back to indexSilvio Micali: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Algorand, Bitcoin & Ethereum | Lex Fridman Podcast #168
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The following is a conversation with Silvio McCauley, a computer scientist at MIT,
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winner of the Turing Award, and one of the leading minds in the fields of cryptography,
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information security, game theory, and most recently, cryptocurrency and the theoretical
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foundations of a fully decentralized, secure, and scalable blockchain at Algorand, a company
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of cryptographers, engineers, and mathematicians that he founded in 2017.
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Quick mention of our sponsors. Athletic Greens Nutrition Drink, the Information In Depth Tech
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Journalism website, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor
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links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I will
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be having many conversations this year on the topic of cryptocurrency. I'm reading and thinking
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and thinking a lot on this topic. I just recently finished reading The Bitcoin Standard, a book I
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highly recommend. As always, with this podcast, I'm approaching it with an open mind, with
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compassion, with as little ego as possible, and yes, with love. I hope you go along with me on
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this journey and don't judge me too harshly on any likely missteps. As usual, I will play devil's
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advocate. I will, on purpose, sometimes ask simple, even dumb questions, all to try and explore the
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space of ideas here with as much grace as I can muster. I have no financial interests here. I
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only have a simple curiosity and a love for knowledge, especially about a set of technologies
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that may very well transform the fabric of human civilization. If you enjoy this thing,
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subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or
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connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Silvio McCauley.
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Let's start with the big and the basic question. What is a blockchain? And why is it interesting?
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Why is it fascinating? Why is it powerful? All right. So a blockchain, think of it, is really
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a common database distributed. Think about it as a ledger in which everybody can write an entry
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in a page. You can write, I can write, and everybody can read, and you have a guarantee
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that everybody has the same copy of the ledger that is in front of you. So whatever you see on
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page seven, anyone else sees on page seven. So what is extraordinary about this is this common
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knowledge thing that I think is really a first for humanity. I mean, if you look at communication,
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like right now, you can communicate very quickly images, photos, but do you have a certainty that
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whatever you have received has been received by everybody else? Not really. And so there's a
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commonality of knowledge and the certainty that everybody can write, nobody has been prevented
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from writing whatever they want. Nobody can erase. Nobody can tear a page of a ledger.
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Nobody can swap page. Nobody can change anything. And that is immutable common record is
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extremely powerful. And there's something fundamental that is decentralized about it.
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So at least in spirit, some degree against maybe a resistance to centralization.
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Absolutely. If it is not decentralized, how can it be common knowledge? If only one person or a
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few people have a ledger, you don't have a ledger, you have to ask, you know, what is on page seven?
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And how do you know that whatever they tell you is on page seven, they tell the same thing to
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everybody else. And so this commonality is extremely powerful. Just to give you an example,
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assume that you do an auction, okay? You have worked very hard, you build a building,
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and now you want to auction it off. Makes sense because you want to auction worldwide,
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better yet, you want to tokenize the building and sell it in all in parcels.
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Now, everybody sees the bids. And you know that everybody sees the bids. You and I see the same
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bids, and so does everybody else. So you know that a fair price has reached, and you know who owns
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what and who has spent how much. And if you do it instead of, otherwise, in a centralized system,
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I put a bid saying, oh, congratulations, Alex, you won, and your price is $12,570. How do you know?
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So if instead of this common knowledge is a very powerful tool for humanity.
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So we return to it from a bunch of different perspectives, including like a technical
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perspective. But you often talk about blockchain and some of these concepts of decentralization,
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scalability, security, all those kinds of things. But one of the most maybe impactful, exciting
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things that leverage the blockchain, this kind of ledger idea of common knowledge is cryptocurrency.
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So in the financial space. So is there, can you say in the same kind of basic way,
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what is cryptocurrency in the context of this common knowledge and in the context of the blockchain?
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Great. Cryptocurrency is a currency that is on such a ledger. So imagine that on the ledger,
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initially, you know that somehow, say you and I are the only owner, each one, let's give it
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ourselves a billion each of whatever this unit. Then I start writing on the ledger,
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I give 100 of these units to my sister, I give this much to my aunt. And then now,
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because it's written on the ledger and everybody can see, my sister can give 57 of these units
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that she received from me to somebody else. And that is money. And that is money because
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you can see that somebody who tenders your payment has really the money there. You don't
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have any more of a doubt when you want to sell an item. If I write you a check, is the check covered?
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Or do I have the money at the moment of a transaction? You really see because the ledger
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is always updated. What you see is what I see, what the merchant sees. You know that the money,
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the money is the most powerful money system there is because it is totally transparent. And so you
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know that you have been paid, and you know that the money is there, you have not to second guess
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anything else. So the common knowledge applied there is you're basically mimicking the same kind
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of thing you would get in the physical space, which is if you give 100 bucks or 100 of that
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thing, whatever of that cryptocurrency to your sister, the actual transfer is as real as you
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giving like a basket of apples to your sister. So in the case in the physical space, the common
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knowledge is in the physics of the atoms. And then it's digital space, the common knowledge
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is in this ledger. And so that transfer holds the same kind of power, but now it's operating
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in the digital space. Again, I apologize for a set of ridiculous questions, but you mentioned
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cryptocurrencies and money. What is money? Why do we have money? Do you think about this
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kind of from this high philosophical level at times of this tool, this idea that we humans
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have all kind of came up with and seem to be using effectively to do stuff?
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Money is a social construct, okay, in my opinion. And this has been somehow people always felt
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that somehow money is a way to allow us to transact, even though we want different things. So
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I have two sheep, and then you have one cow, and I want the cow, but you are looking for
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blankets instead, you know, so to have money is really simplifies this. But at the end of
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it, that's why a bit was invented. And you started with gold, you started with
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the coinage, then you started with the check. But at the end of the day, money is essentially
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a social construct because you know that what you receive, you can actually spend with somebody
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else. And so there is a kind of a social pact and social belief that you have. At the end of the day,
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even barter requires these beliefs that other people are going to accept
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the quote unquote currency you offer them. Because if I'm a mason, and you ask me to build a wall
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in your field, and I did, and you, in exchange, you give me a thousand sheep,
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what am I going to do? Eat them all? No, I have to feed them. And if I don't feed them, they die,
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and my value is zero. So in receiving this livestock, I must believe that somebody else
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will accept them in return for something else. So money is a social belief, social shared belief
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system that makes people transact. That's fascinating. I didn't even think about that,
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that you're actually, you have a deep like network of beliefs about how society operates.
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So the value is assigned even to sheep, based on that everyone will continue operating how they
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were previously operating. Somebody will feed the sheep. I didn't even think about that. That's
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fascinating. So that directly transfers to the space of money and then to the space of digital
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money, cryptocurrency. Okay. Does it bother you sort of intellectually when this money that is
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a social construct is not directly tied to physical goods like gold, for example?
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Not at all, because after all, gold has some industrial value. Nobody delights it. It's a
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metal. It doesn't oxidate. It has some good things about it. But does this industrial value
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really represent the value to which it now is traded? No. So gold is another way to express
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our belief. I give you an ounce of gold, you treat it like, oh, somebody else will want this
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for doing something else. So it is really this notion of this. Money is a mental construct,
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is really, and is shared, is a social construct, I really believe. And so some people feel that
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it's physical, so therefore gold exists. Then, as you know now, countries, most sophisticated
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country right now, they print their own money and you believe that they are not going to
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exaggerate it with inflation. Not everybody believes it, but at least they are not going
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to exaggerate it blatantly. And therefore you receive it because you know that somebody else
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will accept it, will have faith in the currency and so on and so forth. But whether it's gold,
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whether it's livestock, whatever it is, money is really a shared belief.
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So there is something, you know, and I've been reading more and more about different cryptocurrencies.
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There is a kind of belief that the scarcity of a particular resource like Bitcoin has a
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limited amount and it's tied to physical, you know, to proof of work. So it's tied to physical
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reality in terms of how much you can mine effectively and so on. That that's an
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important feature of money. Do you think that's an important feature to be a part of whatever
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the money is? That is certainly a very useful part. So at some point in time, you know,
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assume that money is something that all of a sudden we say, daisies are money, are the currency.
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Then, you know, I offer you 10 daisies in payment of whatever goods and services you want to
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provide. But at the end of the day, if you know that you can cultivate it and generate them at
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will, then perhaps, you know, you should not accept my payment. Here is a bouquet of daisies.
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So you need some kind of a scarcity. The inability to create it suddenly out of nothing
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is unimportant. And it's not an intrinsic necessity, but it's much easier to accept
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once you know that there is a fixed number of units of whatever currency there is and therefore
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you can mentally understand I'm getting, you know, this much of this piece of a pie and therefore
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I consider myself paid. I understand what I'm receiving. You described the goals of a blockchain.
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You have a nice presentation on this as scalability, security, and decentralization.
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And you challenged the blockchain trilemma that claims you can only have two of the three.
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So let's talk about each. What is scalability in the context of blockchain and cryptocurrency?
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What does scalability mean? So remember, we said that the blockchain is a ledger and each page
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receives a, gets some transaction and everybody can write in these pages of the ledger. Nobody
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can be stopped from writing and everybody can read them. Okay. Scalability means how fast can
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you write? Just imagine that you can write an entry in this special shared ledger once every
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hour. Well, you know, what are you going to do if you have no one transaction of an hour,
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the world doesn't go around. So you need to have scalability means here that you can
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then somehow write a lot of transaction and then you can read them and everybody can validate them.
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And that is the speed and the number of transactions per second and the fact that
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they are shared. So you want to have this speed not only in writing, but in sharing and
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in inspection for validity. This is scalability. The world is big. The world wants to interact,
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the people want to interact with each other and you better be prepared to have a ledger
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in which you can write lots and lots and lots of transactions in this special way very,
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very, very quickly. So maybe from a more mathematical perspective or can we say
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something about how much scalability is needed for a world that is big?
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Well, it really depends how many transactions you want, but remember that I think right now
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yet to go into at least 1000s of transactions per second, even if you look at credit cards,
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we are going to go from an average of 1600 to peaks of 20,000 or 40,000, something like this.
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But remember, it's not only a question of a transaction per se, but the value is that the
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transaction is actually being shared and visible to everybody and the certainty that that is the
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case. I can print on my own printer way more transactions, but nobody has the time to see
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or to inspect. That doesn't count. So you want scalability at this common knowledge level.
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That is the challenge. I also meant from a perspective of like a complexity analysis.
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So when you get more and more people involved, doesn't need to scale in some kind of way that
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do you like to see certain kind of properties in order to say something is scalable?
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Oh, absolutely. I took a little bit implicitly that the people transacting are actually very
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different. So if there is a two people who can do thousands of transactions per second with each
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other, this is not so interesting. What do we really need is to say there are billions of
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people at any point in time, you know, thousands and thousands of them want to transact with each
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other and you want to support to that. So Algorand, it solves, so that's the company,
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the team of cryptographers and mathematicians, engineers, so on, that challenged the blockchain
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trilemma. So let's break it down in terms of achieving scalability. How do we achieve scalability
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in the space of blockchain, in the space of cryptocurrency? Okay. So scalability, security,
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remember, and decentralization, right? So that's what they want. What's the best way to approach?
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Can we break it down? Let's start with scalability and think about how do we achieve it? Well,
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to achieve it one at a time is perhaps easy, even security. If nobody transacts,
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nobody loses money. So that is secure, but it's not scalable. So let me tell you, I'm a cryptographer,
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so I try to fight the bad guys. And what you want is that the vesselager that we discussed before
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cannot be tampered with. So you must think of it as a special link that nobody can erase. Then
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it has to be, everybody should be able to read and not to alter the pages or the content of the pages.
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That's okay. But you know what? That is actually easy cryptographically. Easy cryptographically
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means you can use tools invented 50 years ago, which in cryptographic time is prehistory, okay?
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We cavemen working around and solve the problem in cryptography land. But there is really a
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fundamental problem, which is really almost a social, seems a political problem, is to say,
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who the hell chooses or publishes the next page of the ledger? I mean, that is really the challenge.
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This ledger, you can always add a page because more and more transaction had to be written on
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there. And somebody has to assemble this transaction, put them on a page and add the
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next page. Who is the somebody who chooses the page and adds it on? Who can be trusted to do it?
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Exactly. Assume it is me for what I'm being, not that I want to volunteer for the job, but
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then I would have more power than any absolute monarch in history, because I would have a
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tremendous power to say, these are the transactions that the entire world should see. And whatever I
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don't write, this transaction will never see the light of day. I mean, no one had any such a power
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in history. So it's very important to do that. And that is the quintessential problem in a blockchain.
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And people have thought about it to say, it's not me, it's not you. But for instance,
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in proof of work, what people say is, okay, it's not me, it's not you, you know what it is?
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We make a very difficult, we invented a cryptographic puzzle, very hard to solve.
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The first one to solve it has the right to add one page to the ledger on behalf of everybody else.
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That now seems okay, because sometimes I solve a puzzle before you do, sometimes you solve
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before I do, or before somebody else solves it, it's okay.
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And presumably, the effort you put in is somehow correlated with how much trust
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you should be given to add to the ledger.
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Yeah, so somehow you want to make sure that you need to work because you want to prevent,
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you want to make sure that you get one solution every 10 minutes, say, like in a particular
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example of Bitcoin, so that it is very rare that two pages are added at the same time.
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Because if I solve a puzzle at the same time you do, it could happen that if it happens once or
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twice, we can survive it. But if it happens every other page is a double page, then which of the two
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is the real page, it becomes a problem. So that's why in Bitcoin, it is important to have a substantial
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amount of work so that no matter how many people try on Earth to solve a puzzle, you have one
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solution out of how many people are trying every 10 minutes. So that you have, you distance these
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pages, and you have the time to propagate through the network a solution and the page attached to
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it. And therefore, there is one page at a time that is added. And you say, well, why don't we
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do it? We have a solution. Well, first of all, a page every 10 minutes is not fast enough. It's a
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question of scalability. And second of all, to ensure that no matter how many people try, you
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get one page every 10 minutes, one solution to the riddle every 10 minutes. This means that the riddle
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becomes very, very hard. And to have a chance to solve it within 10 minutes, you must have such an
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expensive apparatus in terms of specialized computers, not one, not two, but thousands and
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thousands of them. And they produce tons of heat, okay? They dissipate heat like maniac. And then
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you have to refrigerate them too. And so then now you have air conditioning galore to add to the
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thing. It becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer and fewer people can actually compete in
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order to add to the page. And the problem becomes so crucial that in Bitcoin, depending on which
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day of the week you look at it, you are going to have two or three mining pools that are really
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the ones that are capable of controlling the chain. So you're saying that's almost like
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at least a centralization. Right. It started being decentralized, but the expenses became
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higher and higher and higher. When the cost becomes higher and higher, fewer and fewer
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people can afford them. And then it becomes de facto centralized, right? Yeah. And a different
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type of approach is instead, for instance, a delegated proof of stake, which is also
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very easy to explain, essentially boils down to say, well, look at these 21 people, say, okay?
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Don't they look honest? Yes, they do. In fact, I believe that they're going to remain honest
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for the foreseeable future. So why don't we do ourselves a favor? Let's entrust them
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to add the page on behalf of all of us to the ledger. Okay. Okay. But now we are going to say,
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is this centralized or decentralized? Well, 21 is better than one, but to say is very little.
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So if you look at when people rebelled to centralize power, I don't know, the French
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revolutions, okay? There was a monarch and the nobles. Were there 21 nobles? No, there were
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thousands of them, but there were millions and millions of disempowered citizens. So one is
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centralized, 21 is also centralized, right? So that's delegated proof of stake. Delegated. It's
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kind of like representative democracy, I guess. Yes, which is good. It's working great, right?
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It's working great. Well, it's better than the single monarch, right? There's problems.
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There are problems. And so we were looking for a different, when thinking about Algorand,
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for a different approach. And so we have an approach that is really, really decentralized
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because essentially it works as follows. You have a bunch of tokens, right? These are the tokens
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that have equal power. And you have say 10 billions of tokens distributed to the entire
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world. And the owners, each token has a chance to add the ledger, equal probability to everybody
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else. In fact, actually, if you want, here is how it works. So think about by some magic
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cryptographic process, which is not magic, it's mathematics, but think of it as magic. Assume that
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you select a thousand tokens and so sometimes a random, okay? And you have a guarantee that the
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random selected. And then the owners of these 1000 tokens somehow agree on the next page,
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they all sign it, and that is the next page. Okay? So it is clear that nobody has the power
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but in a while, one of your tokens is selected and you are in charge of this committee to select
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the next page. But this goes around very quickly. So, and if you look at this, the equation really
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is that it's not really centralized. And because for agreeing on the same page, it is important
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that the 1000 tokens that you randomly selected are in honest ends, the majority of them.
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So which, if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, that is essentially true because
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if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, if you select, say 90% of the people are,
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90% of the tokens are in honest ends. So can you randomly select a thousand,
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in this thousand you find the 501 tokens in bad ends. Very, very improbable.
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So basically, when a large fraction of people are honest, then you can use randomness as a powerful
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tool to get decentralization. So what does honesty mean? And now we're into the social
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side of things, which is how do we know that like the fraction, a large fraction of people
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or participating parties are honest? That is an excellent question. So by the way,
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first of all, we should realize that the same thing is for every other system. When you look
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at proof of work, you rely that the majority of the mining power is in honest ends. When you look
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at delegated proof of stake, you rely that the majority of these 21 people are honest. What is
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the difference? The difference is that in these other systems, you should say the whole economy
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is secure if the majority of this small piece of economy are honest. And that is a big question.
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But instead, in Algorand, in our approach, we say the whole economy is secure if the majority
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of the economy is honest. In other words, who can subvert Algorand is not a majority of a small
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group, but is a majority of the token holders had to conspire with each other in order to sink the
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very economy for which they own the majority of. That I think it is a bit harder to...
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Like a self destructive majority, essentially. And you're also making me realize that basically
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every system that we have in the world today assumes that the majority of participants is
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honest. Yes. The only difference is the majority of whom. And in some cases, the majority of a club
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and in our case is the majority of the whole system.
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The whole system. Okay. So that's... So through that kind of random sampling,
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you can achieve decentralization. You can achieve... So the scalability, I understand.
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And then the security that you're referring to, basically the security comes from the fact that
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the sample selected would likely include honest people. So it's very difficult to... So by the way,
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the security, as you mentioned, you're referring to is basically security against dishonesty,
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right? Or manipulation or whatever. Yes. Yes. So essentially when what you're going to do is to
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the following and say, well, Silvio, I understood what you're saying, but somebody has to randomly
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randomly selected these tokens, then I believe you. So then who does this random selection?
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That's a good point. And in Algorand, we do something a little bit unorthodox.
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Essentially is the token choose themselves at random. And you say, if you think about it,
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that seems to be a terrible idea. Because if you want to say, choose yourself at random,
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and whoever chooses himself is a thousand people committee, you choose the page for the rest of us.
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Mm hmm. And because if I'm a bad person, I'm going to select myself over and over again,
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because I want to be part of the committee every single time. But not so fast. So what do we do
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in Algorand? What does it mean that I select myself? That each one of us,
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in the privacy of our own computer, actually a laptop, what you do is that you execute your own
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individual lottery. And think about that you pull a lever of a slot machine, you can only pull the
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lever once, not until you win, not enough times until you win. And when you pull the lever, case
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one, either you win, in such a case, you have a winning ticket. Or you lose, you don't get any
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winning ticket. So if you don't have a winning ticket, you can say anything you want about the
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next page in the ledger, nobody pays attention. But if you ever win a ticket, people say, Oh,
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wow, this is one of the 1000 winning tickets, we better pay attention to what he or she says.
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And that's how it works. And the lottery is a cryptographic lottery, which means that even if I
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am an entire nation, extremely powerful, with incredible computing powers, I don't have the
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ability to improve even minimally my probability of one of my token winning the lottery. And
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that's how it happens. So everybody pulls the lever, the 1000 random winners say, Oh, here is
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my winning ticket. And here is my opinion up or down about the block. These are the ones that
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count. And if you think about it, while this is distributed, because there is, in the case of
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Algon, there is 10 billion tokens and you selected 1000 of them more distributed than this, you
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cannot get. And then why is this scalable? Because what do you have to do? Okay, you have to do the
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lottery. How long the lottery takes? It takes actually one microsecond. Whether you have one
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token or two tokens or a billion tokens is always one microsecond of computation, which is very
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fast. We don't hit the planet with a microsecond of computation. And finally, why is this secure?
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Because even if I were a very evil and very, very powerful individual, I'm so powerful that I can
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corrupt anybody I want instantaneously in the world, whom would I want to corrupt? The people
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in the committee so that I can choose the page of the ledger. But I do have a problem. I do not
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know whom I should corrupt. Should I corrupt this lady in Shanghai, this other guy in Paris?
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Because I don't know. The winners are random, so I don't know whom I should corrupt.
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But once the winner comes forward and says, here is my winning ticket, and you propagate
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your winning ticket across the network, together with your opinion about the block,
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now I know who they are. For sure, I can corrupt all 1000 of them given to my incredible powers.
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But so what? Whatever they said, they already said, and their winning tickets and their opinions
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are virally propagated across the network. And I do not have the power, no more than the US
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government or any government has the power, to put back in the bottle a message virally
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propagated by WikiLeaks. So everything you just described is kind of is fascinating,
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a set of ideas. And, you know, online I've been reading quite a bit, and people are really excited
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about the set of ideas. Nevertheless, it is not the dominating technology today. So Bitcoin,
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in terms of cryptocurrency, is the most popular cryptocurrency, and then Ethereum, and so on.
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So it's useful to kind of comment. We already talked about proof of work a little bit.
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But what, in your sense, does Bitcoin get right? And where is it lacking?
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Okay, so the first thing that Bitcoin got right is to understand that there was the need
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of a cryptocurrency. And that, in my opinion, they deserve all the success because they said
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the time is right for this idea. Because very often, it's not enough to be right here to be
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right at the right time. And somebody got it right there. So hat off to Bitcoin for that.
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And so what they got right is that it is hard to subvert and change the ledger, to cancel a
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transaction. It's not impossible. That is very hard. What they did not get right is somehow that
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it is a great store of value, currency wise. But money is not only a question that you store it
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and you put under the mattress. Money wants to be transacted. And the transaction bitcoins are very
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little. So if you want to store value, everybody needs a store of value. Might as well use Bitcoin.
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I mean, it's the plan. But if you don't look at that for a moment, at least it's a great store
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of value. And everybody needs a store of value. But most of the time, we want to transact. We
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want to interact. We don't put the money under the mattress. So we wanted to embed. They didn't get
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it right. That is too slow to transact. Too few transactions. There's a scalability issue.
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Is it possible to build stuff on top of Bitcoin that sort of fixes the scalability? I mean,
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this is the thing you look at. There's a bunch of technologies that kind of hit the right
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need at the right time and they have flaws, but we kind of build infrastructures on top of them
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over time to fix it as opposed to getting it right from the beginning. Or is it difficult to do?
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Well, that is difficult to do. So you're talking to somebody that when I decided to throw my heart
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in the arena and I decided, first of all, as I said before, I much admire my predecessors. I
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mean, they got it right, a lot of things. And I really admire for that. But I had a choice to
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make. Either I patch something that has holes all over the place or I start from scratch. I decided
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to start from scratch because sometimes it's a better way. So what about Ethereum, which looks
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like proof of stake and a lot of different innovative ideas that kind of improve or seek
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to improve on some of the flaws of Bitcoin. Ethereum made another great idea. So they
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figured out that money and payments are important as they are. They are only the first level, the
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first stepping stone. The next level are smart contracts. And they were at the vision to say
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the people will need smart contract, which allow me and you to somehow to transact securely without
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being shopped around by a trusted third party, by a mediator. By the way, because mediators are hard
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to find. And in fact, maybe even impossible to find if you live in Thailand and I live in New
link |
Zealand, maybe we don't have a common person that we know and trust. And even if we find them,
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guess what? They want to be paid. So much so that 6% of the world GDP goes into financial friction,
link |
which is essentially third party. So the head of right of the world needed that.
link |
But again, the scalability is not there. And the system of smart contracts in Ethereum is slow
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and expensive. And I believe that is not enough to satisfy the appetite and the need that we have
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for smart contracts. Well, what do you make of just as a small sort of aside in human history,
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perhaps it's a big one is NFT, the non fungible tokens. Do you find those interesting technically,
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or is it more interesting on the social side of things? Well, both. I think NFTs are actually
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great. So you are an artist to create a song or it could be a piece of art. He has many unique
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representations of a unique piece where there is an artifact of something dreamed up by you and
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has unique representations that now you can trade. And the important part is that now you have this
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is not only the NFTs themselves, but the ability to trade them quickly, fast, securely, knowing
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who owns which rights. And that gives a totally new opportunity for content creators to be
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remunerated for what they do. But ultimately, you still have to have that scalability, security
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and decentralization to make it, you know, to make it work for bigger and bigger applications.
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Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I still wonder what kind of applications are yet to be
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like enabled by it because so much. The interesting thing about NFTs, you know,
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if you look outside of art is just like money, you can start playing with different social
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constructs, is you can start playing with the ideas. You can start playing with even like
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investing. Somebody was talking about almost creating an economy out of like creative people
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or influencers. Like if you start a YouTube channel or something like that, you can invest
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in that person and you can start trading their creations. And then almost like create a market
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out of people's ideas, out of people's creations, out of the people themselves that generate those
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creations. And there's a lot of interesting possibilities of what you can do with that.
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I mean, it seems ridiculous, but you're basically creating a hierarchy of value, maybe artificial
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in the digital world and are trading that. But in so doing are inspiring people to create.
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So maybe as a sort of our economy gets better and better and better where actual work in the
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physical space becomes less and less in terms of its importance, maybe we'll completely be operating
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in the digital space where these kinds of economies have more and more power. And then
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you have to have this kind of blockchains to the scalability, security, and decentralization.
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And then decentralization is of course the tricky one because people in power start to get nervous.
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Absolutely. Once in power, you're always nervous that you'll be supplanted by somebody else.
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But this is your job. Congratulations, you got the job, the top job, and now everybody wants it.
link |
Well, what is your sense about our time and the future hope about the decentralization
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of power? Do you think that's something that we can actually achieve given that power corrupts
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and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it's so wonderful to be absolutely powerful?
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Well, good question. So first of all, I believe that by the way, there is a
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complex question, Lex, and like all the rest of your questions.
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I'm so very sorry.
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It's okay. I am enjoying it. So there are two things. First of all,
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power has been centralized for a variety of reasons. When you want to get it, it's easier
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for somebody, even a single person, to grab power. But there is also some kind of a technology,
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lack thereof, that justified having power. Because in a society in which even communication,
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never mind blockchain, which is common knowledge, but even simple unilateral communication is hard,
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it is much easier to say, you do as I say. So there is a little bit of a technology barrier.
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But I think that now to get to this common knowledge, it is a totally different story.
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Now we have finally the technology for doing this. So that is one part. But I really believe
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that by having a distributed system, you have actually a much more stable and durable system.
link |
Because not only for corruption, but even for things that go astray, and given a long enough
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time by a strange version of Murphy's law, whatever goes wrong, goes wrong. And if the
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power is diffused, you actually are much more stable. If you look at any complex living being,
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it's distributed. I mean, I don't have somebody who says, okay, tell Silvio now it's time to eat.
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You have millions of cells in your body. You have billions of bacteria.
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Exactly. Help me in the guts. We are in a soup that somehow keeps us alive.
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So strange enough, however, when we design systems, we design them centralized. We ourselves
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are distributed beings. And when we plan to say, okay, I want to create an architecture,
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how about I make a pyramid, I put this on the top and the power flows down. And so again,
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it's a little bit perhaps of a technology problem. But now the technology is there.
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So that is a big challenge to rethink how we want to organize power in a very large system and
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distribute a system, in my opinion, much more resilient. Let's put it this way. There was
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Italian compatriots, Machiavelli, who looked at the time, there was a bunch of small state
link |
democratic Republic of Florence and Venice and the other thing. And there was the Ottoman Empire
link |
that at the time was an empire and the Sultan was very centralized. And he made a political
link |
observation that goes roughly to say, whenever you have such a centralized thing, it's very hard
link |
to overtake that former government is centralized. But if you get it, it's so easy to keep
link |
the population. While instead these other things are much more resilient. When the power is
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distributed, it's going to be lasting for a much longer time. And ultimately maybe the human spirit
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wants that kind of resilience, wants that kind of distribution. It's just that we didn't have
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technology throughout history. Machiavelli didn't have the computer, the internet.
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That is certainly part of a reason. Yes. You've written an interesting blog post. If we
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just take a step out of the realm of bits and into the realm of governance, you wrote a blog
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post about making Algorand governance decentralized. Can you explain what that means, the philosophy
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behind that? How you decentralized basically all aspects of this kind of system?
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Let's start with the philosophy. I really believe that nothing fixed lasts very long.
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So I really believe that life is about intelligent adaptation. Things change, and we have to be
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nimble and adjust to change. When I see a lot of a crypto project, I'm actually very proud to say
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it's fixed in stone. Code is law. Law is code. I verify the code. It will never change. You go,
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wow. When I'm saying this is a recipe to me of disaster, not immediately, but soon. Just imagine
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you take an ocean liner, and you want to go, I don't know, from Lisbon to New York, and you set
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a course, iceberg, no iceberg, tempest, no tempest. It doesn't matter. You need a teal. You need to
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correct. You need to adjust. By the way, you would design Algorand with the idea that the code was
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evolving as the needs. Of course, there is a system in which every time there is an adjustment,
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you must have essentially a vote that right now is orchestrated at 90% of the stake. They say,
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okay, we are ready. We agree on the next version, and we pick up this version. So we are able to
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evolve without losing too many components left and right. But I think without evolving, any system
link |
essentially becomes aesthetic and is going to shrivel and die sooner or later. That is needed.
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What you want to do on the blockchain, you have a perfect platform in which you can log
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your wishes, your votes, your things, so that you have a guarantee that whatever vote you express
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is actually seen by everybody else. Everybody sees really the outcome, call it a referendum,
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of a change. And Vete is, in my opinion, a system that wants to live long as to adapt.
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There is an interesting question about leaders. I've talked to Vitalik Buterin. I'll probably
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talk to him again soon. He's one of the leaders, maybe one of the faces of the Ethereum project.
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And it's interesting. You have Satoshi Nakamoto, who's the face of Bitcoin, I guess. But he's
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faceless. He, she, they. It does seem like in our whatever it is, maybe it's 20th century,
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maybe it's Machiavellian thinking, but we seek leaders. Leaders have value. Linus Torvalds,
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the leader of Linux, the open source development a lot. It's not that the leadership is sort of
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dogmatic, but it's inspiring. And it's also powerful in that through leaders, we propagate
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the vision. Like the vision of the project is more stable. Maybe not the details, but the vision.
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And so do you think there's value to, because there's a tension between decentralization
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and leadership, like in visionaries. What do you make of that tension?
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SL. Okay. So I really believe that, that's another great question. I think of it,
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I really believe in the power of emotions. I think the emotion are of a creative impulse
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of everybody else. And therefore it's very easy for a leader to be a physical person, a real
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being, and that interprets our emotions. And by the way, these emotions have to resonate.
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And what is good is that the more intimate our emotions are, the more universal they are,
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paradoxically. The more personal, the more everybody else somehow magically agrees and
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feels a bit of the same. And it's very important to have a leader in the initial phase that
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generates out of nothing something. That is important leadership. But then the true tested
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leadership is to disappear after you lead the community. So in my opinion, the quintessential
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leader according to my vision is George Washington. He served for one term, he served for another
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term, and then all of a sudden he retired and became a private citizen. And two hundred and
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change years later, we still are, with some defects, but we have done a lot of things right.
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And we have been able to evolve. That to me is success in leadership.
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While instead you contrast our experiment with a lot of our experiment. I've done so much so well
link |
that I want another four years. And why shouldn't I be only a four and I have another eight?
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Why should it be another eight? Give me 16 and I will fix all your problems. And then is the type,
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in my opinion, of failed leadership. Leadership ought to be really lead, ignite, and disappear.
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And if you don't disappear, the system is going to die with you. It is not a good idea for everybody
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else. So we've been talking a little bit about cryptocurrency, but is there spaces where
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this kind of blockchain ideas that you're describing, which I find fascinating,
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do you think they can revolutionize some other aspects of our world that's not just money?
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A lot of things are going to be revolutionized is independent of finance. By the way,
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I really believe that finance is an incredible form of freedom. I mean,
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if I'm free to do everything I want, but I don't have the means to do anything, that's a bad idea.
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So I really think financial freedom is very, very important. But you just can say that against
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you know, censorship, you write something on the chain and now nobody can take it out.
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That is a very important way to express our view. And then the transparency that you give,
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because everybody can see what's happening on the blockchain. So transparency is not money.
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But I believe that transparency actually is a very important ingredient also of finance. Let's put
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this way, as much as I'm enthusiastic about blockchain and decentralized finance, and we have
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actually our expression, we're creating this future five, because as much as we want to do,
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we must agree that the first guarantee of financial growth and prosperity are really
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the legal system, the courts. Because we may not think about them and say, oh, the courts
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are a bunch of boring lawyers. But without them, I'm saying there is no certainty. There is no
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notion of equality. There is no notion that you can resolve your disputes thing. That's
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what thrives commerce and things. And so what I really believe that the blockchain actually
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makes a lot of this trust essentially automatic, but make it impossible to cheat in very way. You
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don't even need to go to court if nobody can change the ledger. So essentially it's a way of
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you cannot solve an illegal system that reduces to a blockchain. But what I'm saying, a big chunk
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of it can actually be guaranteed. And there is no reason why technology should be antagonistic
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to legal scholarship. It could be actually coexisting and one should start to doing the
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interest things that the technology alone cannot do. And then you go from there. But I think that
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essentially blockchain can affect all kinds of our behavior.
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Yeah. So in some sense, the transparency, the required transparency ensures honesty,
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prevents corruption. So there's a lot of systems that could use that. And the legal system is one
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of them. There's a little bit of attention that I wonder if you can speak to where this kind of
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transparency, there's a tension with privacy. Is it possible to achieve privacy if wanted
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on a blockchain? Do you have ideas about different technologies that can do that? People have been
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playing with different ideas. So absolutely. The answer is yes. And by the way, I'm a cryptographer.
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Right. Okay. So I really believe in privacy and I believe in and I've devoted a big chunk of my
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life to guarantee privacy, even when it seems almost impossible to have it. And it is possible
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to have it also in the blockchain too. However, I believe in timing as well. And I believe that
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the people have the right to understand their system they live in. And right now people can
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understand the blockchain to be something that cannot be altered and is transparent. And that
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is good enough. And there is a pseudo privacy for the fact that who knows if this public key belongs
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to me or to you. And I can, when I want to change my money from one public key, I split it to other
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public keys, going to figure out which one is Silvio or all of them are Silvio or only one of
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Silvio. Who knows? So you get some vanilla privacy, not the one I could talk. And I think it's good
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enough because, and it's important for now that we absorb this stage. Because in the next stage,
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we must understand the privacy tool rather than taking on faith. When the public starts saying,
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I believe in the scientists and whatever they say, I swear by them. And therefore,
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the term is private is private and nobody understands it very well. We need a much more
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educated about the tools we are using. And so I look forward to deploying more and more privacy
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on the blockchain, but we are not, I will not rush to it until the people understand and are behind
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whatever we have right now. So you build privacy on top of the power of the blockchain. You have
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to first understand the power of the blockchain. Yes. So Algorand is like one of the most exciting,
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technically at least from my perspective, technologies, ideas in this whole space.
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What's the future of Algorand look like? Is it possible for it to dominate the world?
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Let's put it this way. I certainly working very hard with a great team to give the best blockchain
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that one can demand and enjoy. And they said, I really believe that there is going to be,
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it's not a winner takes them all. So it's going to be a few blockchains and each one is going to
link |
have its own brand and it's going to be great at something. And sometimes it's scalability,
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sometimes it's your views, sometimes it's a thing. And it's important to have a dialogue between
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these things. And I'm sure, and I'm working very hard to make sure that Algorand is one of them,
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but I don't believe that it's even desirable to have a winner takes all because we need to express
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different things. But the important thing is going to have enough interoperability with
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various systems so that you can transfer your assets where you have the best tool to service
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them, whatever your needs are at the time. So there's an idea, I don't know, they call
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themselves Bitcoin maximalists, which is essentially the bet that the philosophy that
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Bitcoin will eat the world. So you're talking about, it's good to have variety.
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Their claim is it's good to have the best technology dominate the medium of exchange,
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the medium of store of value, the money, the digital currency space.
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What's your sense of the positives and the negatives of that?
link |
So I feel people are smart and it's going to be very hard for anybody to win. And because
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people want more and more things. There is an Italian saying that translates well, I think.
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It goes, the appetite grows while eating. I think you understand what he means. So I say,
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I'm not hungry. Okay, food. Let me try this. So we want more and more and more. And when you find
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something like Bitcoin, which are already very good things to say, but it does something very
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well, but it's a static, I mean, store of value. Yes, I think it's a great way for the rest. You
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know, it would be a sad world if the world in which we are so anchoring down, so defensive
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that we want to store value and hide it under the mattress. I long for a world in which is open.
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People want to transact, interact with each other. And therefore, when you want to store value,
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one, perhaps one chain, where you want to have to transact, maybe is another. I'm not saying that,
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you know, one chain cannot be store of value or another thing, but I really believe,
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I believe in the ingenuity of people and in the innovation that is intrinsic to the human nature.
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We want always different things. So how can it be something invented,
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whatever it is decades ago, is going to fulfill the needs of our future generations.
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I'm not going to fulfill my needs, let alone my kids or their kids. We are going to have a
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different world and things will evolve. So you believe that life, intelligent life,
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is ultimately about adaptability and evolving. So static loses in the end.
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Yes. Let me ask the, well, first the ridiculous question. Do you have any
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clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is? Is that even an interesting question?
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Well, your questions are very interesting. So, and I think, so I would say, first of all,
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it's not me. Okay. And I can prove it because, you know, if I were Satoshi Nakamoto, I would
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have not found an algorithm. It takes a totally different principle to approach to the system.
link |
But the other thing, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? You know what the right answer is? It's not him
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or her or them. Satoshi Nakamoto is Bitcoin. Because to me, it's such a coherent proof of
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work that at the end, the creator and the creation identify themselves. So you say,
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okay, I understand Michelangelo. Okay. He did the Sistine Chapel. Fine. He did the
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St. Peter's Dome. Fine. He did the Moses of the Pieta statue. Fine. But besides this,
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who was Michelangelo? That's the wrong question. It's his own work. That is Michelangelo.
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So I think that when you look at the Bitcoin is a piece of work that as it defects, yes,
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like anything human, but it was captivated the imaginations of millions of people as subverted
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the status quo. And I'm saying, you know, whoever this person of people are, he's living in this
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piece of work. I mean, it is Bitcoin. The idea of the work is bigger. We forget that sometimes.
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It's something about our biology likes to see a face and attach a face to the idea when really
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the idea is the thing we love. The idea is the thing that impact the idea is the thing that
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ultimately we, you know, Steve Jobs or somebody like that, we associate with the Mac or the iPhone
link |
with just everything he did at Apple. Apple, actually the company is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs,
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the man is a pales in comparison to the creation. Correct. And the sense of aesthetics that has
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brought to the daily lives and very often aesthetic wins in the long, in the long,
link |
in the long game. And these are very elegant design product. And when you say, Oh,
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elegance, very few people care about it. Apparently millions and millions and millions
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and millions of people do because we are attacked by beauty and these are beautifully designed
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products. And, and, and, you know, and they've in addition to ever the technological aspect
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of the other thing. And I think, yes, that is, yeah, as the Stajewski said, beauty will save
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the world. So I'm, I'm with you on that one. Right. It currently seems like cryptocurrency,
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all these different technologies are gathering a lot of excitement, not just in our discourse,
link |
but in their like scale of financial impact. A lot of companies are starting to invest in Bitcoin.
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Do you think that the main method of store value and exchange of value, basically money will soon
link |
or at some point in the century will become cryptocurrency?
link |
Yes. So mind you, as I said, that the notion of cryptocurrency, like any other fundamental human
link |
notion has to evolve, but yes. So I think of it, uh, he has a lot of momentum behind it.
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Um, it's not only static as a visa programmable money as a smart contract. It allows a peer to
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peer interaction among people who don't even know each other. Right. Uh, and they don't even,
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therefore I cannot even trust each other just because they never saw each other.
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So I think it's so powerful that, uh, uh, is going to do this said again,
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a particular cryptocurrency should develop and cryptocurrency will all develop. But the answer
link |
is yes, we are going towards a much more, uh, unless we have a society, a sudden crisis for
link |
different reasons, which nobody hopes there's always an asteroid. There's always something,
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uh, nuclear war and all the existential crisis that we kind of think about,
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including artificial intelligence. Uh, okay. It's funny. You mentioned that, um,
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um, Michelangelo and Steve jobs, you know, set of ideas represents the person's work.
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So we talked about Algorand, which is a super interesting set of technologies, but,
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you know, he did also win the touring award. You have a bunch of, you have a bunch of ideas that
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are, you know, seminal ideas. So can we talk about cryptography for a little bit? What is the most
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beautiful idea in cryptography or computer science or mathematics in general asking somebody who has
link |
explored the depths of all? Well, there are a few contenders
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and, uh, either your work or, uh, or other words, uh, let's leave my work aside and, uh, and, uh,
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so, but one powerful idea and is, uh, both an old idea in some sense and a very, very modern one.
link |
And, uh, in my opinion is this idea of a one way function. So a function that easy to evaluate.
link |
So given X, you can compute F of X easily, but given F of X is very hard to go back to X. Okay.
link |
Think like breaking a glass, easy. Reconstruct the glass harder. Frying an egg, easy. From the
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fried egg to go back to the original egg, harder. If you want to be extreme, killing a living being,
link |
unfortunately, easy. The other way around, very hard. And so the fact that the notion of a function,
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whichever a recipe that is in front of your eyes to transform an X into F of X,
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and then from F of X, even though you see the recipe to transform it, you cannot go back to X.
link |
That in my opinion is one of the most elegant and momentous notions that there are. And it is a
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computational notion because of the difficulties in a computational sense. And it's a mathematical
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notion because we were talking about function. And it's so fruitful because that is actually
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the foundation of all cryptography. And let me tell you, it's an old notion
link |
because very often in any mythology that we think of, the most powerful gods or goddesses are the
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ones of X and the opposite of X, the gods of love and death. And when you take opposites,
link |
they don't just erase one another, you create something way more powerful. And this one,
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the function is extremely powerful because essentially becomes something that is easy
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for the good guys and hard for the bad guys. So for instance, in pseudo random number generation,
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the easy part of the function corresponds, you want to generate bits very quickly. And hard is
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predicting what the next bit is. It doesn't look the same. One is X f of X going from X f of X to
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X. What does it do? Predicting bits. By a magic of reductions in mathematical apparatus, this simple
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function morphs itself into pseudo random generation. This simple function morphs itself in
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digital signature scheme in which digitally signing should be easy and forging should be
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and forging should be hard. Again, a digital signature is not going from X to f of X,
link |
but the magic and the richness of this notion is that it is so powerful that it morphs in all
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kinds of incredible constructs. And in both these two opposites coexist, the easy and the hard,
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and in my opinion is a very, very elegant notion. That simple notion ties together cryptography,
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and like you said, pseudo random number generation. You have work on pseudo random functions.
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What are those? What's the difference in those and the generators, the pseudo random number
link |
generators? How do they work? Let's go back to pseudo random number generation. First of all,
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people think that the pseudo random number generation generates a random number. Not true,
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because I don't believe that from nothing you can get something. So nothing from nothing.
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But randomness, you cannot create it out of nothing, but what you could do
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is that it can be expanded. In other words, if you give me somehow 300 random bits,
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truly random bits, then I can give you 300,000, 300 million, 300 trillions, 300 quadrillions,
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as many as you want random bits, so that even though I tell you the recipe by which I produce
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these bits, but I don't tell you the initial 300 random numbers, I keep them secret, and you see
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all the bits I produced so far, if you were to bet, given all the bits produced so far,
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what is the next bit in my sequence? Better than 50, 50. Of course, 50, 50, anybody can guess.
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But to be inferring something, you have to be a bit better. Then the effort to do this extra bit
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is so enormous that is de facto random. So that is a pseudo random generator, are these
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expanders of secret randomness, which goes extremely fast. Okay, that said, what is that?
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Expanders of secret randomness, beautifully put. Okay, so every time somebody, if you're a
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programmer, is using a function that's not called pseudo random, it's called random usually,
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you know, these programming languages, and it's generating different, that's essentially
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expanding the secret randomness. But they should. In the past, actually, most of the library,
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they used something pre modern cryptography, unfortunately. They would be better served
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with 300 real seed random number, and then expand them properly, as we know now.
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But that has been a very old idea. In fact, one of the best philosophers have debated
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whether the world was deterministic or probabilistic. Very big questions, right?
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Does God play dice?
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Exactly. Einstein says it does, it doesn't. But in fact, now we have a language that even
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at the Albert time was not around, but it was this complex theory of modern
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complexity based cryptography. And now we know that if the universe has 300 random bits,
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whether where is random or probabilistic or deterministic, it doesn't matter,
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because you can expand this initial seed of randomness forever in which all the experiments
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you could do, all the inferences you could do, all the things you could do, they are,
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you are not be able to distinguish them from truly random. So if you are not able to distinguish
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truly random from this super duper pseudo randomness, are they really different things?
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So many to become really philosophical. So for things to be different, but I don't have
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in my lifetime, in the lifetime of the universe, any method to set them aside,
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well, I should be intellectually honest, say, well, pseudo random in this special
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fraction is as good as random.
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Do you think true randomness is possible? And what does that mean?
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So practically speaking, exactly as you said, if you're being honest,
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that the pseudo randomness approaches true randomness pretty quickly.
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But is it, maybe this is a philosophical question. Is there such a thing as true randomness?
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Well, the answer is actually maybe, but if it exists, most probably it's expensive to get.
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And in any case, if I give you one of mine,
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you will never tell them apart by any other shape, no matter how much you work on it.
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So in some sense, if it exists or not, it really is a quote philosophical sense in the
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colloquial way to say that we cannot somehow pin it down.
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Do you ever, again, just to stay unphilosophical for a bit, for a brief moment,
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do you ever think about free will and whether that exists because ultimately free will sort of
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is this experience that we have, like we're making choices, even though it appears that,
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you know, the world is deterministic at the core. I mean, that's against the debate,
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but if it is in fact deterministic at the lowest possible level, at the physics level,
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how do you make, if it is deterministic, how do you make sense of the difference between the
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experience of us feeling like we're making a choice and the whole thing being deterministic?
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So first of all, let me give you a gut reaction to the question. And the gut reaction is that
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it is important that we believe that there exists free will. And second of all, almost
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by weird logic, if we believe it exists, then it does exist. Okay. So it's very important for our
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social apparatus, for our sense of ourselves that it exists. And the moment in which, you know,
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we so want to, we almost conjure it up in existence. But again, I really feel that if
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you look at some point, the space of free will seems to shrink. We realize how more and more,
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how much of our, say, genetic apparatus dictates who we are, why we prefer certain things than
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others, right, and why we react to noises of music. We really prefer poetry and everything
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else. We may explain even all this. But at the end of the day, whether it exists in a
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philosophical sense or not, it's like randomness. If pseudo random is as good as random vis a vis
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lifetime of the universe, our experience, then it doesn't really matter.
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Yeah. So, you know, we're talking about randomness. I wonder if I can weave in
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quantum mechanics for a brief moment. There's a, you know, a lot of advancements on the quantum
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computing side. So leveraging quantum mechanics to perform a new kind of computation, and there's
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concern of that being a threat to a lot of the basic assumptions that underlie cryptography.
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What do you think? Do you think quantum computing will challenge a lot of cryptography? Will
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cryptography be able to defend all those kinds of things?
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Okay, great. So first of all, for the record, and not because I think it matters, but it's
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important to set the record, there are people who continue to contend that quantum mechanics exist,
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but that's nothing to do with computing. It's not going to accelerate it, at least, you know,
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very basic, you know, hard computation. That is a belief that you cannot take it out. I'm a little
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bit more agnostic about it, but I really believe, going back to whatever I said about the one way
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function. So one way function, what is it? That is a cryptography. So does quantum computing
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challenge the one way function? Essentially, you can boil it down to does quantum computing
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challenge the one way function. What is one way function? Easy in one direction, hard in the other.
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Okay, but if quantum computing exists, when you define what it is easy, it's not easy by a classical
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computer and hard by a classical computer, but easy for a quantum computer, that's a bad idea.
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But once easy means it should be easy for a quantum and hard for also quantum. Then you can
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see that you are, yes, it's a challenge, but you have hope because you can absorb if one computing
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really realizes and becomes available according to the promises, then you can use them also for the
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easy part. And once you use it from the easy part, the choices that you have a one way function,
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they multiply. So, okay, so they particularly candidates of one way function, they not only
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candidates of one way function, they not be one way anymore, but quantum one way function may
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continue to exist. And so I really believe that for life to be meaningful, this one way function
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had to exist. Because just imagine that anything that is becomes easy to do. I mean, what kind of
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life is it? I mean, so you need that. And if something is hard, but it's so hard to generate,
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you'll never find something which is hard for you. You want to that there is abundance,
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that is easy to produce hard problem. That's my opinion is why life is interesting,
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because pop up really, really speed. So in some sense, I almost think that I do hope they exist
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if they don't exist, somehow life is way less interesting than it actually is.
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Yeah, it does. That's funny. It does seem like the one way function is fundamental to all of life,
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which is the emergence of the complexity that we see around us seem to require the one way function.
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I don't know if you play with cellular automata. That's just another formulation of.
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I know, but it's very simple.
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It's almost a very simple illustration of starting out with simple rules in one way,
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being able to generate incredible amounts of complexity. But then you ask the question,
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can I reverse that? And it's just surprising how difficult it is to reverse that. It's surprising,
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even in constrained situations, it's very difficult to prove anything that it almost,
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I mean, the sad thing about it. Well, I don't know if it's sad, but it seems like we don't
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even have the mathematical tools to reverse engineer stuff. I don't know if they exist or not,
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but in the space of cellular automata, where you start with something simple and you create
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something incredibly complex, can you take something, a small picture of that complex
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and reverse engineer? That's kind of what we're doing as scientists here. You're seeing the result
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of the complexity and you're trying to come up with some universal law that generate all of this.
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What is the theory of everything? What are the basic physics laws that generated this whole
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thing? And there's a hope that you should be able to do that, but it gets, it's difficult.
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Yeah. But there is also some poetry on the fact that it's difficult because it gives us some
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mystery to life, without which, I mean, it's not so fun. Life is no business fun.
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Can we talk about interactive proofs a little bit and zero knowledge proofs? What are those?
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What are those? How do they work?
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So interactive proof actually is a modern realization and conceptualization of something
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that we knew was true, that is easy to go to lecture. In fact, that's my motivation.
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We invented schools to go to lecture. We don't say, oh, I'm the minister of education. I published
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this book. You read it. This is book for this year, this book for this year. We spend a lot
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of our treasury in educating our kids and in person, educating, go to class, interact with
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teacher, on the blackboard and chalk on my time. Now we can have a whiteboard and presumably you're
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going to have actually this magic pens and a display instead. But the idea is that interactively
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you can convey truth much more efficiently. We knew this psychologically. It's better to
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hear an explanation than just to belabor some paper. Same thing. So interactive proofs is a
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way to do the following. Rather than doing some complicated, very long papers and possibly
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infinitely long proofs, exponentially long proofs, you say the following. If this theorem is true,
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there is a game that is associated to the theorem. If the theorem is true, this game,
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I have a winning strategy that I can win half of the time, no matter what you do.
link |
So then you say, well, is the theorem true? You believe me. Why should I believe you? Okay,
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let's play. If I prove that I have a strategy and I win the first time and I win the second time,
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then I lose a third time. But I win more than half of the time, or I win, say, all the time
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if the theorem is true, and at least at most half of the time if the theorem is false, you
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statistically get convinced. You can verify this quickly. And therefore, when the game typically
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is extremely fast, so you generate a miniature game in which if the theorem is true, I win all
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the time, and if the theorem is false, I can win at most half of the time. And if I win, win, win,
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win, win, win, win, win, you can deduce either the theorem is true, which most probably is my
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case of the week, or I've been very, very unlucky because it's like if I had 100 coin tosses and I
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got 100 heads. Very improbable. So that is a way. And so this transformation from the formal
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statement of a proof into a game that can be quickly played, and you can draw statistics
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how many times you win, is one of a big conquest of modern complexity theory. And in fact,
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actually has highlighted the notion of a proof as it really gives us a new insight of what to
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be true means and what truth is and what proofs are. So these are legitimately proofs. So what
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kind of mysteries can it allow us to unlock and prove? You said truth. So what does it allow us?
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What kind of truth does that allow us to arrive at? So it enlarges the realm of what is provable
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because in some sense of the classical way of proving things was extremely
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inefficient from the verifier point of view. Yes.
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Right. And so therefore, there is so much proof that you can take. But in this way,
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you can actually very quickly, in minutes, verify something that is the correctness of an assertion
link |
that otherwise would have taken a lifetime to belabor and check all the passages of a very,
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very, very long proof. And you better check all of them because if you don't check one line,
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an error can be in that line. And so you have to go linearly through all the stuff rather than
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bypass this. So you enlarge a tremendous amount what the proof is. And in addition,
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once you have the idea that essentially a proof system is something that
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allows me to convince you of a true statement, but does not allow me to convince you of a false
link |
statement, and that at the end is proof. Proof can be beautiful, should be elegant,
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but at the end is true or false. It is possible to prove the truth and it should be impossible
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or statistically extremely hard to prove something false. And if you do this, you can prove way,
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way more once you understand this. And on top of it, we got some insight like in this zero
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knowledge proofs that is in something which you took for granted where the same knowledge
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and verification are actually separate concepts. So you can verify that an assertion is correct
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without having any idea why this is so. And so people failed to say, if you want to verify
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something, you have to have the proof. Once you have the proof, you know why it's true,
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you have the proof itself. So somehow you can totally differentiate knowledge and verification
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validity. So totally, you can decide if something is true and still have no idea.
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Is there a good example in your mind?
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Oh, actually, you know, at the beginning, we labored to find the first zero knowledge proof.
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Then we found a second, then we found a third. And then a few years later, actually, we proved
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a theorem which essentially says every theorem, no matter what about, can be explained in a zero
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knowledge way. So it's not a class of theorem, but all theorems. And it's a very powerful thing. So
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we were really, for thousands of years, bought this identity between knowledge and verification
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had to be hand in hand together, and for no reason at all. I mean, we had to develop a
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way of technology. As you know, I'm very big on technology because it makes us more human
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and make us understand more things than before. And I think that's a good thing.
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So this interactive proof process, there's power in games.
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And you've recently gotten into, recently, I'm not sure you can correct me, mechanism design.
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So first of all, maybe you can explain what mechanism design is and the fascinating
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space of playing with games and designing games.
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Mechanism design is that you want a certain behavior to arise. If you want to organize
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a societal structure or something, you want to have some orderly behavior to arise because
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it is important for your goals. But you know that people, they don't care what my goals are.
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They care about maximizing their utility. So put it crassly, making money. The more money,
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the better, so to speak. I'm exaggerating.
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Self interest in whatever way then.
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So what you want to do is, ideally, what you want to do is to design a game so that
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while people play it, so to maximize their self interest, they achieve the social goal
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and behavior that I want. That is really the best type of thing. And it is a very
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hard science and art to design these games. And it challenges us to actually come up with
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solution concepts for a way to analyzing the games that need to be broader. And I think
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game theory has developed a bunch of very compelling ways to analyze the game,
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that if the game has the best property, you can have a pretty good guarantee that it's going to
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be played in a given way. But as it turns out, and not surprisingly, these tools have a range
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of action like anything else. All these so called the technical resolution concept,
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the way to analyze the game, like dominant strategy equilibrium, if something comes to mind,
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would be very meaningful. But as a limited power, in some sense, the games that can be
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admit to such a way to be analyzed.
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There's a very specific kind of games and the rules are set, the constraints are set,
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the utilities are all set.
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Yes. So if you want to reason, if there is a way, say, that you can analyze a restricted
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class of games this way, but most games don't fall into this restricted class, then what do I do?
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When you need to enlarge a way what a rational player can do. So for instance, in my opinion,
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at least in some of my, I played with this for a few years, and I was doing some exoteric things,
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I'm sure, in the space that was not exactly mainstream. And then I changed my interest in
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blockchain. But what I'm saying for a while I was doing. So for instance, to me, is a way in which
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I design the game, and you don't have the best move for you. The best move is the move that is
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best for you, no matter what the other players are doing. Sometimes a game doesn't have that,
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okay, it's too much to ask. But I can design the game such that given the option in front of you
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say, oh, these are really stupid for me, take them aside. But these, these are not stupid.
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So if you design the game so that in any combination of non stupid things that the player
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can do, I achieve what I want, I'm done. I don't care to find the very unique equilibrium. I don't
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give a damn. I want to say, well, as long as you don't do stupid things, and nobody else does
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stupid things, good social things outcome arise, I should be equally happy. And so I really believe
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that this type of analysis is possible and has a bigger radius. So it reaches more games, more
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classes or games. And after that, we have to enlarge it again. And it's going to be, we're
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going to have fun because human behavior can be conceptualized in many ways. And it's a long game.
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It's a long game. Do you have favorite games that you're looking at now? I mean, I suppose
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your work with blockchain and Algorand is a kind of game that you're basically this mechanism
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design, design the game such that it's scalable, secure and decentralized, right? Yes. And very
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often you have to say, and you must also design so that the incentives are, and tell you the truth,
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whatever little I learned from my venture in mechanism design is that incentives are very
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hard to design because people are very complex creatures. And so somehow the way we design
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Algorand is a totally different way, essentially with no incentives, essentially. But technically
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speaking, there is a notion that is actually believable, right? So that to say people want
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to maximize their utility. Yes. Up to a point. Let me tell you. Assume that if you are honest,
link |
you make a hundred bucks. But if you are dishonest, no matter how dishonest you are,
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you can only make a hundred bucks and one cent. What are you going to be? I'm saying,
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you know what? Technically speaking, even that one cent, nobody bothers and say,
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how much am I going to make by honest? A hundred. If I'm devious and if I'm a criminal,
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100 bucks and one cent, you know, I might as well be honest. Okay. So that essentially is called,
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you know, Epsilon utility equilibrium, but I think it's good. And that's what we design
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essentially means that, you know, having no incentives is actually a good thing because
link |
prevent people from reasoning, how else are you going to gain the system? But why can we achieve
link |
an algorithm to have no incentives and in Bitcoin instead, you have to pay the miners because they
link |
do a tremendous amount of work. Because if you have to do a lot of work, then you demand to be
link |
paid accordingly. Because you, right? But if I'm going to say you have to add two and two equal
link |
to four, how much you want me to pay for this? If you don't give me this, I don't add the two
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and two. I would say you can add two and two in your sleep. You don't need to be paid to add the
link |
two and two. So the idea is that if we make the system so efficient, so that generating the next
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block is so damn simple, it doesn't hit the universe, let alone my computer, let alone
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take some microsecond of computation, I might as well not being received incentives for doing that
link |
and try to incentivize some other part of the system, but not to the main consensus,
link |
which is a mechanism for generating and adding block to the chain.
link |
Since you're Italian, Sicilian, I also heard rumors that you are a connoisseur of food.
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If I said today's the last day you get to be alive, you shouldn't have trusted me.
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You never know with a Russian whether you're going to make it out or not. Well, if you had
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one last meal, you can travel somewhere in the world. Either you make it or somebody else makes
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it. What's that going to look like? All right. If it's one last meal, I must say in this era of
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COVID, I have not been able to see my mom. My mom was a fantastic chef and had this very
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traditional food. As you know, the very traditional food are great for a reason,
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because they survived hundreds of years of culinary innovation. There is one very laborious
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thing, which is, you heard the name, which is parmigiana, but to do it is a piece of
link |
art. So many hours that only my mom could do it. If we have one last meal, I want a parmigiana.
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Okay. What's the laborious process? Is it the ingredients? Is it the actual process?
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Is it the atmosphere and the humans involved?
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The latter. The ingredient like in any other, in the Italian cuisine, believes in very few
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ingredients. If you take say quintessential Italian recipe, spaghetti pesto. Pesto is olive oil,
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very good extra virgin olive oil, basil, pine nuts, pepper, clove of garlic, not too much,
link |
otherwise you overpower everything. And then to do either two schools of thought, parmesan or pecorino
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or a mix of the two. I mentioned six ingredients. That is typical Italian. I understand that there
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are other cuisines, for instance, a French cuisine, which is extremely sophisticated
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and extremely combinatorial, or some Chinese cuisine, which has a lot of many more ingredients
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than this. And yet the art is to put them together a lot of things. In Italy is really the striving
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for simplicity, yet to find few ingredients, but the right ingredients to create something.
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So in parmigiana, the ingredients are eggplants, tomatoes, basil, but how to put them together
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and the process is an act of love, labor and love. You can spend the entire day,
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I'm not exaggerating, but the entire morning for sure to do it properly.
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Yeah, as a Japanese cuisine too, there's a mastery to the simplicity with the sushi. I don't know
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if you've seen Giorgio's of sushi, but there's a mastery to that that's propagated through the
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generations. It's fascinating. You know, people love it when I ask about books. I don't know
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if books, whether fiction, nonfiction, technical or completely non technical had an impact on your
link |
life throughout. If there's anything you would recommend or even just mention as something that
link |
gave you an insight or moved you in some way. So, okay. So I don't know if I can comment because
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in some sense you almost had to be Italian or to be such a scholar, but being Italian,
link |
one thing that really impressed me tremendously is the Divine Comedy. It is a medieval poem,
link |
a very long poem divided in three parts, hell, purgatory and paradise. Okay. And that is the
link |
non trivial story of a middle man gets into a crisis, personal crisis. And then out of this
link |
crisis he purifies, makes a catastrophe, purifies himself more and more and more until he's become
link |
capable of actually meeting God. Okay. And that is actually a complex story. So you have to get
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some very sophisticated language, maybe Latin at that point. We are talking about 1200s Italy,
link |
in Florence. And this guy instead, he chose his own dialect, not spoken outside his own immediate
link |
circle, a Florentine dialect. Actually, Dante really made Italian, Italian. How can you express
link |
such a sophisticated thing? And then the point is that these words that nobody actually knew
link |
because they were essentially dialect and plus a bunch of very intricate rhymes in which they had
link |
to rhyme with things. And it turns out that by getting meaning from the things that rhyme,
link |
you essentially guess what the word means and you invent Italian and you communicate
link |
it by almost osmosis what you want. It's a miracle of communication. In a dialect,
link |
a very poor language, very unsophisticated to express very sophisticated situation.
link |
I love it. People love it, Italians and not Italian. But what I got of it is that very often
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limitations are our strength. Because if you limit yourself at a very poor language,
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somehow you get out of it and you achieve even better form of communication using a hyper
link |
sophisticated literary language with lots of resonance from the prior books so that you can
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actually instantaneously quote. He couldn't quote anything because nothing was written in Italian
link |
before him. So I really felt that limitations are our strength. And I think that rather than
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complaining about the limitations, we should embrace them because if we embrace our limitation,
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limited as we are, we find very creative solutions that people with less limitation we have,
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we would not even think about it. So limitations are kind of superpower if you choose to see it
link |
that way. Since you speak both languages, is there something that's lost in translation to you? Is
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there something you can express in Italian that you can't in English and vice versa maybe? Is
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there something you could say to the musicality of the language? I mean, I've been to Italy a few
link |
times and I'm not sure if it's the actual words, but the people are certainly very, there's body
link |
language too. There's just the whole being is language. So I don't know if you miss some of that
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when you're speaking English in this country. Yes. In fact, actually, certainly I miss it.
link |
And somehow it was a sacrifice that I made consciously by the time I arrived. I knew that
link |
this, I was not going to express myself at that level. And it was actually a sacrifice because
link |
given to you also your mother tongue is Russian. So you know that you can be very expressive in
link |
your mother tongue and not very expressive in a new tongue, a new language. And then what people
link |
think of you in the new language, because when the precise of expression of things, it generates,
link |
it shows elegance or it shows knowledge or it shows as a census or it shows as a caste or
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education, whatever it is. So all of a sudden I found myself on the bottom.
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So I had to fight all my way up, back up. But what I'm saying, their limitations are actually
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our strength. In fact, it's a trick to limit yourself to exceed. And there are examples in
link |
history. If you think about Hernan Cortes, he goes to invade Mexico. He has what, a few hundred
link |
people with him and he has a hundred thousand people in arms on the other side. First thing he
link |
does, he limits himself. He sinks his own ship. There is no return. And at that point he actually
link |
manages. That's really profound. I actually, first of all, this inspiring to me, I feel like I have
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quite a few limitations, but more practically on the Russian side, I'm going to try to do a couple
link |
of really big and really tough interviews in Russian. Once COVID lifts a little bit, I'm
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traveling to Russia and I'll keep your advice in mind that the limitations is a kind of superpower.
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We should use it to our advantage because you do feel less, like you're not able to convey
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your wisdom in the Russian language. Cause I moved here when I was 13. So you don't,
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the parts of life you live under a certain language are the parts of life you're able
link |
to communicate. I became a thoughtful, deeply thoughtful human in English.
link |
But the pain from World War II, the music of the people that was instilled with me in Russian.
link |
So I can carry both of those and there's limitations in both. I can't say philosophically
link |
profound stuff in Russian, but I can't in English express like that melancholy feeling
link |
of like the people. And so combining those two, I'll somehow.
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Oh, beautifully said. Thanks for sharing. This is great. Yes. I totally understand you. Yes.
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You've accomplished some incredible things in the space of science, in the space of
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technology, in the space of theory and engineering. Do you have advice for somebody young,
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an undergraduate student, somebody in high school or anyone who just feels young
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about life or about career, about making their way in this world?
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So I was telling before that I believe in emotion and my thing is to be true to your
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own emotion. And that I think that if you do that, you're doing well because it's a life well spent
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and you are going never tire because you want to solve all these emotional knots that
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always intrigued you from the beginning. And I really believe that to live meaningfully,
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creatively, and yet to live your emotional life. So I really believe that whether you're a scientist
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or an artist even more, but a scientist, I think of them as artists as well. If you are a human
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being, so you are really to live fully your emotions and to the extent possible, sometimes
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emotions can be overbearing and my advice is try to express them with more and more confident.
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Sometimes it's hard, but you are going to be much more fulfilled than by suppressing them.
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What about love? One of the big ones. What role does that play?
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That's the bigger part of emotions. It's a scary thing. It's a lot of vulnerability that comes
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with love, but there is also so much energy and power and love in all senses and in the traditional
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sense, but also in the sense of a broader sense for humanity, this feeling, this compassion that
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makes us one with other people and the suffering of other people. All of this is very scary stuff,
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but it's really the fabric of life. Well, the sad thing is it really hurts to lose it.
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Yes, that's why the vulnerability comes with it. That's the thing about emotion is
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the up and the down and the down seems to come always with up, but the up only comes with the
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down. Let me ask you about the ultimate down, which is unfortunately we humans are mortal
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or appear to be for the most part. Do you think about your own mortality? Do you fear death?
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I hope so. Without death, there is no life. At least there is no meaningful life. Death is
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actually in some sense our ultimate motivator to live a beautiful and meaningful life. I myself
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felt as a young man that unless I got something that I wanted to do, I don't know why I got this
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idea of something to say. If I'm not able to say, I would suicide. Maybe it was a way to motivate
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myself, but you don't need to motivate it because in some sense, unfortunately, death is there.
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So you better get up and do your thing because that is the best motivation to live fully.
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Well, what do you hope your legacy is?
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You mentioned you have two kids.
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Yes. I really feel that on one side is my biological legacy and that is my two kids
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and their kids, hopefully. That is one side. The other thing is this common enterprise,
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which is society. I really feel that my legacy would be better by providing security and privacy.
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Actually, for me, it's metaphorical to say I want to give you the ability to interact more and take
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more risks and reach out more for more people as difficult and dangerous as it may seem.
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But my whole scientific work is about to guarantee privacy and give you the security
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of interaction. Not only in a transaction, like it would be a blockchain transaction, but
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that is really one of the hardcore of my emotional problems. I think that these are
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the problems I want to tackle. Ultimately, privacy and security is freedom.
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Freedom is at the core of this. It's dangerous. It's like the emotion thing,
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but ultimately, that's how we create all the beautiful things around us. Do you think there's
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meaning to it all, this life, except the urgency that death provides and us anxious
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beings create cool stuff along the way? Is there a deeper meaning? If it is, what is it?
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Well, meaning of life. Actually, there are three meanings of life.
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That's great. One, to seek. Two, to seek. And three, to seek.
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To seek what? Or is there no answer to that?
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There's no answer to that. I really think that the journey is more important than the destination,
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whatever that be. I think that is a journey and is, in my opinion, at the end of the day,
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I must admit, meaningful in itself. We must admit that maybe whatever your destination might be,
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at the end, we may never get there, but hell was a great ride towards it.
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Well, I don't think there's a better way to end this, Silvio. Thank you for wasting your extremely
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valuable time with me today, joining on this journey of seeking something together. We found
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nothing, but it was very fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for talking to us.
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Thank you, Alex. It's been really special for me to be interviewed by you.
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Thank you for listening to this conversation with Silvio McCauley,
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and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens Nutrition Drink, the Information In Depth
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Tech Journalism website, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the
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sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with
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some words from Henry David Thoreau. Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.