place of a lottery where some, let's say, some naturally occurring number that would be printed in a newspaper and presumably nobody has the influence over what number gets printed. Right. Constitutes the lotto draw. Yeah. Lotteries have existed on blockchain since the beginning. Yeah. Even...

there's definitely been this kind of sub-community of people that created these kind of provably fair Ponzi contracts where, you know, you have a smart contract and you can throw money in and as soon... Like, if you're the nth person to throw money in, as soon as two n people throw money in, you get, like, 1.9 back or something like that. And, like, this is just a fun...

game that people have made and participated in, even fully knowing what the economics of the thing are. So, yeah, and things like that have definitely happened. Though, I don't like...

Though, gambling is the sort of thing that there isn't this kind of 99% plus consensus that it's really horrible and evil, right? Because on the one hand, lots of people want to ban it, but on the other hand, people do it. And it's something that people see negative consequences of, but at the same time, it is something that people participate in and enjoy. Whereas the...

And then if extremely bad stuff like that, there's definitely this kind of, uh,

this kind of barrier between kind of things that are edgy versus things that are just so far over the edge. And for things that are kind of so far over the edge, like it is even with smart contracts and even with all of those things, it's still hard to coordinate those structures. And I think like the blockchain, like the blockchain's inability to directly read facts about the real world could even be a saving grace here because

Like because a blockchain can't directly read like whether or not something in the real world happened, it basically means that if you want to have some application, whether a prediction market or something else that does. So can we say a little bit more about the intellectual problem that you're touching? Sure. So the idea is that there may be something that's very perceptible to us about the real world, but we might naively think, well, the computer should be able to tell whether that happened

Or it didn't happen and that that's a surprisingly difficult thing to code up reliably so that the interface between the world of bits and bytes and the world of otherwise physical reality, which often we don't realize we're thinking about subjectively, that it's hard to maintain that interface so that the

in which the things that have happened in the real world can be definitely agreed upon without any kind of adjudication inside of the digital world. Right, yeah. I don't know how to say that well. Blockchains are fundamentally a programmatic medium. All they see is data that gets fed into them and what they can

compute as a result of that data. And so if you want to create a smart contract that says, if someone figures out what the prime factors of a big number are, pay them a reward, you can do that because prime factors are something that you can multiply together and verify. But if you want to have a smart contract that says,

if there's a hurricane in Sri Lanka, then pay 500 bucks. Then like, you can't do that on the blockchain itself. Cause like computer code has no idea what hurricanes are. It has no idea what Sri Lanka is. No, but it could, in that case, you could have a,

A designation that, you know, that the national... Correct. You can get data from third-party sources. And this is the thing that... Somebody else turns it into data. Exactly. This is the thing that a lot of applications are doing. But the thing that's important to keep in mind is that as soon as you do that, your smart contract is no longer fully trustless. Right. Right.

So there's this concept, which is like a utopian concept of a trustless legal system so that you don't have the messiness of humans anywhere in the system and you can have complete faith and confidence in the contract that you've struck. Yeah, right. And like outside of like basically giving bounties for solving math problems, like it's

not something that you can 100% achieve. So I can't necessarily ensure my vacation that if, uh, if I go all the way to, um, Argentina and the weather is terrible, um,

It pays out because we can't agree what terrible weather is right like you can create structures made out of individual participants that can try to and if align incentives to get people to kind of give to give correct results like you can have complicated and of contraptions involving people giving different answers and policing each other and rewarding people who give the same answer that other people have committed to and things like this but

like you can only try to approach the like the ideal of kind of correct truth like you can never 100% reach it now you started ethereum in 2014 2015 um started started end of 2013 i mean it launched in 2015 okay would you say let's use launch date as an artificial sure date would you say you are more or less excited emotionally hmm

than you were when it started. You've now been through, you've logged some miles here. I've definitely, definitely still excited. Um,

More excited. I think the main difference is kind of more definitely excited in the sense of four years... Well, definite as opposed to indefinite. Four years ago, it was about, hey, let's make this platform to try a bunch of really cool things. We have no idea what's going to happen, and let's just stick it out there. And now, like...

We know things about things that people are already doing. We know things about things that people want to do. And we also know more about what the limitations are. And so instead of just being this kind of extremely fuzzy dream of like, let's stick smart contracts and algorithms and kind of trust-less-ify everything. It's something that's kind of both more...

kind of moderate, but also kind of more like seeming much more like it, like it actually has a big chance of kind of transforming the world kind of precisely because it's kind of moderated to some extent. So you more, if I gave you a false three choices and by the way, smart people always hate these things. So feel free to break the model.

If I gave you a choice between saying, are you mostly excited about the technology and the amount of innovation? Are you mostly excited about the business opportunities for yourself? Or are you mostly excited about the way in which this could transform human life? Would that be an easy call? Or would you say I reject that decision tree? Some mix of the first and the third.

I don't know. I guess like the framing of business opportunities is definitely kind of never like this is weird. I mean, despite kind of even. I get the sense that you don't love money enough. Yeah, this is true. Okay. Hmm.

I mean, it's weird because for a long time... You have a lot of it. Yeah, well, I have a lot of it, and it's also even weirder because for a long time I subscribed to this kind of branch of economics that basically says that love of money is the best motivation for people to have. Sort of an Ayn Randian? Well, I'd say...

Like in that area. But I don't get that. I'll be honest. I just don't get that vibe. Right. I mean, I've definitely kind of shifted a lot over the years. I think my experience even within the crypto space itself has kind of given me a lot of new information to work with. Say more?

Like, basically, and this goes back to this kind of cryptocurrencies as a kind of microcosm of wider society thing, right? Like, if you're, like...

Basically, any movement, regardless of what the movement is for or what its goals are, to be succeeded needs to be sufficiently big. And once something is sufficiently big, it needs to have internal structure to coordinate and achieve its objectives, which means that...

It suffers from governance issues. It suffers from public goods issues. It suffers from conflicts with adjacent movements. It suffers from conflicts between its own values and its own desire to succeed and so on and so forth. And like it needs to come up with ways to answer like basically almost the same kinds of hard problems that the world as a whole is working on. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. When I look at this sort of world of people, maybe it had an epicenter in the Bay Area, though I think it's less true now, who are trying to figure out what is the future and how do we get there? There's a very clear sense that

people's creativity and their intelligence is correlated with their financial success, but it's not very tight. And so there's like an embarrassment that, well, that person is super amazing and they're not doing all that well. This person somehow metabolized a tremendous amount. This is something that I've definitely kind of realized just from one of my travels. Like I've,

with a lot of kind of super famous people in different kinds of positions, which includes like some world leaders and includes some kind of leaders of like fields in cryptography. And...

You realize that people in these positions, they are impressive, but they're not super amazing, godlike impressive. Some of them are. Some of them are, but then there's also super amazing, godlike impressive people that just don't get that much recognition at all. That's sort of what I'm trying to get at. If you hang around with musicians, very often...

You'll have somebody who's a super famous musician. I'll say, you want to know who's really good? And they'll tell you somebody you've never heard of. And you say, well, that person's a musician's musician. Exactly this, yes. Right. And so, you know, if I gave the name of...

who are famous for being, let's say physicists. They're very often the people on television as physicists, but they would all point to some guy who doesn't give a lot of interviews and say, well, that's the top guy. Exactly. Like basically like social status, like is, uh,

predicted by competence multiplied by like basically publicity skill. And that's half correlated with competence for obvious reasons. Like those people also know the people that have the real competence. And that's one of the things that I've always found really interesting about people who have this diehard belief that markets produce justice, which is, I do think that success in markets is somewhat correlated or has been with the

things like productivity, but it's also correlated sometimes with how predatory somebody can be or how lucky they happen to be at a particular moment. And one of the questions that I have is if you're really interested in innovation, which is what I sort of pick up as one of the main things

Um, how does something like Ethereum give us a possibility to revitalize innovation after what many of us consider a period of relative stagnancy outside of the areas of computation and communication, which everybody knows have exploded. Hmm. Do you think about how Ethereum can mediate a new Renaissance, a new generative age?

You sort of talked about it a little bit. Definitely. And I think there's kind of Ethereum as a platform for experiments in governance and public goods funding is one thing I mentioned. And education is another thing that I kind of talk about. And obviously we do. I mean, I have a lot of these blog posts on Vitalik.ca and other forums. And...

One of the big challenges, for example, is that in internet educational resources in general, there's basically two kinds, right? There's papers and Wikipedia and basically things that are technically accurate, but they're just horribly not understandable at all, and we should not be forcing people to even try reading them. And then there's pop-sci literature, which is very accessible, but it's often just...

actively wrong in really horrible ways. And I personally, even before Ethereum, like I did Bitcoin Magazine, for example, I've always tried to find this kind of middle gap, this way to explain, take concepts that are technical and expand them to a broader audience so they are more accessible.

And this to me has been important in part because I view accessibility of information about the technology as a precondition for even the decentralization of the space. If the thing technically runs on 50,000 computers but only 42 people know how it works, then your decentralization index isn't 50,000, it's 42.

and and so that's a very nice point yeah and so trying to kind of improve like even how we in the ethereum community and of work on innovation internally but so those are kind of things that and if

that happen in blockchains as a lab for trying out new things, kind of first for the blockchain space and then potentially export it to other things. And then we can also look at kind of blockchains as

something that can be used to improve and create better institutions. So like one of the Ethereum Foundation's researchers Vlad Zamfir, he actually got into Ethereum because he was looking at how to improve academic publishing. And like he saw things like, you know, the existing peer review mechanisms and how they were just very flawed in a bunch of ways. And he thought that like, hey, here's

potentially a platform that we could use to build something that does better. And like, that's one of his core interests and why he is even continuing to work on the technology. You know, I hadn't understood how insiders viewed peer review in an academic context until a finance professor got drunk at a party and said, uh, you know, that guy who's harassing you in your research and finance,

you don't know why he's doing it. I said, well, why do you think he's doing? He said, I know. He says, we've created a system where our fees are sky high to consult. And we do this by making the number of professors in our field small by controlling peer review. And so that effectively we are a conspiracy and restraint. And like this guy's just telling me straight out that this is a gating function to keep their consulting fees high.

And that this guy is going to do everything that they tell him to do because otherwise he can't come into the club and charge these rates. That sounds about right. Right. So that one of the app, another killer application. So you have one potential suite of applications which have to do with facilitating illegality. Some of that might regard result in net reduction of harm because you could replace violence with math. Yes. On the other hand, uh,

a place where you could have a really positive effect is political economy, whereby removing, um, the human ability to act badly. Um, you effectively create a much fairer, more representative world. Exactly. Yeah. Uh,

What do we do? So you have an interest in... The two fields that I find Wikipedia can't explain to any normal human being are theoretical math and physics. Even biology, you can sort of guess what's going on because you have something concrete to think through. Yeah, but even biology, you've got to learn math to deeply crack it because otherwise you're just memorizing names of chemicals. Well, but you could...

I have a PhD in math. If I try to read a math paper one or two fields over from my own field, I will do less well with it than if I read a biology paper, even though I've taken no class in biology. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a difference between the level of math that you have to know to just...

because it's important for you as a philosopher. And that's about the level of math that I think you need, even to be good at biology, to be good at economics, to be good at a lot of things, right? It's understanding principles, even things like, for example, if you have a trade-off between X and Y, and right now you're optimizing entirely for X, and it's a smooth curve, then if you want a little bit of Y, then you can get your first bit of Y at almost zero cost of X, right? And that's just...

It's a property of continuous functions that from the maximum, the derivative starts at zero. And if you kind of just deeply kind of mentally grok about a couple hundred of these facts, the same way you deeply kind of mentally grok how to walk, then you get a lot. But then from there, there's also the frontiers. And often, I mean, the frontiers are less important. Yeah.

Well, so here's a weird thing I don't know how to bring up. When I try to understand crypto as a space, I'm always confronted by how incredibly Byzantine and impossible it is to understand all of the acronyms, all of the sub pieces of history. I mean, it's an incredibly fragmented experience in which I spend a long period of time just feeling moronic. Isn't it odd that like,

Ethereum itself suffers from this problem. It's hard to know what's going on. Yeah, it's definitely something that we want to fix. So, I mean, if you ever have suggestions on what specifically we can make more understandable, I'm always happy to hear those. Fantastic. Now, one thing that I think is really interesting is this episode that occurred in the Ethereum space in which you were faced with

a very serious question of leadership, uh, having to do with an emergency that you could have either allowed to follow the rules that had been previously specified in some sense, or could, where you could interject a certain amount of human intervention, but thereby letting people know that this was to some extent, um, not mediated only by rules and computers. Can you,

Can you say a little bit about this famous incident and describe it? So in 2016, there was this smart contract that a group called Solakit launched called the DAO. And DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. It's a term I came up with about three years before. And it basically means that

You can have a smart contract, this computer program that controls digital assets and encode a set of rules for an organization. And you can use this kind of smart contract basically as a replacement for things like companies.

And so Swacket decided to launch a DAO. And their DAO was intended to be basically a decentralized VC fund. So people could apply. The DAO would vote on which projects were worth investing in. So leaderless, rule-based, and virtual. Exactly. Yeah.

hit all the cypherpunk nodes that are in the right place. And the thing launched, and we were all expecting it during its initial fundraising phase, which was also an open public blockchain process, to maybe get $5 million. But then it got $5 million, and it got $10 million, and it got $20 million, it got $50 million, and $100 million. And then the price of ETH went up, and it got $200 million. And then...

When I was sitting at AF Friends. Was this at all alarming that it was so successful? After the 50 mark, I definitely kind of switched from excitement to deep apprehension. But, you know, it's a contract. Did you let on that you were feeling that way? A bit. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, so on June 17th, 2016, when I was in Shanghai at a friend's apartment, and it was about 15:30 something in the afternoon, I

saw a message in one of the Skype chats that I was in and someone basically saying, "Hey guys, look at the DAO. It seems like there's some money coming out of it." And so I checked on the public block explorer on the blockchain and I saw, "Oh look, it seems like about $2 million ETH has actually already been removed from the DAO and more ETH is slowly being drained over time."

And so I pinged the core developers and I asked, hey, is this normal? And at first I was thinking, okay, the alternative is unthinkable. There has to be a reasonable explanation for this. So you were locked into some sort of denial. For the beginning, yes. And...

The developers looked at it and over the next half hour as more and more people came online and started chattering with each other, it became clear that the unthinkable has actually happened. And I actually burned about 20 of my own ETH, like basically just

Dossing my the ethereum blockchain itself and just spamming it with transactions to try to and if slowly attacker Austin is denial of service. Yeah. Yeah, just spam the blockchain was not all of my listeners will know the terms Okay, so that the attackers transactions could not get in as quickly because the attackers transact the attacker could only withdraw something like a couple hundred ETH with every transaction so it was a slow process and

like in the hopes that the developers would find some way to plug the hole. Was that an intentional inefficiency or it was just that... It was not intentional. So in some weird way, the inefficiency was a good thing. Yes, it gets even weirder. There's an even bigger inefficiency that would prove to be an even better thing. So...

But then the developers, however, did not find a way to plug the hole. But the attacker voluntarily stopped after stealing about 4 million ETH from the DAO. But in any case, this is the second inefficiency, right? Voluntarily stopped? Yeah. There was a request made? No, no, no. As in the attacker just stopped. Okay. And...

So here's the second and bigger inefficiency. The money that the attacker took out, the 4 million ETH, it did not go into the attacker's wallet immediately. Instead, it went into a child smart contract, and only after 35 days could the attacker actually take that money out.

A child smart contract, you mean a... Separate smart contract that was created through a function call of the main DAO smart contract. Okay. So this was also not intended, right? It was just like a random quirk of fate that...

There was this big bug that was the biggest smart contract theft in history up until that point. And it put the money into this convenient box where it would just stay conveniently locked for 35 days where everyone could stare and look at it. Limbo. Yeah. And...

Soon after this, there were calls happening between core developers and the proposal to remedy the situation with a blockchain fork came into play. So basically what happened here is the... Was a blockchain fork an emotional issue for this community? Yeah. Why is that? So...

Well, I guess first of all... What is it? Exactly. So explain what would happen. So in general, a blockchain fork is a normal process, right? You have an upgrade and the developers of the Ethereum clients implement code that basically says, after block number 4370000, stop processing blocks according to the old rules, start processing blocks according to the new rules, which have extra features attached. And... Where blocks are just...

Set packages of transactions. Yeah.

And generally, it's agreed that these changes are good. And so people just go and download the code. And because everyone's downloaded the code, the blockchain after block 4370000 follows these difference in better ways. This is a very warm and very human process. It isn't the cold logic of a machine. Exactly. Okay. And...

So the DAO fork was also a fork. It was also a code change implemented by the developers of the clients that was pushed out through a new version of the different clients that people could download and users went ahead and voluntarily downloaded it. And it would basically change the rules of the blockchain, except instead of changing them permanently, it would only do a single one-time change.

And the single one-time change basically said, during block 192000, before processing any transactions, take the Ether that's stuck in this child contract and move it into another contract that could then basically refund it all to the victims. And...

So this was a very kind of manual intervention, right? It basically says like, we all agree to run code that just irregularly takes this money and just reassigns it to this other thing. So it's very weird because, you know, we always think in like a sci-fi movie that something that you think is human would rip off a

and reveal itself to be a computer. And this is the reverse. The computer face is ripped off, revealing humans behind this technological stack. Yes. And I mean, ultimately, like people talk about kind of blockchain immutability and...

Like, this is this idea that basically you're not supposed to do this sort of thing. And... Well, where does that supposed to come from? Exactly. So, like, there's definitely a sense in which it exists technologically because, like, actually pulling off one of these forks is incredibly hard. And, for example...

If it was not the case that the money was conveniently stuck there in one nice little address for 35 days, it would basically not have been possible to do it, right? Because as soon as you announce this protocol change that says we're going to take money out of here, put it in there, the attacker could just move the money from there to a different address. And basically you play this cat and mouse game and the attacker could win.

But sometimes there is this possibility where you absolutely can just do these interventions and you can just decide to stop running this code and start running this other code. And the only reason why this is not done more frequently is basically because there exist these norms, right?

And there exist norms in the blockchain community. Vlad Zamfir, the researcher I mentioned before, kind of calls them Sabo's Law and named after Nick Sabo. And Nick Sabo actually dislikes the moniker Sabo's Law, but it is a pretty accurate representation of kind of his beliefs and the beliefs of many in the crypto community, which is basically that...

like even though it technically is code run by humans we should act as though it is code not run by humans and like because it is digital gold right gold is not run by humans gold is gold and so if we want to make something that is like gold then even though we're unfortunately stuck with this thing run by humans we should like try as hard as we can to pretend it's not

And this was the ideology of a lot of people in this space. And the DAO fork very much went against this ideology. And so even though, in my opinion, having norms that you can't just go and edit whatever you want is valuable, but when such a large fraction of the ecosystem is at stake, it's worth rethinking things. But other people were even more rigid in this regard. And so there was this kind of split in the community.

And a portion of the community actually did not download the updates, right? A portion of the community did not download these code patches and implement the fork. And they just said, we will continue running our old chain. And the old chain has since then been called Ethereum Classic and it runs to this day. This is a fascinating civil war in essence. Yes. And what I get out of this is that there's this very weird thing, which is that people...

get very attached to ideologies and then they come to understand why the simplistic version of that ideology can't possibly work in a warm human system. I watched this. Have you ever gone to this festival called Ephemeral, which is sort of burning man on the water? It was part of it and I got invited to it, but I haven't had the chance to go yet. So it's kind of a libertarian water world in the Sacramento Delta. And it's,

What was interesting is that one year, in order to come to the festival, you had to have a lecture and you had to agree that you would receive the lecture because of problems that had happened the previous year. And you realize that these libertarians were being forced to invent

governance. And rather than just anarchy, you had to have some organized system. And so one of my questions is, is the, is that dream of escape from the heavy hand of government effectively not something to be pursued or,

inside of crypto space for the most part because we realize that it is going to require governance and that we can't figure out a way to turn this into a completely cold and methodical process. It depends which version of the dream you subscribe to. If the version of the dream you subscribe to is the dream that says that we can

finally use algorithms to basically completely eliminate humans' ability to interfere in things, then if your goal is to see that enforced 100%, then no, you're not going to get that. If your dream is that...

you dislike how governments have hit existing governments and monopolies of violence have hegemony over this social function of coordination and enforcing structures of rules and you want there to exist an alternative then like that's something that we can talk about right so like

If the dream is to augment, yes. And I mean, I'd argue that blockchains have a very necessary role now, especially kind of given modern kind of political trends where there basically is no single traditional political body that's accepted as trustworthy by the entire world. And it doesn't look like there's going to be one. But if your dream is to kind of

completely overturn things and have some simplistic notion of digital property rights as the only thing that governs behavior, then that's something that you can try for, but you're not going to succeed. Let me try something else with you that I'm curious about. You and I are both plugged into this weird alternate world that thinks very differently. And I had Andrew Yang in that chair and you saw that episode of the of the before.

Some people call this neurodivergence, that this is a non-neurotypical world. And I would say that both you and I exhibit some

indicia of not thinking along standard lines. The thing that occurred to me is that you brought up Slate Star Codex, which is this website that is extremely influential in our shared world. And I was thinking about the difference between Slate Star Codex and CNN in terms of sense making. Is there any way in which the Ethereum world is

can create a counterweight so that the neurodivergent

can rest the stranglehold that seemingly the neurotypical institutional world seems to have on sense-making at scale? Like, is there a way of promoting another blog in this world would be like less wrong? There are particular thinkers that I think of as being very important, influential. I think you've given to Aubrey de Grey and Eliezer Yudkowsky. There's like this very different world that isn't well-known yet.

And in part, I view podcasting as like pirate radio, which is the phrase I keep, or some is that because you're Russian. What can we do potentially using your technology to even the playing field between corporate sensemaking and this kind of home-brewed sensemaking that seems to me to be of an infinitely superior level? Well, not infinitely, but quite superior. Yeah, so I think...

Once again, there's kind of two aspects to blockchain TM that I think are equally valuable here. One is the technology itself, and then the other is the existing community around the technology. And with the technology itself, you can...

try to like create institutions for like do even things like funding like podcasts for example and like even like things like this kind of gitcoin grants quadratic voting for example it would be potentially a great way to kind of fund media organizations that avoids the pitfalls of both say like

present day media, which is funded by some combination of advertising and horrible clickbait incentives. And at the same time, avoid the pitfalls of essentially controlled media and create a third alternative. And it doesn't even have to be quadratic voting. It could be some other kind of mechanism for funding and blockchains could be used as a base layer for that.

There's also the kind of watching of community as a group of people who care about the...

many of these kinds of ideas and I mean even a lot of aetherium people are definitely and so wait star codex adjacent and I feel like I've tried my best to kind of bring these worlds together and get them to talk to each other and mean sometimes it is a challenge because There's ways in which they're similar and there's a lot of people who are in both and

There's also ways in which they're sometimes different, but those differences can be a good thing. Yeah, I guess I'm concerned that we're coming up on an election in the U.S., and I view Fox News and the New York Times and CNN as like watching professional wrestling. It's got a very clear narrative structure before the facts even come in,

Yeah, this is actually one of the things I've only really started noticing maybe in the last one to two years. Narratives are something that don't seem like you're there when you're fully inside of them. But once you step outside and you start seeing that, wait, these people are missing something and they're making predictions that turn out to be materially incorrect, that's

There's no memory. There's no cost. Yeah, you want to... There's no accountability at all. It's something that you just actively start seeking out how to move beyond. I think figuring out a better funding model for media organizations in general seems... Because in some ways, what I've

Concerned about is that something like podcasting is almost a public good and so the average only a public good Well advertising isn't the one thing that keeps I call it the business model of last resort. Yes, and We are going with an ad supported Model because I don't want to disguise we were somebody offered to endow the podcast not not my employer and

And I decided against it because I think what I really want to do is to try to figure out how to improve the business model. We've talked about a couple of different variations on, on advertising in order to make sure that controversial, but very sensible and level headed people can weather the storm that the big problem that I keep seeing is that advertisers pull when there's a coordinated campaign to say, well,

Drop that program or else. Yes. And there's a need for something like the blockchain or smart contract to make sure that you can't silence people who are speaking decently just because they've pissed off a very large activist community. Right. So do you see any way in which the blockchain, for example, like I might give up advertising because.

if I could figure out a way to fund not only this program, but allied programs. So in 2011, when I was starting Bitcoin Magazine, I, well, it started off with like this one anonymous person whose name I'll never know who, well, aside from Kiba, his internet handle, who was just paying me five Bitcoin, which back then was $4 per article to write articles for him. And

I mean, this was five times lower than a minimum wage, but I loved it because it was the highest wage I've ever had. And eventually, despite paying me five times less than minimum wage, Akiba ran out of money. And he told me, hey, maybe Bitcoin week we will have to shut down.

And I came up with this business model that actually ended up saving it for a few months and basically saving it all the way until I got kind of poached by Bitcoin magazine. And the business model is basically I write two articles a week.

And we'll publish the first paragraph of each article kind of publicly. And we'll say the rest of these articles is kind of hidden for ransom. And here are some Bitcoin addresses. And if people can collectively come together and pay 2.5 BTC to these Bitcoin addresses... Then they're free for everybody? Yes. That's nice. Yeah. And it actually worked well. And it actually started raking in like much more money than Kiba had paid before. So...

And it's not saying like that precise model is going to save. It's a clever, it's a clever exploit. Yeah, exactly. And like, to me, it's,

more clever experiments as like what smart contracts are all about so like let's try lots of different things and we're gonna have come upon some steps forward that are interesting italic i'd love to have you come back and talk to us about other things and other points but let me just close by asking you a couple of questions about the mysterious origins of decentralized computing the blockchain and all of this stuff sure what the hell

Why don't we know who Satoshi is at this point where Satoshi seemingly came up with the first really viable version of this, this idea. We can prove that, you know, I guess those, those blocks have never transacted that, that are under Satoshi's control. One would think. Yeah. And, and,

That's a very mysterious origin story. Yeah, it surprises a lot of people. Does it surprise you? It does. I mean, it's...

There's definitely not many people that have managed to stay anonymous through that level of prominence. Even Silk Road, the first big crypto-anarchist outlaw project on top of Bitcoin. After about two years, Russell Burke got caught. And the tools for just...

continuing to look at things that you say until eventually you slip up and you use some word patterns that match like word patterns that you used under your name and then you correlate things like it's difficult to get around like I've Unabomber got away with it for a long time mmm

I don't know if you know about the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI that pulled off this amazing heist in 1971. So Ted wrote his stuff in the 1970s, right? And that's also 1970s. Now we have the internet and everyone's stuff is publicly available. We have machine learning. We have statistical tools. Do you think it's well known who Satoshi is within a group that doesn't want to talk?

No. So I think that, I mean, there's high uncertainty about this, but I think that it's very likely that Satoshi is one person. You think Satoshi is one person? Yeah, and there isn't some very grand conspiracy. Do you think you know Satoshi?

Not that you know who Satoshi is, but do you think... Or do I think it's someone I know personally? So if I had to pick one person... And I'm not asking you to out that. You can say if you want to. I'll say it. It's not an uncommon opinion. If I had to bet my life on one person, it's Hal Finney.

basically because Hal was around in the early days. He clearly understood what was going on. He clearly participated since the beginning. And he also died at the exact time, basically, that Satoshi disappeared. And so there's a lot of these kind of coincidences in his favor. But then he's the one person I'd bet on if I had to bet on someone, but I'd also bet against him. Like, it's well under 50%. Got it. It's a pretty good caper. Yeah. And there's...

There's definitely a significant chance that it's, like, someone who's still in the crypto space somewhere that I've met at some point. Or it could just be someone we have never met and never will. He's done a really good job. Like, even just kind of setting himself up as this kind of perfect relationship. Or she or they. Yes, yes. No, no, she... She really, like...

impressed a lot of people. It's pretty true. I find it very inspiring. One of the great intellectual feats of our time would have, uh, anonymous authorship, um,

And the only story I know that's comparable to that is this bizarre break-in story where there was a woman, I believe named Judy Feingold, who was determined to take the secret to the grave. And the other people in the conspiracy left the conspiracy after the statute of limitations had run out and they started talking. And then her perspective was, we all agreed we were never going to mention who did it. There's some desire usually to get caught and an urge to purge.

Yeah, well that does make it more likely there's one person right conspiracies get exponentially harder the more people you add. That's true.

It's been fantastic having you here. I want to let you know that you're welcome to come back and to talk about things that are unrelated to Ethereum and blockchain and crypto, because actually, I have to say, I found very inspiring your attempt to use this platform to rethink what can economics be repurposed to do. And I think that that's an unheralded potential killer app for your program. Thank you. It's been good to be on here. OK.

Okay. You've been through the portal with Vitalik Buterin. Thanks for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and to check out our YouTube channel and to subscribe there and click the bell for more episodes when they become available. Thanks for joining us.