back to indexVitalik Buterin: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Money | Lex Fridman Podcast #80
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The following is a conversation with Vitalik Buterin, co creator of and author of the white
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paper that launched Ethereum and Ether, which is a cryptocurrency that is currently the
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second largest digital currency after Bitcoin.
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Ethereum has a lot of interesting technical ideas that are defining the future of blockchain
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technology and Vitalik is one of the most brilliant people innovating in the space today.
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Unlike Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown person or group that created Bitcoin, Vitalik is
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very well known and at a young age is thrust into the limelight as one of the main faces
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of the technology that may redefine the nature of money and all forms of digital transactions
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in the 21st century.
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And now here's my conversation with Vitalik Buterin.
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So before we talk about the fundamental ideas behind Ethereum and cryptocurrency, perhaps
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it'd be nice to talk about the origin story of Bitcoin and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto.
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You gave a talk that started with sort of asking the question, what did Satoshi Nakamoto
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Maybe you could say who is Satoshi Nakamoto and what did he invent?
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So Satoshi Nakamoto is the name by which we know the person who originally came up with
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So the reason why I say the name by which we know is that this is an anonymous fellow
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who has shown himself to us only over the internet just by first publishing the white
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paper for Bitcoin, then releasing the original source code for Bitcoin, and then talking
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to the very early Bitcoin community on Bitcoin forums and interacting with them and helping
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the project along for a couple of years.
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And then at some point in late 2010 to early 2011, he disappeared.
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So Bitcoin is a fairly unique project in how it has this kind of mythical, kind of quasi
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godlike founder who just kind of popped in, did the thing and then disappeared and we've
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somehow just never heard from him again.
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So in 2008, so the white paper was the first, do you know if the white paper was the first
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time the name would actually appear, Satoshi Nakamoto?
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So how is it possible that the creator of such an impactful project remains anonymous?
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That's a tough question.
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There's no similarity to it in the history of technology as far as I'm aware.
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So one possibility is that it's hellfinny because hellfinny was kind of also active
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in the Bitcoin community and as hellfinny in those two beginning years.
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Who is hellfinny, maybe you could say?
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He is one of the people in the early cypherpunk community.
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He was a computer scientist, cryptographers, people interested in technology, internet
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freedom, like those kinds of topics.
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Was it correct that I read that he seemed to have been involved in either the earliest
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or the first transaction of Bitcoin?
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The first transaction of Bitcoin was between Satoshi and hellfinny.
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Do you think he knew who Satoshi was?
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If he wasn't Satoshi, probably no.
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How is it possible to work so closely with people and nevertheless not know anything
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about their fundamental identity?
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Is this like a natural sort of characteristic of the internet?
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Like if we were to think about it, because you and I just met now, there's a depth of
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knowledge that we now have about each other that's like physical, like my vision system
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is able to recognize you.
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I can also verify your identity of uniqueness, like it's very hard to fake you being you.
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So the internet has a fundamentally different quality to it, which is just fascinating.
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This is definitely interesting as I definitely just know a lot of people just by their internet
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And to me, when I think of them, I see their internet handles and one of them has a kind
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of profile picture as this kind of face that's kind of not quite human with a bunch of psychedelic
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And when I visualize him, I could just visualize that.
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That's not an actual face.
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You are the creator of the second, well, he's currently the second most popular cryptocurrency
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So on this topic, if we just stick on Satoshi Nakamoto for a little bit longer, you may
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be the most qualified person to speak to the psychology of this anonymity that we're talking
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Like your identity is known, like I've just verified it.
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But from your perspective, what are the benefits in creating a cryptocurrency and then remaining
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Like if it can psychoanalyze Satoshi Nakamoto, is there something interesting there?
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Or is it just a peculiar quirk of him?
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It definitely helps create this kind of image of this kind of neutral thing that doesn't
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And that you created a project and because you're anonymous and because you also disappear
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or as unfortunately happened to Hal Finney, if that is him, he ended up dying of Lou Gehrig's
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disease and he's in the cryogenic freezer now.
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But if you pop in and you create it and you're gone and all that's remaining of that whole
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process is the thing itself, then no one can go and try to interpret any of your other
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behavior and try to understand like, oh, this person wrote this thing in some essay at age
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16 where he expressed particular opinions about democracy.
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And so because of that, this project is a statement that's trying to do this specific
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Instead, it creates this environment where the thing is what you make of it.
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It doesn't have the burden of your other ideas, political thought and so on.
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So now that we're sitting with you, do you feel the burden of being kind of the face
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I mean, there's a very large community of developers, but nevertheless, is there like
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a burden associated with that?
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There definitely is.
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This is definitely a big reason why I've been trying to kind of push for the Ethereum ecosystem
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to become more decentralized in many ways, just encouraging a lot of core Ethereum work
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to happen outside of the Ethereum Foundation and of expanding the number of people that
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are making different kinds of decisions, having multiple software limitations instead of one
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and all of these things.
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There's a lot of things that I've tried to do to remove myself as a single point of failure
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because that is something that a lot of people criticize me for.
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So if you look at like the most fundamentally successful open source projects, it seems
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that it's like a sad reality when I think about it, is it seems to be that one person
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is a crucial contributor often, if you look at Linus for Linux for the kernel.
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That is possible and I'm definitely not planning to disappear.
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That's an interesting tension that projects like this kind of desire a single entity and
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yet they're fundamentally distributed.
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I don't know if there's something interesting to say about that kind of structure and thinking
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about the future of cryptocurrency, does there need to be a leader?
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There's different kinds of leaders.
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There's dictators who control all the money.
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There's people who control organizations.
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There's high priests that just have themselves other Twitter followers.
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What kind of leader are you, would you say?
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These days, actually a bit more in the high priest direction than before.
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I definitely actually don't do all that much of going around and ordering Ethereum Foundation
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people to do things because I think those things are important.
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If there's something that I do think is important, I do just usually kind of say it publicly
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or just kind of say it to people and quite often projects just going to start doing it.
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So let's ask the high philosophical question about money.
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What at the highest level is money?
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It's a kind of game and it's a game where we have points and if you have points, there's
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this one move where you can reduce your points by a number and increase someone else's points
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by the same number.
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So it's a fair game, hopefully.
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Well, it's one kind of fair game.
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For example, you can have other kinds of fair games.
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You're going to have a game where if I give someone a point and you give someone a point
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and instead of that person getting two points, that person gets four points and that's also
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But, you know, money is easy to kind of set up and it serves a lot of useful functions
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and so it kind of just survives in society as a meme for thousands of years.
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It's useful for the storage of wealth, it's useful for the exchange of value.
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And it's also useful for denominating future payments, a unit of account.
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A unit of account.
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So what, if you look at the history of money in human civilization, just if you're a student
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of history, how has its role or just the mechanisms of money changed over time in your view?
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Even if we just look at the 20th century or before and then leading up to cryptocurrencies,
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that's something you think about?
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Yeah, and I think the big thing in the 20th century is kind of, we saw a lot more intermediation,
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The first part is kind of the move from adding more of different kinds of banking and then
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we saw the move from dollars being backed by gold to dollars being backed by gold that's
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only redeemable by certain people to dollars not being backed by anything to this system
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where you have a bunch of free floating currencies and then people getting kind of bank accounts
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and then those things becoming electronic, people getting accounts with payment processors
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that have bank accounts.
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So what do you make of that, that's such a fascinating philosophical idea that money
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might not be backed by anything.
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Is that like fascinating to you that money can exist without being backed by something
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What do you make of that?
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How is that possible?
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If we look at the future of human civilization, is it possible to have money at the large
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scale at such a hugely productive and rich societies be able to operate successfully
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without money being backed by anything physical?
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I feel like the interesting thing about the 21st century especially is that a lot of the
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important valuable things are not backed by anything.
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If you look at tech companies for example, something like Twitter, you could theoretically
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imagine that if all of the employees wanted to, they could kind of come together, they
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would quit and start working on Twitter 2.0 and then the value of and just kind of build
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the exact same product or possibly build a better product and then just kind of continue
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on from there and the original Twitter would just not have people left anymore.
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There is theoretically kind of code and IP that's owned by the company but in reality
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like good programmers could probably rewrite all that stuff in three months.
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So the reason why the thing has value is just kind of network effects and coordination problems
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right like these employees in reality aren't going to switch all at once and also the users
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aren't all going to switch at once because it's just difficult for them to switch at
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once and so there's these kind of meta stable and of equilibrium in interactions between
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thousands of millions of people that are just actually quite sticky even though if you try
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to kind of assume that everyone's a perfectly rational and kind of perfectly slippery spherical
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cow they don't seem to exist at all.
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Do you have a sense, a grasp of the sort of the fundamental dynamic like the physics of
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It seems to work but and I think some of the cryptocurrency ideas kind of rely on it working.
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It's the sort of thing that's definitely been economically modeled a lot like one of the
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kind of analogy of something as similar that you often see in textbooks as like what is
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a government like if for example like 80% of people in a country just like tomorrow
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suddenly had the idea that like the laws that are currently the laws of the government that
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currently is the government are just people and some other thing is the government and
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they just kind of start acting like it then that would kind of become the new reality
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and then the question is well what happens if and if between zero and 80% of people start
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believing that and like what is the thing you also you see is that if there is one of
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these kind of switches happening is kind of revolution then if you're the first person
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to join then like you probably don't have the incentive to do that but then if you're
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the 55th percentile person to join then suddenly becomes quite safe too and so it's definitely
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is the sort of thing that you can kind of try to analyze and understand mathematically
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but one of the kind of results is that the sort of like when the switch happens definitely
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can be chaotic sometimes yeah but still like to me the idea that the network affects that
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the fact that human beings at a scale like millions billions can share even the idea
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of currency like yeah I'll agree that's just uh I know economists can model it I'm a skeptic
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on the economic and uh it's like uh so my my favorite sort of field maybe recreationally
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psychology is trying to understand human behavior and I think sometimes people just kind of
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pretend that they can have a grasp on human behavior even though we it's such a messy
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space that all the models that psychology or economics those different perspectives
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on human behavior can have are are difficult it's difficult to know how much that's wishful
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thinking and how much it is actually getting to the core of uh understanding human behavior
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but on that idea what do you think is the role of money in human motivation so do you
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think money from an economics perspective from a psychology perspective is core to like
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human desires money is definitely very far from the only motivator um it is a big motivator
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and that's uh one of the closest things you have to a universal motivator think because
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ultimately in like almost any person in the world if you ask them to do something like
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they'll be more inclined to do it if you also offer some uh offer them money right and that's
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uh like there's definitely many cases where people will do things other than things that
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maximize how much money they have and that happens all the time but like though a lot
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of those other things are kind of but much more specific to and of who that person is
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and of what their situation is the relationship between the motive and the action and these
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other things what do you think is the interplay of the other motivator from like Nietzsche
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perspective is power do you think money equals power do you think those are conflicting ideas
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do you think i mean that's the one of the ideas that decentralized currency decentralized
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applications are looking at is uh who holds the power yeah money is definitely a kind
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of power and there's definitely people who want money because it gives them power and
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even if my money doesn't seem to and if explicitly be about money a lot of things that people
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spend money on are ultimately about a social status of some kind um so i mean i definitely
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view those two things as an of interplaying and then there's also money as just a way
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of like measuring how successful you are like as a scoreboard right so this kind of gets
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back to the game i mean like if you have four billion dollars then the main benefit you
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get from going up one of the big benefits you get from going up to six million dollars
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is that now instead of being below the guy who has five you're above the guy who has
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five so you think money could be kind of uh in the game of life it's also a measure of
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self worth it's like how we it's definitely how uh how a lot of people perceive it define
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ourselves in the hierarchy of yeah and i'm not yeah not saying it's kind of a healthy
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thing that people uh define their self worth as money because it's definitely kind of far
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from a uh perfect indicator of how much you value you provide the society or anything
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like this but i definitely think that like as a matter of kind of current practice so
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much of people do feel that way so what does utopia from an economic perspective look like
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to you what does the perfect world look like i guess the economist's utopia would be one
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where kind of everything is incentive aligned in the in the sense that there aren't enough
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conflicts between what satisfies your goals and kind of what is uh good for everyone in
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the world in the world as a whole what do you think that would um look like does does
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that mean there's still poor people and rich people there's still income inequality do
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you think sort of uh marxist ideas are strong do you think sort of ideas of uh objectivism
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like where the market rules is strong like what is there is the different economic philosophies
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that just seem to be reflective what utopia would be so i definitely think that existing
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economic philosophies do end up kind of systematically kind of deviating from the utopia in a lot
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of ways yeah like one of the big things i talk about for example is public goods right
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and public goods are especially important on the internet right because like the idea
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is with kind of money as this game where you know i lose a few coin a few coins and you
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gain the same number of coins is that this usually happens in a trade where i lose some
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money you gain some money you lose a sandwich and i gain a sandwich and this kind of model
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works really well when the thing that we're using money to incentivize this kind of private
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goods right things that you provide to one person where the benefit comes to one person
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but the like on the internet especially but also many many contexts and if off the internet
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there's actions that kind of individuals or groups can take where instead of the benefit
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going to one person the benefit just goes to many people at the same time and you can't
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control where the benefit goes to right so for example this podcast you know we publish
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it and when it's published you don't have any fine grains control over like oh these
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38 000 people can watch it and then like these other 29 000 people can't it's like once the
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number goes high enough then you know people just like copy it and then when i write articles
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on a blog then they're just like free for everyone and that stuff's even harder to prevent
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anyone from copying so and aside from that things like you know scientific research for
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example and even taking more pedestrian examples like climate change mitigation would be a
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big one so there's a lot of things in the world where you have these kind of individual
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actions with enough concentrated costs and distributed benefits and money as a point
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system does not do a good job of encouraging these things and one of the kind of other
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things even kind of tangentially connected to crypto but kind of theoretically outside
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of it that i work on is this sort of mechanism called quadratic funding and the way to think
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about it is i kind of imagine a point system where if like if one person gives coin gives
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coins to one other person then it works the same way as money but if multiple people give
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coins to one person and they do so anonymously so it's kind of not in consideration for a
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specific service to that person themselves then the number of coins received by that
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person is kind of greater than just the sum of the number of coins that have given by
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those different people so the actual formula is you take the square root of the amount
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that each person gave then you add all the square roots and then you kind of square the
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sum yeah and then you give that and the idea here would basically be that if let's say
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for example you just start going off and kind of planting a lot of trees and there's a bunch
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of people that are really happy that you're planting trees and then so they go and all
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kind of throw a coin your way then the like there is like basically the fact that kind
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of you get more than the sub you get this kind of square of sum of these of square roots
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of these tiny nodes that this actually kind of compensates for the tragedy of the commons
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right this there's even this kind of mathematical proof that it's sort of optimally compensates
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for it what is the tragedy of the common this is just this idea that like if there is this
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situation where there's some public good that lots of people benefit from then no individual
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person wants to contribute to it because if they contribute they only get a small part
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of the benefit from their contribution but they pay the full cost of their contribution
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in which context is this sorry what is the term quadratic what quadratic funding like
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what's in which context is this mechanism useful so obviously you said to combat the
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tragedy of the commons but you know in which context do you see it as useful actually practically
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yeah theoretically public goods in general right so like like services like what are
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we what are we talking about what's a public yeah so within the ethereum ecosystem for
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example like we've actually tried using this mechanism like yeah wrote a couple of articles
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about this on vitalik.ca where i go through some of the most recent rounds and it's been
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really interesting um some of the top ones that people supported there were um things
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like kind of just online user interfaces that make it easier for people to interact with
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ethereum um there was a documentation there were podcasts um there were kind of software
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kind of clients like kind of implementations of the ethereum protocol of privacy tools
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just like lots of things that are kind of useful to lots of people when a lot of people
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are contributing for like funding a particular particular entity yeah that's really that's
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really interesting is there something special about the quadratic the the the summing of
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the square roots and yeah so another way to think about it is like imagine if n people
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each give a dollar then the person gets n squared right um and and so each individual
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person's contribution gets multiplied by n right because you have n people and so that
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kind of perfectly compensates for the kind like kind of n to one uh tragedy of the commons
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i just wonder if the the squared part is yeah fundamental no it is um and i'd uh recommend
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you go to on vitalik.ca i have this article called quadratic payments a primer and highly
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recommended it's kind of at least my attempt so far kind of explaining the intuition behind
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this intuition so if we could can we go to the the very basics what is the blockchain
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or perhaps we might even start at the uh the the byzantine generals problem and byzantine
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fault tolerance in general that i i uh bitcoin was taking steps to uh providing a solution
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for so the byzantine generals problem it's this uh paper that leslie lamport published
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in 1982 where he has this thought experiments where if you have two generals that are kind
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of camped out on opposite sides of a city um and they're planning when to attack the
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city then uh the question is and if how could those generals coordinate with each other
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and they could send messengers between each other but those messengers kind of could get
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sniped by the enemy on the road road some of those messages could end up being traders
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and if things could end up happening and with just two mess generals it turns out that there's
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kind of no solution in a finite number of rounds that guarantees that they will be able
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to kind of coordinate on the same answer but then in the case where you have more than
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two generals that then leslie analyzes cases like um are the mess messages kind of just
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oral messages um are the messages kind of signed messages so i could give you a signed
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message and you can pass along that signed message and the third party can still verify
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that i originally made that message and depending on those different cases there's kind of different
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bounds on like given how many generals and how many traders among those generals and
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if what like under what conditions you actually can't agree when to launch an attack uh so
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it's actually a big misconception that the byzantine generalist problem was unsolved
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so let's say lamport solved it the thing that was unsolved though is that all of these solutions
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assume that you've already agreed on and have fixed the list of who the generals are and
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these generals have to be kind of semi trusted to some extent they can't just be anonymous
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people because if they're anonymous then like the enemy could just be 99 percent of the
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generals uh so right the um in the 1980s and the 1990s kind of the general use case
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for distributed system stuff was more kind of enterprisey stuff where you could kind
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of assume that uh you know you know who the nodes are that are running these kind of computer
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networks so if he wants to have some kind of decentralized computer network that pretends
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to be a single computer and that you can kind of do do kind of operations on then it's made
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out of these kind of 15 specific computers and we know kind of who and where they are
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and so we have a good reason to believe that say at least 11 of them would be fine and
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it could also be within a single system exactly almost a network of devices sensors so on
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like in airplanes and i think uh like flight systems in general still use these kinds of
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ideas yep yep um so that's the 80s that's the 80s and 90s now the cypherpunks had a
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different use case in mind which is that they wanted to create a fully decentralized global
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permissionless currency and the problem here is that they didn't want any authorities and
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they didn't even want any kind of privileged list of people and so now the question is
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well how do you use these techniques to create consensus when you have no way of kind of
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measuring identities right you have no way of kind of determining whether or not some
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99 of participants aren't actually all the same guy and so the clever solution that satoshi
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had this is uh kind of going back to the that presentation i made at defcon a few months ago where i said that the
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things that satoshi invented with crypto economics um is this uh really neat idea that you can
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use economic resources to kind of limit identity how many identities you can get and the uh
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if there isn't any existing decentralized digital currency then the only way to do this
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is with proof of work right so with proof of work the solution is uh just uh you publish
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a solution to a hard mathematical puzzle that takes some uh kind of clearly calculable amount
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of computational power to solve you get an identity and then you solve five of those
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puzzles you get five identities and then these are the identities that we run the consensus
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algorithm between so the proof of work mechanism you just described is like the fundamental
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idea proposed in the in the white paper that defines bitcoin uh what's the idea of consensus
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that we wish to reach why is consensus important here what is consensus so the goal here in
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just simple technical terms is to basically kind of wire together a set of a large number
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of computers in such a way that they kind of pretends to the outside world to be a single
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computer where that single computer keeps working even if a large portion of the kind
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of constituents the computers that make it up break and kind of break in arbitrary ways
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like they could shut off they could try to actively break a system they could do lots
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of mean things so the reason why the cypherpunks wanted to do this is because they wanted to
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run one particular program on this virtual computer and the one particular program that
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they wanted to run is just a currency system right it's a system that just processes a
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series of transactions and for every transaction it verifies that the sender has enough coins
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to pay for the transaction it verifies that the digital signature is correct and if the
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checks pass then it subtracts the coins from one account and adds the coins to the other
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account roughly so first of all the the the proof of work idea is kind of i mean at least
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to me seems pretty fascinating it is i mean that's a it's kind of a revolutionary idea
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i mean is is it is it obvious to come up with that you can use uh you can exchange basically
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computational resources for for identity it's uh it actually has a pretty long history it
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was uh first proposed in a paper by uh mc cynthia dwork and nixon naor in 1994 i believe
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and the original use case was uh combating email spam so the idea is that if you send
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an email you have to send it with a proof of work attached and like this makes it reasonably
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cheap to send emails to your friends but it makes it really expensive to send spam to
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a million people yeah that's a simple brilliant idea so maybe also taking a step back so what
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is the role of blockchain in this what is the blockchain sure so the blockchain my way
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of thinking about it is that it is this kind of system where you have this kind of one
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virtual computer created by this a bunch of these nodes in the network and the reason
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why the term blockchain is used is because the data structure that these systems use
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at least so far is one where they um different nodes in the network periodically publish
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blocks and a block is a kind of list of transactions together with a pointer like a hash of a previous
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block that it builds on top of and so you have a series of blocks that that nodes in
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the network create where each block points to the previous block and so you have this
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chain of them is a fault tolerance mechanism built into the idea of blockchain or is it
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a lot of possibilities of different ways to make sure there's no funny stuff going on
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there are indeed a lot of possibilities um so in a kind of just simple architecture as
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I just described the way the fault tolerance happens is like this right so you have a bunch
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of nodes and they're just happily and have occasionally creating blocks building on top
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of them each other's blocks and let's say you have kind of one block we'll call it kind
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of block one and then someone else builds another block honestly you'll call it block
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two then we have an attacker and what the attacker tries to do is the attacker tries
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to revert block two and the way they revert block two is instead of doing the thing they're
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supposed to do which is build a block on top of block two they're going to build another
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block on top of block one um so you have block one which has two children block two and then
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block two prime now this might sometimes even happen by random chance if you know two nodes
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in the network just happen to create blocks at the same time and they don't hear about
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each other's things before they create their own but this also could happen because of
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an attack now if this happens you have an attack then the uh no in the bitcoin system
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uh the nodes follow the longest chain um so if um this um attack had happened uh and when
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the original chain had more than two blocks on it so if it was trying to kind of revert
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more than more than two blocks then everyone would just would just ignore it and everyone
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would just keep following the regular chain but here you know we have block two and we
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have block two prime and so the two are kind of even and then whatever block um the next
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block is created on top of so say block three is now created on top of block two prime then
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everyone says uh agrees that block three is the new head um and block two prime is just
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kind of forgotten and then everyone just kind of peacefully builds on top of block three
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and the thing continues so how difficult is it to mess with the system right so how like
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if we look at the general problem like how many what fraction of people who participate
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in the system have to be bad players in order to mess with it truly like what's your is
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there is there a good number there is um well depending on kind of what your model of the
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participants is and like what kind of attack we're talking about it's anywhere between
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23.2 and 50 of what of all of the computing power in the network sorry so 22 and 23 point
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between 23.2 and 50 and 50 can be compromised so like once your once your your portion of
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the total computing power in the network goes above the 23.2 level then there's kind of
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things that you could mean things that you can potentially do and as your percentage
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of the network kind of keeps going up then the your abilities as you mean things kind
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of goes higher and then if you have above 50 then you can just break everything so how
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how hard is it to achieve that level like it seems that so far historically speaking
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it's been exceptionally difficult so this is a challenging question um so the economic
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cost of acquiring that level of stuff from scratch is fairly high i think it's uh somewhere
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in the low billions of dollars and when you say that stuff you mean computational resources
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yeah so specifically specialized hardware and of asics that people use to solve these
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puzzles to do the mining these days small tangent uh so obviously i work a lot in deep
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learning with gpus and asics for that application and i tangentially kind of hear that so many
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of these you know sometimes nvidia gpus are sold out because of this other application
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like what do if you can comment i don't know if you're familiar or interested in this space
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what kind of asics what kind of hardware is generally used these days for to do the actual
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computation for the proof of work sure so in the case in bitcoin and ethereum are a
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bit different so in the case of bitcoin there is an algorithm called sha256 it's just a
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hash function and so the puzzle is just coming up with a number where the hash of the number
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is below some threshold and so because the hashes are designed to be random you just
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have to keep on trying different numbers until one works and the asics are just like specialized
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circuits that contain and if circuits for evaluating this hash over and over again and
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you have like millions or billions of these hash evaluators and just stacked on top of
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each other inside of a box and you just keep on running the box 24 7 in the asics there's
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literally specialized hardware designed for this yes oh this is a little bit an amazing
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world another tangent i'll come back to the basics but uh does quantum computing throw
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a wrench into any of this very good question so uh quantum computers have two main uh kind
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of families of algorithms that are relevant to cryptography one is shor's algorithm and
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shor's algorithm is one that kind of completely breaks the hardness of some specific kinds
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of mathematical problems so the one that you've probably heard of is it makes it very easy
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to factor numbers so figure out kind of what prime factors are the kind of that you need
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to multiply together to get some number even if that number is extremely big shor's algorithm
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can also be used to break elliptic curve cryptography it can break like any kind of hidden order
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groups it breaks a lot of kind of cryptographic nice things that we're used to but the good
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news is that for every kind of major use of things that shor's algorithm breaks we already
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know of quantum proof alternatives right now we don't use these quantum proof alternatives
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yet because in many cases they're five to ten times less efficient but the crypto industry
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in general kind of knows that this is coming eventually and it's kind of ready to take
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the hit and switch to that stuff when we when we have to the second algorithm that is relevant
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to cryptography is grover's algorithm and in grover's algorithm might even be kind of
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more familiar to ai people that's basically usually described as solving search problems
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but the idea here is that if you have a problem of the form find a number that satisfies some
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property then if with a classical computer you need to try and if n times before before
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you find a number then with a quantum computer you only need to do square root of n computations
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and grover's could potentially be used for mining but there's two possibilities here
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one is that grover's could be used for mining and whoever creates the first working quantum
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computer that could do grover's will just mine way faster than everyone else and we'll
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see another round of what we saw when a6 came out which is that kind of the new hardware
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just kind of dominated the old stuff and then eventually it switched to a new equilibrium
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but by the way way faster not exponentially faster quadratically faster quadratically
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faster which is not sort of it's not game changing i would say it's like a6 like you
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said it would be exactly yeah so it would not necessarily break proof of work as a that's
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right yeah now the other kind of possible world right is that quantum computers have
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a lot of overhead there's a lot of a complexity involved in maintaining quantum states and
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there's also as we've been realizing recently making quantum computers actually work requires
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kind of quantum error correction which requires kind of a thousand real qubits per logical
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qubit and so there's the very real possibility that the overhead of running a quantum computer
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will be higher than the speed up you get with grover's which would be kind of sad but which
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would also mean that the given proof of work will just keep working fine so beautifully
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put so so proof of work is the core idea of bitcoin is there other core ideas before we
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kind of take a step towards the origin story and ideas of ethereum is there other stuff
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that were key to the white paper of bitcoin there is proof of work and then there's just
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the cryptography is just kind of public keys and signatures that are used to verify transactions
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those two are the big things so then what is the origin story maybe the human side but
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also the technical side of ethereum sure so i joined the bitcoin community in 2011 and
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i started by just writing i first wrote for this sort of online thing called bitcoin weekly
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then i started writing for bitcoin magazine um and uh sorry to interrupt you have this
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funny kind of uh story true or not is uh that you were disillusioned by the downsides of
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centralized control from your experience with wow world of warcraft is this true or you're
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just being witty uh i mean the event is true the fact that that's the reason i do decentralization
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is witty maybe just a small tangent do have you always had a skepticism of centralized
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control is that sort of degree yeah has that feeling evolved over time or has that just
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always been a core feeling that decentralized control is the future of a human society it's
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definitely been something that felt very attractive to me ever since i could have learned that
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such a thing is possible it's possible even yeah so great so you're you joined the bitcoin
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community in 2011 you said you began writing so what's next started writing uh moved from
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high school to university halfway in between that and spent a year in university then at
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the end of that year i dropped out to do bitcoin things full time and this was a combination
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of continuing to write bitcoin magazine but also increasingly work on software projects
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and i traveled around the world for about six months and just going to different bitcoin
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communities like i went to first in new hampshire then spain other european places israel and
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then san francisco and along the way i've met a lot of other people that are working
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on different bitcoin projects and when i was in israel there were some very smart teams
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there that were working on ideas that people were starting to kind of call bitcoin 2.0
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so one of these were colored coins which is basically saying that hey let's not just use
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the blockchain for bitcoin but let's also like kind of issue other kinds of assets on
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it and then there was a protocol called master coin that supported issuing assets but also
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supported many other things like financial contracts like domain name registration and
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a lot of different things together and i spent some time working with these teams and i quickly
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kind of realized that this master coin protocol could be improved by kind of generalizing
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it more right so the best the analogy i use is that the master coin protocol was like
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this swiss army knife you have 25 different transaction types for 25 different applications
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but what i realized is that you could replace a bunch of them with things that are more
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general purpose so one of them was that you could replace like three transaction types
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for three types of financial contracts with a generic transaction type for a financial
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contract that just lets you specify a mathematical formula for kind of who how much money each
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side gets by the way it's a small pause what's you say financial contract just the terminology
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what is the contract what's a financial contract so this is just generally an agreement where
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kind of either one or two parties kind of put collateral kind of in and then they depending
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on kind of certain conditions like this could involve prices of assets this could involve
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the actions of the two parties it could involve other things but they kind of get different
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amounts of of assets out that just depend on things that happened so a contract is really
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a financial contract is at the core it's the it's the core interactive element of a financial
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system yeah there's yeah there's many different kinds of financial contracts like there's
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things like options where you kind of give someone the right to buy a thing that you
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have for some specific price for some period of time there's uh contracts for difference
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where you basically are kind of making a bet that says like for every dollar this thing
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goes up i'll give you seven dollars or for every dollar that thing goes down you give
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me seven dollars or something like that and but the main idea that these contracts have
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to be enforced and trusted them yes exactly you have to trust that they will work out
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in a system where nobody can be trusted yes this is such a beautiful complicated system
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okay so uh so you were seeking to kind of generalize this basic uh framework of contracts
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um so what does that entail so what what technically are the steps to creating ethereum
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sure so i guess just to kind of continue a bit with this master coin story um so started
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by kind of giving ideas for how to generalize the thing and eventually um this turned into
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a much more kind of fully fledged proposal that just says hey how about you scrap all
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your futures and instead you just um put in this programming language and i gave this
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idea to them and their response was something like hey this is great but this seems complicated
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and it seems like something that we're not going to be able to put onto our roadmap for
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a while and my response to this was like wait do you not realize how revolutionary this
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is well i'll just go do it myself and then i what was the name of the programming language
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i just called it ultimate scripting great uh so then i kind of went through a couple
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more rounds of iteration and then the idea for a theorem itself started to form
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um and the idea here is that you just have a blockchain where the core unit of the thing
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is what we call contracts it's these kind of accounts that can hold assets um and like
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they have their own internal memory but that are controlled by a piece of code and so if
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i send some ether to a contract the only thing that can determine where that kind of ether
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the currency inside ethereum and it goes after that um is the code of that contract itself
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and so basically kind of sending assets to computer programs becomes this kind of paradigm
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for creating these sort of agreements self executing agreements self executing it's so
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cool that code is sort of part of this contract so that that's what's meant by smart contracts
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yeah so how hard was it to build this kind of thing harder than expected um and originally
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i actually thought that this would be a thing that i would kind of casually work on for a
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couple of months publish and then go back to university um then i released it and a bunch
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of people or i released the white paper the white paper the idea is there the idea the
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white paper um a whole bunch of people came in offering the help a huge number of people
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and have expressed interest and this was something i was totally not expecting and then i kind of
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realized that this would be something that's kind of much bigger than i had ever um thought
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that it would be and then we started on this kind of much longer development slog of making
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something that lives up to this sort of much higher level of expectations what are the some
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of the is it fundamentally like software engineering challenges it was their social
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okay so there's social so so what are the biggest interesting challenges that you've learned about
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human civilization and in in software engineering through this process
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so i guess one of the challenges for me is that like i'm one of the kind of apparently unusual
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geek schoolers and i've never treated with anything but kindness in school yes um and so
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when i got into crypto i kind of expected everyone would just kind of be the same kind
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of altruistic and nice in that same way um but the um kind of the algorithm that i used for
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finding cofounders for this thing was not very good it was sort of literally one computer
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scientist called the greedy algorithm it's sort of the first 15 people who replied back offering
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to help kind of are the cofounders oh you mean like literally the the the people that for will
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form to be the the founders cofounders of the community the algorithm i like how you call it
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the algorithm yeah um and so what happened was that uh these um like especially as the project
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got really big like there started to be a lot of this kind of infighting and there were a lot of
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like i wanted the thing to be a non profit and some of them wanted to be a for profit
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uh and then there started to be people who were just kind of totally unable to work with each
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other there were people that were kind of trying to get an advantage for themselves in a lot of
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different ways and this uh just about six months later led to this big governance crisis and then
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we kind of reshuffled leadership a bit and then uh the project kept on going then nine months
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later there was another governance crisis and then there was a third governance crisis and so
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is there a way to if you're looking at the human side of things is there a way to optimize this
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aspect of the cryptocurrency world it seems that there is uh from my perspective there's a lot of
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different characters and personalities and egos and like you said uh i don't know if you know i
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also like to think that most of the world most of the people in the world are well intentioned
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but the way those intentions are realized may perhaps come off as uh yeah as as negative like
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what uh is there is there a hopeful message here about creating a governance structure for
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cryptocurrency that uh where everyone gets along and after about four rounds of reshuffle like i
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think we've actually come up with something that seems to be pretty stable and happy um i think uh
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i mean i definitely do think that most people are well intentioned i just think that like one of the
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reasons why i like decentralization is just because there's like this thing about power
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where power attracts people with egos and so that just allows us a very small percentage of people
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to just ruin so many things you think ego has a you think ego has a use like is ego always bad
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it seems like sometimes does but then the ethereum research team i feel like we've found
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also kind of a lot like a lot of very good people that are just kind of primarily just interested
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in things for the technology and uh things seem to just generally be going quite well
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yeah when you're when the focus and the passion is in the tech so on the so that's the human side
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of things but the technology side like what have you learned what have been the biggest challenges
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of bringing ethereum to life on the technology side so i think first of all just uh you know
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there's like the first law of software development which is that when someone gives you a timetable
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i switch the unit of time to the next largest unit of time and add one and like we basically
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fell victim to that um and uh and so instead of taking like three months it ended up taking like
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20 months to watch the thing um and that was just i think underestimating the sheer technical
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complexity of the thing um there are research challenges like so for example one of the things
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that we've been saying from the start that we would do one is a switch from a proof of work
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to a proof of stake um where proof of stake is so this uh alternative consensus mechanism where
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instead of having to waste a lot of computing power on solving these mathematical puzzles
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that don't mean anything you kind of prove that you have access to coins inside of the system and
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this uh then it gives you some level of participation in the consensus can you
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maybe elaborate on that a little bit i understand the idea of proof of work
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um i know that a lot of people say that the idea of proof of stake is really appealing can you
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maybe linger on it longer explain what it is sure uh so basically the idea is like if i kind of lock
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up a hundred coins then i turn that into a kind of quote virtual miner and the system itself kind
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of automatically and randomly assigns that in a virtual miner the right to create blocks at
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particular intervals and then if someone else has 200 coins and they walk on the walk there's 200
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coins then they get a kind of twice as big virtual miner they'll be able to create blocks twice as
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often so it tries to kind of do similar things to proof of work except instead of the thing
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and of rate limiting your participation being your ability to crank out solutions to kind of
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hash challenges the thing that really limits your participation is kind of how much coins you're
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kind of locking into this mechanism okay so interesting so that that limited participation
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doesn't require you to run a lot of compute does that mean that the richer you are so rich people
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um are more like their identities more right and this stable yeah verifiable or whatever
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whatever the right terminology is right and this is definitely a common critique i think my usual
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answer to this is that like proof of work is even more of that kind of system exactly yeah because
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i didn't mean it and that statement is a criticism i think you're exactly right that's equivalent
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the proof of work is the same kind of thing but in the proof of work you have to also use physical
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resources yes and burn computers and burn trees and all of that stuff is there um a way to mess
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with the system of the proof of uh proof of stake there is but you will once again need to have a
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very large portion of all the coins that are locked in the system to do anything bad got it
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yeah and just that maybe take a small tangent one of the criticisms of cryptocurrency is the fact
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that i guess for the proof of work mechanism you have to use so much energy in the world
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yes is one of the motivations of proof of stake is to move away from this definitely like what's
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your sense of the uh maybe i'm just under informed is there like legitimately environmental impact
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from this yeah uh so the latest thing was that bitcoin consumed as much energy as the country of
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austria or something like that yeah and then ethereum is like right now maybe only like
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half in order of magnitude smaller than bitcoin i've heard you talk about ethereum 2.0 so what's
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the what's the dream of ethereum 2.0 what's the the status of proof of stake is the mechanism that
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ethereum moves towards and also how do you move to a different mechanism of consensus
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within a cryptocurrency so ethereum 2.0 is a collection of major upgrades that we've wanted
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to do to ethereum for quite some time the two big ones uh one is a proof of stake and the other is
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what we call sharding um sharding solves another problem with blockchains which is a scalability
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and what sharding does is it basically says instead of every participant in the network
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having to personally download and verify every transaction every participant in the network only
link |
downloads and verifies a small portion of transactions and then you kind of randomly
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distribute who gets how much work um and because of how the distribution is random it still has the
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property that you need a large portion of the entire network to corrupt what's going on inside
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of any shard but the system is still in a very redundant and very secure that's brilliant how
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hard is that to implement and how hard is uh proof of stake to implement like on the technical level
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yeah software level proof of stake and sharding are both challenging um i'd say sharding is a bit
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more challenging the reason is that proof of stake is kind of just a change to the how the
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consensus layer works sharding does both that but it's also a change to the networking layer
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um the reason is that sharding is kind of pointless if at the networking layer you still
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do what you do today which is you kind of gossip everything which means that if someone publishes
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something every other node and the client hears it like from uh on the networking layer and so
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instead we have to have kind of subnetworks and the ability to quickly switch between subnetworks
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and have the subnetworks talk to each other and this is all doable but it's a more complex
link |
architecture and it's definitely the sort of thing that hasn't not yet been done in cryptocurrency
link |
so most most of the networking layer in uh cryptocurrency is you're shouting you're like
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broadcasting messages and this is more like ad hoc networks like yeah you're shouting within
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smaller groups smaller group but you have like a bunch of subnet like exactly then you have to
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switch between oh man i'd love to see the uh so it's a beautiful idea uh so from a graph
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theoretical perspective but just the software that like who's responsible is the ethereum
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project like the people involved would they be implementing like what's the actual
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you know this is like legit software engineering uh who like how does that work how do people
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collaborate build that kind of project is this like almost um like is there a software engineering
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lead is there it's like is it a legit almost like large scale open source project there is
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yeah so um we have uh someone named uh danny ryan on our team who's just been brilliant and
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great all around and he is a kind of de facto kind of development coordinator i guess it's like you
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have to invent job titles for this stuff the reason is that um like we also have this unique
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kind of organizational structure where the ethereum foundation itself kind of does research
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in house but then the actual implementation is done by independent teams that are separate
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companies and they're located all around the world and like fun places like australia and and
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and so uh you know you kind of just need a bunch of kind of almost nonstop cat herding to just
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keep getting these people to kind of talk to each other and kind of implement this back make sure
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that everyone agrees on kind of what what's going on and kind of how to interpret different things
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so how far into the future are we from these two mechanisms in ethereum 2.0 like what's what's your
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sense of the timeline keeping in mind the previous comment you made about the sort of uh general
link |
curse of software projects so ethereum 2.0 is split into three phases so phase zero just
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creates a proof stake network and it's actually separate from kind of proof of uh the proof of
link |
work network at the beginning just to kind of give it time to grow and improve itself
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do people get to choose sorry to interrupt do people get to choose i guess yes they get they
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get to choose to move over if they want to then phase one adds sharding but it only adds sharding
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of data storage and not sharding of computation and then after that there is kind of the merger
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phase which is where the uh and if the accounts uh kind of smart contracts like all of the activity
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and uh the existing eth1 system just kind of gets cut and pasted into eth2 and then the proof of
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work chain gets forgotten and then and things all the things that were living there before just
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kind of continue living inside of the proof of stake system so for timelines um phase zero has
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been uh kind of almost fully implemented um and now it's just a matter of uh a whole bunch of
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security auditing and testing um my own experience is that right now it feels like we're at about a
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phase comparable to when we were doing uh the original ethereum launch when we were maybe about
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four months away from launch so that's just a hunch then that's just a hunch yeah so how you
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know it took it took like over a decade for people to move from python 2 to python 3 uh how do you see
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the move from like this phase zero of for for different consensus mechanism do you see there
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being a a drastic phase shift in people just kind of jumping to this better mechanism so in phase
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zero i don't expect too many people to do much because in phase zero in phase one the new chain
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the get of deliberately enough doesn't have too much functionality turned on it's there just like
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if you want to be a proof of stake validator you can get things started if you want to store data
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for other blockchain applications you can get started but existing applications will largely
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keep living on eth1 and then when the merger happens then the merger is a operation that
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happens all at once so that's kind of one of the benefits of a consensus system that like on the
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one hand you have to coordinate the upgrade but on the other hand the upgrade can be coordinated
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so what's casper ffg by the way um casper ffg is the consensus algorithm that we are using for
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the proof of stake is there something interesting uh specific about casper ffg
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like some beautiful aspect of it that's uh there is so casper ffg combines together kind of two
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different schools of a consensus algorithm design uh so the general two different schools of the
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of this design are right one is uh 50 fault tolerant but dependent on network synchrony
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so 50 fault tolerant but it didn't tolerate up to 50 of faults but not more but it depends on
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an assumption that all of the nodes can talk uh talk to each other within some
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kind of limited period of time like if i send the message you'll receive it within a few seconds
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and the second school is 33 fault tolerant but safe under asynchrony which means that
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like if we agree on something then that thing is finalized and even if the network goes horribly
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wonky the second after that thing is finalized there's no way to revert that thing um and that's
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fascinating how you would make that happen it's uh definitely quite clever um i'd recommend the
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uh casper ffg paper if you just search like archive as in like arxiv casper ffg it's that's
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that's an archive the paper is an archive yeah yeah who are the authors um myself and uh virgil
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griffith that's awesome i take a small tangent this idea of just putting out white papers and
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papers and putting them on archive and just putting them publicly is that is that at the core
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is that a necessary component of the currency is that the tradition started with uh uh satoshi
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nakamoto's what do you make of it like what do you make of the future of that kind of sharing of
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ideas i guess so yeah and it's definitely something that's kind of mandatory for crypto because like
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crypto is all about making systems where you know you don't have to trust the operators to
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trust that the thing works and so if anything behind our system works is closed sourced and
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that kind of uh kills the point and so there is the kind of a sense in which the fundamental
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properties of the category of the thing we're trying to build just kind of forces openness
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but also openness just has proven to be a really great way to collaborate and then there's actually
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had a lot of kind of innovation and academic collaboration that's just kind of happened
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ad hoc in the crypto space the last few years so like for example we have this forum called
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eth research that's like e th r e s e a r and then dot ch um and there we publish kind of just
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ideas in a form that's kind of half formal like it's halfway in between like it's it's a kind of
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a text write up and then you can have math in it but it's often and of much shorter than a paper
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and it turns out that the great majority of new ideas like they're just kind of fairly small
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nuggets that you can explain in like five to ten lines and they don't really they don't need the
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whole formality of a paper exactly they don't require the kind of like 10 pages of a filler
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and so introduction conclusion is not needed yeah and so instead you just kind of publish the idea
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and then people can go comments on it and that's brilliant yeah this has been great for us i think
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i interrupted you was there something else on casper ffg that's just casper ffg is just kind
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of combines together these two schools um and so basically it creates this system where if you have
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more than 50 that are honest then and you have network synchrony then the thing kind of goes
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as a chain but then if network synchrony fails then kind of the last few blocks in the chain
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might um kind of get replaced but anything that was finalized by this kind of more asynchronous
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process uh gets uh can't be reverted and so you essentially get a kind of best of both worlds
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between those two models okay so i know what i'm doing tonight i'm going to be reading the casper
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fg paper uh apologize for the romanticized question but what to you are some or the most
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beautiful idea in the world of ethereum just something uh surprising something beautiful
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something powerful yeah i mean i think the fact that money can just emerge out of a database if
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enough people believe in it i think is definitely one of those things that's up there um i think one
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of the things that i really love about ethereum is also this concept of composability so this is the
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idea that like if i build an application on top of ethereum then you can build an application that
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talks to my application and you don't even need my permission you don't even need to talk to me
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right so one really fun example of this is there was this game on ethereum called crypto kitties
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that just involved kind of breeding digital cats yes and someone else created a game called crypto
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dragons where the way you play crypto dragons is you have a dragon and you have to feed it crypto
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kitties um and they just uh created the whole thing just like as an ethereum contract that you
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would send these uh these tokens that are defined by this other ethereum contract and for the
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interoperability to happen like the projects didn't don't really need to like the teams don't
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really need to talk to each other you just kind of interface with the existing program so it's
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arbitrarily composable in this kind of way so you have different uh you know different groups that
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could be working and so you could see it scaling to just outside of dragons and kitties it could
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be you could build like entire ecosystems of software yeah and in the i mean especially in
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the decentralized finance space that's been popping up the last two years there has been
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a huge amount of really interesting things happen as a result of this is a particular kind of like
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financial applications kind of thing yeah i mean there's like stable coins so this is a kind of
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tokens that retain a value equal to one dollar but they're kind of backed by a crypt uh cryptocurrency
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um then there's decentralized exchanges um so when as far as the decentralized exchanges goes
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there's this uh really interesting construction that um has existed for about one and one and a
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half years now called uniswap so what uniswap is it's a smart contract that holds the balances of
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two tokens we'll call them token a and token b and it maintains an invariance that the balance
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of token a multiplied by the balance of token b has to equal the same value and so the way that
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you trade against the thing is basically like you have this kind of curve you know like x times y
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equals k and yeah before you trade it's at some points on the curve after you trade you just like
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pick some different any to any other points on the curve and then whatever the delta x is that's the
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amount of a tokens you provide whatever the delta y is that's the amount of b tokens you get or vice
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versa and that's just and then kind of the slope at the current points on the curve kind of is the
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price um and so that just is the whole thing and that just allows you to have this exchange for
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tokens and even if there's very few participants and the whole thing is just like so simple and
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it's just very easy to set up very easy to participate in and it just provides so much value
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to people so and uh the uh the fundamental the the distributed application infrastructure allows
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that somehow yes so this is a smart contract meeting this is all a computer program that's
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just running on ethereum smart contracts too are just fascinating they are okay do you think
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cryptocurrency may become the main currency in the world one day so where do you think we're headed
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in terms of the role of currency the structure type of currency in the world i definitely expect
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um fiat currencies to continue to exist and continue to be strong and i definitely expect
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kind of fiat currencies to also digitize in their own way over the next couple of decades what's
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fiat currency by the way oh just like things like us dollars and like dollars and euros and yen and
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these other things and they're sort of backed by governments yes but i also expect kind of
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cryptocurrencies to play this kind of important role in just making sure that people always have
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an alternative if fiat currencies start breaking so like if or if you're in you know some very
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high inflation place like venice will for example or if uh your country just kind of gets cut off
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from um cut off from other financial systems because of like something the banks do
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uh if any kind of if there's even like some major trade disruption or something worse happens then
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like cryptocurrencies are the sort of thing that just because of their kind of global neutrality
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they're just kind of always there and you can keep using them it's interesting that you're quite
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humble about the possibilities of the future of cryptocurrency you don't think there's a possible
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future where it becomes the main set of currency because it feels like it feels like the centralized
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control by governments of currency is limiting somehow maybe my naive utopian view of the world
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it's uh i mean it's definitely very possible uh i mean i think like for cryptocurrencies being
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the main form of value to kind of work well like you do need to have some much more price stability
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than they have today and i mean there are now stable coins and there are kind of cryptic
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cryptocurrencies that try to be more stable than existing things like bitcoin and ether but
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and that just is to me the kind of the main challenge do you think oh that's do you think
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that's a characteristic of this just being the early days it's such a young concept the 10 years
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is nothing in the history of money yeah and i think it's a combination of two things right one
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is um it's uh uh it's still early days but the other is a kind of more durable any kind of
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economic problem which is that like demand for currency is volatile right because of like
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recessions booms changes to technology lots of things and if people's demand for how much
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currency they want to hold changes and if you have a currency that has a fixed supply
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then the change in demand has to be entirely expressed as a change in value of the currency
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and so what that means is that kind of the volatility of demand becomes entirely translated
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into volatility and ahead of prices of things that dominated in that currency but if you have
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a currency where instead the supply can change and so the supply can kind of go up when there's
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more demand then you have the supply and of absorbing more of that volatility and so the
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price of the currency would absorb less of the volatility on that topic so bitcoin does have a
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limited supply a specific fixed supply yes uh what's what's the idea and ethereum doesn't but
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can you clarify just in the comments you just made is ethereum qualify to the kind of currency
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that you're talking about and being flexible in the supply i mean it's a bit more flexible but
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kind of the thing that you would really want is something that's kind of specifically flexible
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in response to how valuable the currency is and and i'd recommend you to look at stable coins
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as well so like things like die for example it's a new like how you spell that da i and what uh
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what's stable coins is it a type of cryptocurrency it is a type of cryptocurrency it's um a type of
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cryptocurrency that's issued by a smart contract one of these ethereum computer programs that um
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where the smart contract holds a bunch of ether and then it is basically like that people deposit
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and then it issues die and the reason why people deposit is because they want to kind of go high
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leverage on their ether and so it kind of pairs these two sets of users one that wants stability
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and one that kind of wants extra risk together with each other and it basically creates some
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or gives one set of participants a guarantee that they'll be that they have this asset that can
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that can be later converted back into ether but and like specifically at kind of the one dollar
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rate and it has some kind of uh stabilizing network effects yeah it has this yeah it has
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many kinds of stabilizing mechanisms in it that's fascinating okay this is this world is awesome
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technically just from a scientific perspective is an awesome world uh that i i often don't see from
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an outsider's perspective what i often see is kind of uh maybe hype and a little bit if i may say so
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like charlatanism and you don't often see at least from my outsider's perspective the beautiful
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science of it and the engineering of it i mean maybe is there a comment you can make of who to
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follow how to learn about this world without being um interrupted by the charlatans and the hype
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people in this space i think you do need to just know the specific kind of just people to follow
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like there's you know there's all the kind of the cryptographers and the researchers and there's
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just like even just the ethereum research crew like myself you know like dan grad danny justin
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and of the other people were and then and of the academic cryptographers and like before um
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this today i was at stanford and stanford has the center for blockchain research and of dan bonet
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this and really a famous and great cryptographer um was uh running it and there's a lot of other
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people there and there's people working on zero knowledge proofs for example and um zuko from
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zcash has one other person that i respect so i think if you follow the technical you crawl along
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that yeah yeah you just start with the theory group and then look at the academics day bonet
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and so on and then just cautiously expand the network of people you follow yeah exactly and
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like if someone seems too too self promotional then just like remove them is there books
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that are so there's these white papers and we just discussed about about ideas being
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condensed into really small parts is there books that are emerging that are kind of
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good uh introductory material so for historical ones and there's like nathaniel popper's digital
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gold which is just about the history of bitcoin there's like one and then matthew leising announced
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that there's one about the history of ethereum um for technical ones and there's andreas hansenopoulos
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is mastering ethereum great so um let me ask you sort of uh sorry to to pull back to the
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the idea of governments and decentralized currency
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you know there's a tension between decentralization of currency and the power of nations
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um the power of governments you um what's your sense about that tension can is there some rule
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for regulation of currency you yeah is there like is the government the enemy of digital currency
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of distributed currency or can they be like cautious friends i mean i think like
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like the one thing that people forget is that it's clearly not entirely an enemy because i think
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if uh there hadn't been so much government regulation on and if centralized uh issuing
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centralized digital currencies then i like we'd be seeing things people like google and facebook
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and twitter just kind of issuing them left and right and then like if that was the case then
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decentralized currencies would still appeal to some people but they definitely would appeal to
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less people than today so even in that sense i think it's uh clearly been kind of more of a help
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just kind of set the stage for the end of the existence as a of the sector in some ways but
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also and i think some of both you know like there's definitely things that governments
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and if can do in some cases have done to have hurt the spread of uh and of growth of uh of
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blockchains there's uh things that they've done to help and they've uh in some cases definitely done
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a good job of kind of going after fraudulent projects and going after some of the projects
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that have some of the kind of craziest and most misleading marketing um there's uh also the
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possibility that governments will end up using blockchains for a lot of different things like
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you know governments yeah i mean they do a lot more than just regulating right like there's also
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like they have the kind of identity records and they have kind of like property registries
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even just their own currency is like secure like lots of different kind of things that they're
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operating and there's even blockchain applications in a lot of those yeah and they can you know they
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can leverage technology do a lot of good for our societies it is a little unfortunate that
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governments often lag behind in terms of their acceptance and leverage of technology if you look
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at the autonomous vehicle space ai in general they're uh they're a few years behind it'd be
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nice uh to help them catch up that's a that's that's a always ongoing problem you um met
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vladimir putin to discuss the centralized currency here you're born in the where were you born
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columbia it's a city about 115 kilometers south of moscow in russia yes yeah i grew up in moscow
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i mean that's vladimir putin is a is a central figure in this part of the world so what was
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that like meeting or meeting him what was that experience like he's taller in photos than in
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person yeah he's yeah that's right he's 57 i think 58 maybe yeah that's uh unfortunately we
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didn't actually kind of have too much of a chance to talk to him like i managed to see him for about
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one minute at the end of this meeting and i did get a chance to see a lot like some of the other
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end of government ministers and like he recommended some and uh some of them are are actually
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kind of interested in trying to use um like blockchains to like for various government
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use cases they kind of limit corruption and other things and i have like it's hard to tell from one
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conversation kind of what things are genuine and what things are just like oh blockchain is cool
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let's do blockchain right but you know when i when i listen to like um barack obama talk about
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artificial intelligence there's certain things i hear where okay so he might not be an expert in
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ai but he know he like actually studied it carefully enough to think about it like he
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internally like uh even if he's just reading a wikipedia page like he really thought about what
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this technology means did you get a sense that uh putin or some of the ministers like thought about
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blockchain like thought about the fundamentals of technical like understand it intuitively
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are they too old school to try to grasp it some are old school some are more new school
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it depends it's it's definitely like depends on who you talk to i mean that's an open question
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for me with putin because putin has said i don't know i've only talked to him for about one minute
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so but sometimes you can pick up sort of insights there's a quick comment there they're about maybe
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you can correct me on this but they're about 3000 cryptocurrencies being actively traded yes uh and
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ethereum is one of you know a lot of people believe that there will be the the main cryptocurrency i
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think bitcoin is currently still the main cryptocurrency but ethereum very likely might
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become that the the main one um is this kind of diversity good in the crypto world do you see it
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sticking around should there should there be a winner like should there be some consensus globally
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around uh bitcoin or around ethereum like what's your what's your sense i definitely think the
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diversity is good and i definitely think also that there's probably too many people trying to
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make separate blockchains kind of right now the number should definitely be greater than one and
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probably greater than two or even five um not three thousand not three thousand yeah and also
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not even like 40 high quality platforms that try to do the same thing i mean there's definitely
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this range from just like one person who just like wrongly thinks that you can create a cryptocurrency
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in like 12 hours and uh doesn't even think about kind of the community aspects of maintaining it
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going to uh people actually trying but only creating a really tiny one to like scammers
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to people like making something that's actually successful and then there's a lot of different
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categories of blockchain and you have project in terms of what it's trying to do and what
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applications it's for um and i think the experimentation is definitely healthy
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if you look at the two worlds it might be a little bit disjoint but uh the distributed
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applications cryptocurrency and then the world of artificial intelligence do you see there's some
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overlap between these worlds that both worry about centralized control is there some overlap that's
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interesting that you think about do you think about ai much yeah and i think uh definitely
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i'd have thought about things like in like the ai and if control problems and alignment problems and
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all of those things do you worry about the existential threat of ai it's definitely one
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of the things i worry about they think um block there's a lot of uh kind of common challenges
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because in in both cases what you're ultimately trying to do is you're trying to kind of get a
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simple system to direct a more complex system like in the case of uh this is drawing ai's the
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idea would be that the simple system is people and the complex system is well whatever um thing
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uh the people uh the people end up kind of unleashing on the universe that'll hopefully be
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a great thing um and in the case of blockchains and of the complex well the simple thing is uh
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the algorithm which is a piece of static and fully open source code and the more complex thing is
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just the all of the different possible kind of human actors and the end of the strategy is that
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they might end up used to participate in the network do you think about your own mortality
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like what you hope to accomplish in your life oh i definitely i definitely think about ending my
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own mortality so that's if i gave you the option to live forever would you depends a lot on what
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the fine birds is but i mean you know if it's one of those things where i'm going to be kind
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of like floating through empty space for 10 to the 75 years then no if it's uh um forever worth
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of uh and of having you know fulfilling life with uh and of meaning like with with friends to uh to
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spend the time with with kind of meaningful challenges to explore and individual interesting
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things to be working on then i think absolutely move that's uh beautifully put live forever
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but uh you'd have to check the fine print i think there's no better way to end it vitalik
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thank you so much for talking to us so exciting to follow your work from a distance and uh thank
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you for creating a revolutionary idea and sticking with it and building it out and doing some
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incredible engineering work and thanks for talking today yeah thank you thanks for listening to this
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conversation with vitalik buterin and thank you to our sponsors express vpn and masterclass please
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consider supporting the podcast by signing up to masterclass at masterclass.com slash lex
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and getting express vpn at express vpn.com slash lex pod if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on
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youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast support it on patreon or simply connect with me on
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twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from vitalik buterin the thing
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that i often ask startups on top of ethereum is can you please tell me why using ethereum blockchain
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is better than using excel and if they can come up with a good answer that's when you know you've
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got something really interesting thank you for listening and hope to see you next time