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 and Algorand,
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a company 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 InDepth Tech
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Journalism website, FourSigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor
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links to get a discount at the support of 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 am reading and thinking a
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lot on this topic. I just recently finished reading the Bitcoin Standard, a book I highly
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recommend. As always, with this podcast, I'm approaching it with an open mind, with compassion,
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with as little ego as possible, and yes, with love. I hope you go along with me on this journey,
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and don't judge me too harshly on any likely missteps. As usual, I will play devil's advocate,
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I will, on purpose, sometimes ask simple, even dumb questions, all to try and explore the space
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of ideas here with as much grace as I can muster. I have no financial interests here. I only have a
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simple curiosity and a love for knowledge, especially about a set of technologies that may
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very well transform the fabric of human civilization. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it, and have a podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on
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Twitter at Lex Freedman. 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 is 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 if whatever you see
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on page seven, anyone else sees on page seven. So what is extraordinary about this is this
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common knowledge thing that I think is really a first for humanity. I mean, if you look at
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communication, like right now, you can communicate very quickly images of photos, but do you have a
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certainty that whatever you have received has been received by everybody else? Not really.
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And so this common knowledge and knowledge, and the certainty that everybody can write,
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nobody has been prevented from having whatever they want. Nobody can erase, nobody can tear a page
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of a ledger, nobody can swap page, nobody can change anything. And that is a immutable common
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record is extremely powerful. And there's something fundamental that is decentralized about it. So
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at least in spirit, some degree against maybe a resistance to centralization. Absolutely. If it is
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not decentralized, how can it be common knowledge? If only one person or a few people have a ledger,
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they only, you don't have a ledger, you have to ask, you know, what is on page seven, and how do
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you know that whatever they tell you is on page seven, they tell the same thing to everybody
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else. And so that is this common knowledge 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 off. Makes sense, because you want to auction worldwide,
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better yet you want to organize 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 the fair price has reached, and you know, who wants
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what and who has paid how much. And if you do it instead of a price in an essentialized system,
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I put a bid say, oh, congratulations, Alex, you won. And your price is $12,570. So if instead of
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is that common, the knowledge is a very powerful tool for humanity. So we return to it from a
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bunch of different perspectives, including like a technical perspective, but you often talk about
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blockchain and some of these concepts of decentralization, scalability, security,
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all those kinds of things. But one of the most maybe impactful, exciting things that leverage the
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blockchain, this kind of ledger idea of common knowledge is cryptocurrency. So in the financial
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space. So is there, can you say in the same kind of basic way, what is cryptocurrency in the context
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of this common knowledge in the context of the blockchain? Great. Cryptocurrency is a currency
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that is on such a ledger. So imagine that on the ledger, right? Initially, you know that somehow,
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say, you and I are the only owner, each one, let's give it ourselves a billion each of whatever
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this unit. Then I start writing on the ledger, I give 100 of these units to my sister, you give
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my, I give this much to my aunt. And then, and then now, because it's written on the ledger and everybody
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can see my sister can give 57 of these units it should receive from me to somebody else.
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And so, and that is money. And that is money because you can see that somebody who tenders
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your payment has really the money there, right? You don't have any more of a doubt when you want
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to sell an item. If I write your check, is the check covered? If I write or do I have the money
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at the moment of a transaction? You really see, because the ledger is always updated, what you
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see is what I see, what the merchant sees, you know that the money, so is the most powerful
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money system there is because it is totally transparent. And so you know that you have
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been paid and you know that the money is there, you have not to second guess anything else.
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So the common knowledge applied there is you're basically mimicking the same kind of thing you
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would get in the physical space, which is if you give a hundred bucks or a hundred of that thing,
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whatever, of that cryptocurrency to your sister, the actual transfer is as real as you giving
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like a basket of apples to your sister because 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 in
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that digital space. Again, I apologize for a set of ridiculous questions, but you mentioned
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cryptocurrencies of 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
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humans 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 to different things.
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So I have two ships and then you have one cow. And I want the cow, but you are looking for blankets
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instead. So to have money is really simplifies this. But at the end of it, that's why a bit was
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invented. And you start with gold, you start with the coinage, then you start with the check.
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But at the end of the day, money is essentially a social construct because you know that what
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you receive, you can actually spend with somebody else. And so there is a kind of a social pact
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and social belief that you have. At the end of the day, even a barter is of requires
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these beliefs that other people are going to accept the quote unquote currency you offer them.
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Because if I'm amazing and you ask me to build a wall in your field and I did.
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And you, in exchange, you give me a fuzzenship. What am I going to do? Eat them all? No, I had to
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feed them. And if I don't feed them the dye, my value is zero. So in receiving this livestock,
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I must believe that somebody else will accept them in return for something else. So money is
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this social belief, social shared belief system that makes people transact.
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That's fascinating. I didn't even think about that. You have a deep network of beliefs about
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how society operates. So the value is assigned even to sheep based on that everyone will continue
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operating how they were previously operating. Somebody will feed the sheep. I didn't even think
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about that. That's fascinating. So that directly transfers to the space of money and then to the
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space of digital money, cryptocurrency. Okay. Does it bother you sort of intellectually when this
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money that is 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 delies 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 really
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represent the value to which it now is traded? No. So gold is another way to express our belief.
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I give you an answer. Gold, you treat it like, oh, somebody else will want this for doing
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something else. So it is really this notion of this. Money is a mental construct. It's really
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an end. It's a shared. It's a social construct, I really believe. And so some people feel that it's
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physical, so therefore gold exists. But then, as you know now, we, countries, most of us together
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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 what I'm saying. There is at least
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a not they're not going to exaggerate it blatantly. And therefore you receive it because you know that
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somebody else who will accept it will have faith in the currency and so on and so forth.
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But the weather is gold, 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 limited
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amount in its tied to physical, you know, to prefer work. So it's tied to physical reality
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in terms of how much you can mine effectively and so on. That that's an important feature of money.
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Do you think that's an important feature to be a part of what are the money is?
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That is certainly a very useful part. So at some point in time, you know, assume that
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money is something that all of a sudden we say, days is our money, our currency. Then,
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you know, I offer you 10 days is in payment of whatever goods and services you want to provide.
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But at the end of the day, if you know that you can cultivate it and generate them
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at will, then perhaps, you know, you should not accept my payment. Here is a bouquet of days.
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So you need some kind of a scarcity of the inability to create it suddenly out of nothing
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is an important. 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 pie.
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And therefore, I consider myself paid. I understand what I'm receiving.
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You described the goals of a blockchain. You have a nice presentation on this as scalability,
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security and decentralization. And you challenged the blockchain trilemma that claims you can only
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have two of the three. So let's talk about each. What is scalability in the context of blockchain
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and cryptocurrency? What does scalability mean? So remember, if we said that the blockchain is
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a ledger, and each page receives that gets some transaction, and everybody can write in this
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pages of a ledger, nobody can be stopped for writing and everybody can read them.
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Okay, scalability means how fast can you write? Just imagine that you can write an entry in this
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special shared ledger once every hour. Well, you know, what are you going to do if you have
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one transaction per hour, the world doesn't go around. So you need to have scalability means
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here that you can somehow write a lot of transaction, and then you can read them and
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everybody can validate them. And that is the speed and the number of transactions per second,
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and the fact that they are shared. So you want to have this speed, not only in writing, but in
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sharing and inspection for validity. This is scalability. The world is big. The world wants
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to interact with, the people want to interact with each other. And you better be prepared to
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have a ledger in which you can write lots and lots and lots of transactions in this special way
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very, very, very quickly. So maybe from a more mathematical perspective, or can we say something
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about how much scalability is needed for a world that is big? Well, really depends how many
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transactions you want. But remember that I think right now you have to go into at least
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a thousandth of transactions per second. Even if you look at credit cards, we are going to go from
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an average of 1600 to peaks of 20,000 or 40,000, something like this. But remember,
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it's not only a question of the transaction per se, but the value is that the transaction
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is actually being shared and visible to everybody. And the certainty that that is the case,
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I can print on my own printer way more transactions that nobody has the time to see or to inspect,
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that doesn't count, right? So you want scalability at this common knowledge level. That is the
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challenge. I also meant from a perspective of like a complexity analysis. So when you get more
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and more people involved, doesn't you just scale in some kind of way that... Do you like to see
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certain kind of properties in order to say something is scalable? Oh, absolutely. I took a
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little bit implicitly that the people transacting are actually very different. So if there is a
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two people who can do fast and slow transactions per second with each other, this is not so
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interesting. What we really need is to say there are billions of people at any point in time,
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you know, thousands and thousands of them want to transact with each other and you want to support
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that. So Algorand, it solves... So that's the company, the team of cryptographers and mathematicians,
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engineers, so on, that challenged the blockchain trilemma. So let's break it down in terms of
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achieving scalability. How do we achieve scalability in the space of blockchain, in the space of
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cryptocurrency? Okay, so scalability, security, remember, and decentralization. So that's what
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you want. What's the best way to approach? Can we break it down, let's start with scalability
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and think about how do we achieve it? Well, to achieve it at one at a time is perhaps easy,
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even security. If nobody transacts, nobody loses money. So that is secure, but it's not scalable.
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So let me tell you, I'm a cryptographer, so I try to fight the bad guys and what you want is that
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the vesselager that we discussed before cannot be tampered with. So you must think of it that
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is a special link that nobody can erase. Then it has to be everybody should be able to read
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and not to alter the pages or the content of the pages. That's okay. But you know what,
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that is actually easy cryptographically. Easy cryptographically means you can use tools invented
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50 years ago, which in cryptographic time is praistory, okay? We are cavemen working around
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and solve their problem in cryptography land. But there is really a fundamental problem,
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which is really almost a social seems a political problem is to say who the hell chooses or publishes
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the next page on the ledger. I mean, that is really the challenge. This ledger, you can always add
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a page because more and more transaction had to be written on there. And somebody has to assemble
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this, this transaction put them on a page and add the next page. Who is the somebody who chooses
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the page and adds it on who can be trusted to do it. Exactly. Assume it is me for what I'm being,
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not that I won't volunteer for the job, but then I would have more power than any absolute monarchy
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history because I would have tremendous power to say these are the transactions that the entire
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world should see. And whatever I don't write, this transaction will never see the light of day.
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I mean, no one had any such a power in history. So it's very important to do that. And that is
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the quintessential problem in a blockchain. And people have thought about it to say it's not me,
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it's not you. But for instance, in proof of work, what people say is okay, it's not me, it's not you.
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You know what it is? We make a very difficult, invent 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's always seems okay because, you know, sometimes I solve the puzzle before you do,
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sometimes you solve before I do or before somebody else, 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. Yeah. So somehow you want to make sure that, you know,
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you need to work because you want to prevent, you want to make sure that, you know,
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you get one solution every 10 minutes to say, like in particular example of Bitcoin,
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so that is very rare that two pages are added at the same time. Because if I solve the puzzle
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at the same time you do, it could happen that if it happens once or twice, we can survive it.
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But if it happens, you know, every other page, you know, is a double page, then which of the two
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is the real page becomes a problem. So that's why in Bitcoin, it is important that to have
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substantial amount of work so that no many, how many people try on earth to solve the puzzle,
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you have one solution out of how many people are trying every 10 minutes so that you have,
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you distanciate these pages and you have the time to propagate through the network a solution
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and the page attached to it. And therefore there is one page at a time that is added.
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And they say, well, why don't we do it? We have a solution. Well, first of all, a page every 10
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minutes is not fast enough. It's a question of scalability. And second of all, to ensure that
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no matter how many people try, you get one page every 10 minutes, one solution to the riddle
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every 10 minutes, this means that the riddle becomes very, very hard. And to have a chance to
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solve it within 10 minutes, you must have such an expensive apparatus in terms of specialized
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computers, not one, not two, but a thousand and a thousand of them. And they produce tons of heat,
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okay, they dissipate heat like maniac. And you need to refrigerate them too. And so then now you
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have air conditioning, galore to add to the thing. It becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer
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and fewer people can actually compete in order to add to the page. And the problem becomes so
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so so crucial that you know, in in in Bitcoin, depending on which day of the week, look at it,
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you are going to have two or three mining pools are really the ones capable of controlling the
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chain. So you're saying that's that's almost like least centralization. Right. It started being
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decentralized. And but the expenses become higher and higher and higher when the cost becomes higher
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and higher, fewer and fewer people can afford them. And then, you know, it becomes de facto
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centralized, right? Yeah. And in a different type of approach is instead, for instance, a delegated
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proof of stake, which is also very easy to explain, essentially boils down to to say, well,
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look at these 21 people say, OK, and don't they look honest? Yes, they do. In fact, I believe
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that they're going to remain honest for the foreseeable future. So when do we do ourselves a
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favor? Let's entrust them to add the page on behalf of all of us to the ledger. OK.
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OK. But now we are going to say, is this centralized or decentralized? Well, 21 is better
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than one, I have to say, is very little. So if you look at when people rebelled to centralized
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power, I don't know, the French revolutions, OK, there was a monarch and the nobles. Yes.
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Were there 21 nobles? No, there were thousands of them, but there were millions and millions of
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disempowered citizens. So one is centralized, 21 is also centralized. So that's delegated
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proof of stake. Delegated. Kind of like representative democracy, I guess. Yes, which is
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good. It's working great, right? It's working great. Well, it's better than a monarch, right?
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But there's problems. There are problems. And so we were looking for a different,
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when thinking about Algorand for a different approach. And so we have an approach in that,
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you know, is really, really decentralized because essentially it works as follows.
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You have a bunch of tokens, right? These are the tokens that have equal power and you have,
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say, 10 billions of tokens distributed to the entire world. And the owners, each token has a
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chance to add the ledger equal probability of everybody else. In fact, actually, if you want,
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here is how it works. So think about, you know, by some magic graphic process, which is not magic,
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it's mathematics, but think of it the magic. Assume that you select a thousand tokens.
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And so sometimes a random, okay, and you have a guarantee that we're going to select it.
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And then the owners of these 1000 tokens somehow agree on the next page. They all sign it.
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And that's the next page. Okay. So it is clear that, you know, nobody has the power, but you know,
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you know, once in a while, one of your tokens is selected and you are in charge of this
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committee to select the next page. But this goes around very quickly. So and if you look at this,
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the question really is that it's not really centralized. And because of what, for agreeing
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on the same page, it is important that the 1000 tokens that you randomly selected
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are in honest ends, the majority of them. So which if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends,
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that is essentially true. Because if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, if you select,
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say 90% of the people are 90% of the tokens are in honest ends. So can you randomly select
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1000? In this 1000, you find the 501 tokens in bad ends. Very, very improbable. So basically,
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when a large fraction of people are honest, then you can use randomness as a powerful tool to get
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decentralization. So what does honesty mean? And now we're into the social side of things,
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which is how do we know that like the fraction, the large fraction of people or participating
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parties are honest? That is an excellent question. So by the way, first of all, we should realize
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that the same thing is for every other system. When you look at proof of work, you rely that the
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majority of the mining power is in honest ends. When you look at a delegated proof of stake,
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you rely that the majority of these 21 people are honest. What is the difference? The difference
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is that in these other systems, you should say the whole economy is secure. If the majority of this
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small piece of the economy are honest. And that is a big question. But instead of what we in
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Algorand and our approach, we say, the whole economy is secure if the majority of the economy
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is honest. In other words, who can subvert Algorand is not a majority of a small group,
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but is a majority of the token holders had to conspire with each other in order to think
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the 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 honest.
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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 cases, the majority of the whole system, the whole system. Okay. So that's that's
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fast. So through that kind of random sampling, you can achieve decentralization.
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You can achieve. So the scalability, I understand. And then the security that you're referring to,
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basically the security comes from the fact that the sample selected would likely include honest
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people. So it's very difficult to. So by the way, the security, as you, as you mentioned,
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that you're referring to is basically security against dishonesty, right? Or manipulation
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or whatever. Yes. Yes. So essentially, when what you're going to do is to the following,
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say, say, well, see if you understood what you're saying, but somebody has to randomly
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select this tokens when I believe you. So then who does this random selection?
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That's a good point. And in an algorithm, 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,
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for the rest of us. And because if I'm a bad person, I'm going to select myself
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over and over again, because I want to be part of the committee every single time.
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But not so fast. So what do we do in algorithm? What does it mean that I select myself with each
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one of us in the privacy of our own computer, actually a laptop? What you do is that you
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execute your own individual lottery. And think about that, that you pull a lever
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of a slot machine, you can only pull the lever once, not until you win, not enough times until
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you win. And when you pull the lever case one, either you win in such a case, you have a winning
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ticket, or you lose, you don't get any winning ticket. So if you don't have a winning ticket,
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you can say anything you want about the next page in the ledger, nobody pays attention.
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But if you have a winning ticket, people say, oh, wow, this is one of the 1000 winning tickets,
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we better pay attention to what he or she says. And that's how it works. And the lottery is a
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cryptographic lottery, which means that even if I am an entire nation, extremely powerful with
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incredible computing powers, I don't have the ability to improve even minimally my probability
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of one of my talking with the lottery. And that's how it happens. So everybody pulls the lever,
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the 1000 random winners say, oh, here is my winning ticket. And here is my opinion up or down
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about the block. These are the ones that count. And if you think about it, while this is distributed,
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because there is the case of Algon, there is 10 billion tokens, and you selected a 1000 of them
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more distributed than this, you cannot get. And then why is this, you know, scalable? Because
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what do you have to do? Okay, you have to do the lottery. How long the lottery takes? It takes
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actually one microsecond. Whether you have one token or two tokens or a billion tokens is always
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one microsecond of computation, which is very fast. We don't hit the planet with a microsecond of
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computation. And finally, why is this secure? Because even if I were a very evil and very,
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very powerful individual, I'm so powerful that I can corrupt anybody I want instantaneously in the
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world. Whom would I want to corrupt? The people in the committee, so that I can choose the page of
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the ledger. But I do have a problem. I do not know whom I should corrupt. Should I corrupt this lady
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in Shanghai, this other guy in Paris? Because I don't know, the winners are random, so I don't
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know whom I should corrupt. But once the winner come forward and say, here is my winning ticket,
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and you propagate 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 thousand of them given to my
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incredible powers. But so what? Whatever they said, they already said, and their winning tickets and
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their opinions are widely propagated across the network. And I do not have the power,
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no more than the US government or any government has the power to put back in the bottle
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a message widely propagated by WikiLeaks. So everything you just described is kind of,
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is fascinating, a set of ideas. And, you know, online I've been reading quite a bit and people
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are really excited about the set of ideas. Nevertheless, it is not the dominating technology
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today. So Bitcoin, in terms of cryptocurrency, is the most popular cryptocurrency in the Ethereum,
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and so on. 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 say
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that the time is ripe for this idea. Because very often it's not enough to be right here,
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to be right at the right time, and somebody got it right there. So hard to offer to Bitcoin for that.
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And so what they got to write is that it is hard to subvert and change the ledger,
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to cancel a transaction. It's not impossible. That is very hard. What they did not get right is
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somehow that is a great store of value, currency wise, but money is not only a question that you
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store it, and you put under the mattress. Money wants to be transacted. And the transaction
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in Bitcoins are very little. So if you want to store value, everybody needs to store value,
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matter as well, use Bitcoin. I mean, it's the plant, but if you don't look at that for a moment,
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at least it's a great store of value, and everybody needs a store of value. But most of the time,
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we want to transact. We want to interact. We don't put the money under the mattress, right?
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So we wanted to, and that, they didn't get it right. That is too slow to transact. Too few
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transactions. There's a scalability issue. Is it possible to build stuff on top of Bitcoin
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that sort of fixes the scalability? I mean, this is the thing. You look at, there's a bunch of
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technologies that kind of hit the right need at the right time, and they have flaws, but we kind
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of build infrastructures on top of them over time to fix it, as opposed to getting it right from
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the beginning. Or is it difficult to do? Well, that is difficult to do. So you are talking to
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somebody that when I decided to throw my heart in the arena, and I decided, first of all, as I
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said before, I much admire my predecessors. I mean, they got it right, a lot of things, and I
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really admire for that. But I had a choice to make. Either I patch something that holds all over
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the place or start from scratch. I decided to start from scratch, because sometimes this is a
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bit of a way. So what about Ethereum, which looks at proof of stake and a lot of different
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innovative ideas that kind of improve or seek to improve on some of the flaws of Bitcoin?
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Ethereum had another great idea. So they figured out that money and payments are important as they
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are. They are only the first level, the first stepping stone. The next level are smart contracts,
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and they were at the vision to say, the people will need smart contract, which allow me and you
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to somehow to transact securely without being shopped around by a trusted third party, by a
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mediator. By the way, because mediators are hard to find. And in fact, maybe even impossible to
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find if you live in Thailand and I live in New Zealand, maybe we don't have a common person
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that we know and trust. And even if we find them, guess what? They want to be paid. So much so right
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that 6% of the world GDP goes into financial friction, which is essentially third party.
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So headed right to the world needed that. But again, the scalability is not there. And the system
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is, or smart contracts in Ethereum is slow and expensive. And I believe that is not enough to
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satisfy the appetite and the need that we have for smart contracts.
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Well, what do you make of just as a small sort of a side in human history, perhaps it's a big one,
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is the 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?
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Well, both, I think, you know, I think it's NFTs are actually great, right? So you have this,
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you are an artist to create a song or you could be a piece of art. He has many unique
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representation right over a unique piece, where there is an artifact of something dreamed up
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by you. And as unique representation, but now you can trade and allow. And the important part is that
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now you have this, not only the NFTs themselves, but the ability to trade them quickly, fast,
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securely, knowing that who owns which rights. And that gives a totally new opportunity for
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content creators to be remunerator for what they do.
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So but ultimately, you still have to have that scalability, security,
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and decentralization to make it work for bigger and bigger applications.
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Yeah. I still wonder what kind of applications are yet to be enabled by it, because so much,
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the interesting thing about NFTs, if you look outside of art, is just like money,
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you can start playing with different social constructs, is you can start playing with ideas.
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You can start playing with, even like investing, somebody was talking about almost creating
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an economy out of like creative people or influencers. Like if you start a YouTube channel
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or something like that, you can invest in that person and you can start trading their creations.
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And then almost like create a market out of people's ideas, out of people's creations,
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out of the people themselves that generate those creations. And there's a lot of interesting
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possibilities of what you can do with that. I mean, it seems ridiculous, but you're basically
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creating a hierarchy of value, maybe artificial in the digital world and are trading that.
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But in so doing are inspiring people to create. So maybe as a sort of our economy gets better
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and better and better, where actual work in the physical space becomes less and less in terms
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of its importance, maybe we'll completely be operating in a digital space where these kinds
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of economies have more and more power. And then you have to have this kind of blockchains to
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the scalability, security and decentralization. And decentralization is of course the tricky one
link |
because people in power start to get nervous. Absolutely. Once in power, you're always nervous
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to be supplanted by somebody else. But this is your job. So congratulations, your job,
link |
the top job. And now everybody wants it. Well, what is your sense about our time and the future
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hope about the decentralization of power? Do you think that's something that we can actually achieve
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given that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts? Absolutely. And it's so wonderful
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to be absolutely powerful. Well, good question. So first of all, I believe by the way,
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it's a complex question, Alex. Like all the rest of your questions.
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I'm so very sorry. 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 for
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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 even in power. Because in a way, in a society in which even
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communication never mind blockchain, which is common knowledge, but even simple unilateral
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communication is hard, it's much easier to say, you do as I say, because the alternative is,
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but as so there is a little bit of a technology barrier. But I think that and now to get to this
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common knowledge that is a totally different story. Now we have finally the technology for
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doing this. So that is one part. But I really believe that, you know, by having a distributed
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system, not only you don't have a way, you have to actually much more stable and durable system.
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Because not only for corruption, but even for things that go astray and you give it a long
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enough time by strange version of Murphy's law, whatever goes wrong, goes wrong. And so
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and if the power is diffused, you actually are much more stable. If you look at any
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any living, complex living being is distributed. I mean, I'm, I don't have somebody is a, okay,
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tell Sylvia now it's time to eat. You have millions of cells in your body. You have
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billions of bacteria. Exactly. Help me in the guts of a thing. You know, we are in a soup.
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It keeps us alive. And so it's strange enough, however, when we design systems,
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we design them centralized. We ourselves are distributed beings. And when we plan to say,
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okay, I want to get an architecture, how about I make a pyramid, I put the top and the power
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flows down. And so again, it's a little bit perhaps of a technology problem. But now the
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technology is there. So that is a big challenge to rethink how we want to organize power in very
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large system and, and, and distributed system in my opinion, are much more resilient.
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Let's put it this way. There was a wine, or my Italian compatriots, right? You know,
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Machiavelli, who, who looked at the time, there was a big, there was a bunch of small state
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democratic Republic of Florence of Venice and the other thing. And there was the Ottoman Empire,
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but at the time was an empire and a certain was very centralized. And I made a political observation
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that goes roughly to say, whenever you have such a centralized thing is very hard to
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overtake that, that form of government is centralized. But if you get it, it's so easy to
link |
keep the population. One instead, these other, these other things are much more resilient.
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And when the power is distributed, it's much more, it's going to be lasting for much longer
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time. And ultimately, maybe the human spirit wants that kind of resilience, wants that kind
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of distributed. It's just that we didn't have technology throughout history. Machiavelli didn't
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have the computer, the internet, and that is certainly part of a reason. Yes. You've written
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an interesting blog post. If we take a step out of the realm of bits and into this,
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the realm of governance, you wrote a blog post about making Algorand governance decentralized.
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Can you explain what that means, the philosophy behind that? How do you
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decentralize basically all aspects of this kind of system? Well, the philosophy and the
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how let's start with the philosophy. So I really believe that nothing fixed last very long. And
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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. And when I, when I see a lot of a crypto project, actually very
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proud to say it's fixed in stone, right, you know, code is low, law is called, I very
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of a code will never change. Wow. When I'm saying this is a recipe to me of disaster,
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not immediately, but soon. Just imagine you take an ocean liner and you want to go, I don't know,
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from Lisbon to New York, and you set a course, iceberg, no iceberg, tempest, no tempest,
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and all. It doesn't matter. But it's not the way. You need a till, you need to correct,
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you need to adjust. And so, by the way, we design an algorithm with the idea that the code was
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evolving as the needs. And of course, a waiver is a system in which every time there is an
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adjustment, you must have essentially a vote that right now is orchestrated at 90% of the
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stake. They say, okay, we are ready, we agree on the next version, and we pick up this version.
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So we are able to evolve without losing too many components left and right. But I think
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without evolving, any system essentially become asphatic, and that is going to shrivel and die
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sooner or later. And so that is needed. And what do you want to do on the blockchain? You have a
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perfect platform in which you can log your wishes, your votes, your things so that you have a
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guarantee that whatever vote you express is actually seen by everybody else. So everybody
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sees really the outcome, call it a referendum or a change. And that is, in my opinion, a system
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that wants to live long as to adapt. There's an interesting question about leaders. I've talked
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to Vitalik Buterin. I'll probably talk to him again soon. He's one of the leaders, maybe one of
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the faces of the Ethereum project. And it's interesting, you have Satoshi Nakamoto, who's
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the face of Bitcoin, I guess, but he's faceless. He, she, they. It does seem like in our whatever
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it is, maybe it's 20th century, maybe it's Machiavellian thinking, but we seek leaders. Leaders
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have value. Linus Torvald, the leader of Linux, the open source development a lot. I mean, there's
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no, it's not, it's not that the leadership is sort of dogmatic, but it's inspiring. And it's also
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powerful in that through leaders, we propagate the vision, like the vision of the project is
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more stable, maybe not the details, but the vision. And so do you think there's value to, because
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there's a tension between decentralization and leadership, like in vision areas? What do you
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make of that tension? Okay, so I really believe that that's a great question. I think of it, you
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know, I really believe in the power of emotions. I think the emotions 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 being,
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and that interprets our emotions. And by the way, this emotion has to resonate. And what is good
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is that the more intimate our emotions are, the more universal they are, paradoxically. The more
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personal, the more everybody else somehow magically agrees and feels a bit of the same.
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And so, and it's very important to have a leader in the initial phase that
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generates out on nothing something. That is important leadership. But then the true tested
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leadership is to disappear after you led the community. So in my opinion, the quintessential
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leader in my, according to my vision is George Washington. He served for one term,
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he served for another term, and then all of a sudden he retired and became a private citizen.
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And 200 and change years later, we still are with some defects, but we have done a lot of
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things right. And we have been able to vote. That to me is success in leadership. Well,
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instead, you contrast our experiment with a lot of experiments. I've done so much, so well,
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that I want another four years. And why shouldn't I be only a four? And I have another eight. Why
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should it be another eight? Give me 16 and we'll fix all your problem. And now 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. And it's not a good idea for
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everybody else. Is there, so we've been talking a little bit about cryptocurrency, but is there
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spaces where 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 free to do everything I want, but I don't even mean 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
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against censorship, you write something on the chain and now nobody can take it out. That is a
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very important way to express our view. And then the transparency that you give, because
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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.
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Let's put it this way. As much as I'm enthusiastic about blockchain and decentralized finance,
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and we have actually our expression, we're creating this future five, because as much as we
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want to do, we must agree that the first guarantee of financial growth and prosperity
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are really the legal system, the courts. Because we may not think about them and say,
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oh, the courts are a bunch of boring lawyers. But without them, I'm saying there is no certainty.
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There is no notion of equality. There is no notion that you can resolve your disputes thing.
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That's what drives the commerce and things. And so what I really believe that the blockchain
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actually makes a lot of this trust essentially automatic by making it impossible to cheat in
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the real way. You don't even need to go to court if nobody can change the ledger.
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So essentially it's a way of you cannot solve an illegal system that uses to a blockchain.
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But what I'm saying, a big chunk of it can actually be guaranteed. And there is no reason
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why technology should be antagonistic to legal scholarship. It could be actually
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equestrian. And one should start to doing the interest things that the technology alone cannot
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do. And then you go from there. But I think that is essentially is blockchain can affect
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all kinds of our behavior. Yes, in some sense, the transparency, the required transparency ensures
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honesty prevents corruption. So there's a lot of systems that could use that and the legal system
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is one of them. There's a little bit of attention that I wonder if you can speak to where this
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kind of transparency, there's attention with privacy. Is it possible to achieve privacy if
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you wanted on a blockchain? Do you have ideas about different technologies that can do that?
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People have been playing with different ideas. So absolutely. The answer is yes. And by the way,
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I'm a cryptographer. Right. So I really believe in privacy and I believe in and I've devoted in
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all a big chunk of my life to guarantee privacy even when it seems almost impossible to have it.
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And it is possible to have it in also in the blockchain too. And however, I believe in timing
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as well. And I believe that the people have the right to understand
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their system they live in. And right now, people can understand the blockchain to be
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something that is not, cannot be altered and is transparent. And that is good enough.
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And right now, any way to add and there is a pseudo privacy for the fact that
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who knows if the keys belong, public key belongs to me or to you, right? And I can,
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when I want to change my money from one public key, I split it to other public keys going to
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figure out which one is silver or all of them are silver or only one of silver. Who knows?
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So you get some vanilla privacy, not the one acrector. And I think it's good enough because
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and it's important for now that we absorb this stage because the next stage, we must understand
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the privacy tool rather than taking on faith. When the public starts say, I believe in the
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scientists and whatever they say, I swear by them and therefore they tell me private is private
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and nobody understands that we need a much more educated about the tools we are using.
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And so I look forward to deploying more and more privacy on the blockchain.
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But we are not, I will not rush to it until the people understand and are behind whatever we have
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right now. So you build privacy on top of the power of the blockchain. You have to first
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understand the power of the blockchain. Yes. 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
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have its own brand and it's going to be great at something. And sometimes it's a 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 of it. It's even desirable to have a winner takes all because we need to
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express different things. But the important thing is going to have enough interoperability
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of various systems so that you can transfer your assets where you have the best tool to
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service them, whatever your needs are at the time. So there's an idea, I don't know,
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they call 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. Their claim is
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it's good to have the best technology dominate the medium of exchange, the medium of store value,
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the money, the digital currency space. 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 and
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to win. And because people want more and more things, there is an Italian saying that goes
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as translates well, I think. It goes, appetite grows while eating. I think you understand
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what he means. So I say, I'm not hungry. Okay, food. Let me try this and that. So we want more
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and more and more. And when you find something like Bitcoin, which I already had very good things to
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say, but it does something very well, but it's static. I mean, store value, yes, I think it's a
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great way. For the rest, it would be a sad world if the world in which we are so anchoring down,
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so and defensive that we want to store value and hide it on the mattress. I long for a world in which
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it is open. We all want to transact and interact with each way. And therefore, when you want to
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store value, one, perhaps one chain, where you want to have to transact, maybe is another. I'm
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not saying that, you know, one chain cannot be stored value or the other thing, but I really
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believe that I believe in the ingenuity of people and in the innovation that is intrinsic to the
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human nature. We want always different things. So how can it be something invented? Whatever it is
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decades ago is going to fulfill the needs of our future generations. I'm not going to fulfill my
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needs, let alone my kids or their kids. We are going to have a different world and things will
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evolve. So you believe that life, intelligent life is ultimately about adaptability and
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evolving. So static is, static loses in the end. Yes. Let me ask the, well first, the ridiculous
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question. Do you have any clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is? Is that even an interesting question?
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Well, is it you? Your questions are very interesting. So I would say, first of all,
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it's not me and I can prove it because, you know, if I were Satoshi Nakamoto, I would have not found
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an algorithm that takes totally different principles to approach to the system. But the
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other thing, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? You know what the right answer is? It's not him or she,
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her or them. Satoshi Nakamoto is Bitcoin because to me, it's such a coherent proof of work that
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at the end, the creator and the creation identify themselves. So he says, okay, I understand the
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Michelangelo. Okay, he did the Sistine Chapel fine. He did the St. Peter's Dome fine. He did
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the Moses of the Pietra statue fine. But besides this, who was Michelangelo? That's a very long
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question. This is his own work that is Michelangelo. So I think that when you look at the Bitcoin,
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is a piece of work that, as it defects, yes, like anything human, but it was captivated
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the imaginations of millions of people as subverted the status quo. And I'm saying, you know,
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whoever this person of people are, he's living in this piece of work. I mean, it is Bitcoin.
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The idea of the work is bigger. We forget that sometimes. It's something about our biology
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once likes to see a face and attach a face to the idea, when really the idea is the thing we love,
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the idea is the thing that impact ideas, the thing that ultimately we, you know, Steve Jobs or
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something like that, we associate with the Mac, with the iPhone, with just everything he did at
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Apple. Apple actually, the company is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, the man is a pales in comparison to
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the creations of the man. Correct. And the sense of aesthetics that has brought to the daily lives.
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And very often aesthetic wins in the long, in the long, in the long end. And these are very
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elegant design product. And when you say, oh, elegance, a very few people care about it, apparently
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millions and millions and millions and millions of people do because we are attacked by beauty.
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And these are beautifully designed products. And, and, and, you know, and they've, in addition
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to ever the technological aspect of the other thing. And I think, yes, that is,
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yeah, as the Steyesky said, beauty will save the world. So I'm, I'm with you on that one.
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Right. It currently seems like cryptocurrency, all these different technologies are gathering
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a lot of excitement, not just in our discourse, but in their like, scale financial impact.
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A lot of companies are starting to invest in Bitcoin. Do you think that the main method of
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store value and exchange of value, basically money will soon, or at some point in the century,
link |
will become cryptocurrency? Yes. So mind you, as I said, that the notion of cryptocurrency,
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like any other fundamental human notion has to evolve. But yes. So I think that he has a lot
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of momentum behind it. And it's not only static, as this programmable money, as I think smart
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contracts, all the time. It allows a peer to peer interaction among people who don't even
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know each other, right? And they don't even, therefore cannot even trust each other just
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because they never saw each other. So I think it's so powerful that it's going to do this.
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Again, a particular cryptocurrency should develop and cryptocurrency will all develop.
link |
But the answer is yes, we are going towards a much more, unless we have a society,
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a sudden crisis for different reasons, which nobody hopes. There's always an asteroid,
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there's always a nuclear war and all the existential crisis that we think about,
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including artificial intelligence. Okay. It's funny you mentioned that
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Michelangelo and Steve Jobs, a set of ideas represents the person's work. So we talked
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about Algorand, which is a super interesting set of technologies. But he did also win the
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Turing Award. You have a bunch of ideas that are seminal ideas. So can we talk about
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cryptography for a little bit? What is the most beautiful idea in cryptography or computer science
link |
or mathematics in general? Asking somebody who has explored the depths of all?
link |
Well, a few contenders.
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Either your work or other work. Let's leave my work aside.
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But one powerful idea and it's both an old idea in some sense and a very, very modern one.
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And it might be on this idea of a one way function. So a function that easy to evaluate.
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So given X, you can compute f of X easily. But given f of X is very hard to go back to X.
link |
Okay. Think alike, breaking a glass easy, reconstruct the glass harder, frying an egg
link |
easy from the side egg to go back to the original egg harder. If you want to be extreme,
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killings are living big. Unfortunately, easy. The other way around, very hard. And so the fact
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that the notion of a function, which you have a recipe that is in front of your eyes to transform
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an X into f of X, and then from f of X, even though you see the recipe to transform it,
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you cannot go back to X that, in my opinion, is one of the most elegant and momentous
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notions that there are. And there is a computational notion because of the difficulties
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in a computational sense. And it's a mathematical notion because we were talking about function.
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And it's so fruitful because that is actually the foundation of all the cryptography.
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And let me tell you, it's an old notion because very often in any mythology that we think of,
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the most powerful gods or goddesses are the ones of X and the opposite of X, the gods of love and
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death. And when you take opposite, they don't just erase one another, you create something way
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more powerful. And this one way function is extremely powerful because essentially becomes
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something that is easy for the good guys and hard for the bad guys. So for instance,
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in pseudo random number generation, the easy part of the function corresponds, you want to
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generate bits very quickly. And hard is predicting what the next bit is. It doesn't look the same.
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One is Excel for X going from X for X to XR, what does do predicting bits by a magic of
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reductions and mathematical apparatus. This simple function morphs itself into sort of
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random generation. This simple function morphs itself in digital signature scheme,
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in which digitally signing should be easy and forging should be hard. Again, a digital signature
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is not going from X to F for X, but the magic and the richness of this notion is that it is so
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powerful with morphs in all kinds of incredible constructs. And in both, these two opposites
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coexist, the easy and the hard. And in my opinion, it is a very, very elegant notion. So that
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simple notion ties together cryptography. And like you said, pseudo random number generation,
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you have work on pseudo random functions. What are those? What's the difference in those and the
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generators, pseudo random number generators? How do they work? Let's go back to pseudo random number
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generation. First of all, people think that the pseudo random number generation generates random
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number. Not true, because I don't believe that from nothing you can get, you can get something.
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So nothing from nothing. But randomness, you cannot create that on nothing. But what you can do
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is that you can be expanded. So in other words, if you give me somehow 300 random bits, truly
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random bits, then I can give you 300,000, 300,000, 300 trillions, 300 quadrillions, as many as you
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want random bits. So that even though I tell you the recipe by which I produce these bits,
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but I don't tell you the initial 300 random numbers, I keep them secret. And you see all the bits I
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produced so far. If you were to bet, given all the bits produced so far, what is the next bit in
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my sequence? Better than 50, 50. Of course, 50, 50, anybody can guess, right? But to be inferring
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something, you have to be a bit better. Then the effort to do this extra bit is so enormous that
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is the factor random. So that is a pseudo random generator, are these expanders of secret randomness,
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which goes extremely fast. Okay, that said, what is the... Expanders of secret randomness,
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beautifully put. Okay. So every time, every time somebody, if you're a programmer is using a function
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that's not called pseudo random, it's called random usually, you know, these programming
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languages and it's generating different, that's essentially expanding the secret randomness.
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But they should. In the past, actually, in most of the library, they used something
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pre modern cryptography. Unfortunately, they would be better served to make 300 real seed
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random number and then expand them properly, as we know now. But that has been a very
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old idea. In fact, one of the best philosophers have debated whether the world was deterministic
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or probabilistic. Very big questions, right? Does God play dice? Exactly. Einstein says it does,
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it doesn't. But in fact, now we have a language that even at the Albert time was not around,
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but it was this complexity theory, modern complexity based cryptography. And now we know
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that in the universe, as 300 random bits, whether where is random or probabilistic or deterministic,
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it doesn't matter, because you can expand this initial seed of randomness forever in which
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all the experiments you can do, all the influences you can do, all the things you can do, they are,
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you are not 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 for things to be different, but I don't have in my lifetime, in my lifetime of the universe,
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animated, to set them aside, well, I should be intellectually honest to say, well,
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pseudo random in the special function 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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the pseudo randomness approaches true randomness pretty quickly. But is it, maybe this is a
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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 is expensive to get.
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And in any case, if I give you one online random, you will never tell them apart.
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By no any other shape, no matter how much you work on it. So in some sense,
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if it exists or not, it really is a quote philosophical sense in the colloquial way to
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say that we cannot somehow pin it down. Do you ever, again, just to stay on philosophical
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for a bit for a brief moment? Do you ever think about free will? And whether that exists? Because
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ultimately, free will sort of is this experience that we have, like we're making choices.
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Even though it appears that, you know, the world is deterministic at the core, I mean,
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that's against the debate. But if it is, in fact, deterministic at the lowest possible level,
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at the physics level, how do you make, if it is deterministic, how do you make
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sense of the difference between the experience of us feeling like we're making a choice and
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the whole thing being deterministic. So first of all, let me give you a gut reaction to the
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question. And the gut reaction is that it is important that we believe that there exists free
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will. And second of all, almost by weird logic, if we believe it exists, then it does exist.
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So it's very important for our social apparatus, for our sense of the day or ourselves,
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that it exists. And the moment in which, you know, we so want to be almost we conjure it up in
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existence. But again, I really feel that if you look at some point, the space of free will
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so seems to shrink. We realize how more and more, how much of our, say, genetic apparatus
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dictates who we are, why we prefer certain things than others, right? And why we react to noises
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of music. We prefer poetry. We may explain even all this. But at the end of the day,
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whether it exists in a philosophical sense or not, it's like randomness. If you can, if pseudo
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random is as good as random, vis a vis lifetime of the universe, our experience, then it doesn't
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really matter. 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, 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?
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Will cryptography be able to defend all those kinds of things?
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Okay, great. So first of all, for the record, because I think it matters, but it's important
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that the record, there are people who continue to contend that quantum mechanics exist, but
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there'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's the cryptography. So does quantum computing
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challenge the one way function? Essentially, you can boil it down to does one computing
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find a 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 by easy,
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by a classical computer, and hard by a classical computer, but easy for a quantum computer. That's
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a bad idea. But once easy means it should be easy for a quantum and hard for also quantum.
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Then you can see that you are, yes, it's a challenge, but you have a hope because you
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can absorb if one computing really realizes and becomes available, according to the promises,
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then you can use them also for the easy part. And once you use it for the easy part, the choices
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that you have a one way function, they multiply. So, okay, so they particularly candidates of one
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way function, they not be one way anymore, but quantum one way function may continue to exist.
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And so I really believe that for life to be meaningful is the one way function had to exist.
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Because just imagine that anything that is it becomes easy to do. I mean, what kind of life
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is it? I mean, so you need that. And if something is hard, but it's so hard to generate, you'll never
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find something which is hard for you. You want that there is abundance that is easy to produce
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hard problem. That's my opinion is why life is interesting because hard problem pop up
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really relatively speed. So in some sense, I almost think that I do hope they exist if they
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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
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function. I don't know if you play with cellular automata. That's just another formulation of
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I know, but yes, very simple. It's almost a very simple illustration of starting out with
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simple rules and one way being able to generate incredible amounts of complexity. But then you
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ask the question, can I reverse that? And it's just, it's just surprising how difficult it is to
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reverse that. It's surprising even in constrained situations, it's very difficult to prove anything
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that it almost I mean, the sad thing about it. Well, I don't know if it's sad, but it seems
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like we don't even have the mathematical tools to reverse engineer stuff. I don't know if they
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exist or not. But in the space of cellular automata, when you start with something simple
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and you create something incredibly complex, can you take something, a small picture of that
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complex and reverse engineer? That's kind of what we're doing as scientists here.
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You're seeing the result of the complexity and you're trying to come up with some universal law
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that generate all of this. What is the, you know, the theory of everything? What are the basic
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physics laws that generate this whole thing? And there's a hope that you should be able to do that,
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but it gets, it's difficult. Yeah, but there is also some poetry on the fact that it's difficult
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because it gives us a mystery to live without which I mean, it's not so fun. Life will be less
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fun. Can we talk about interactive proofs a little bit and zero knowledge proofs? What are those?
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Okay. How do they work? So interactive proof actually is a modern realization and conceptualization
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of something that we knew was true, that, you know, that is easy to go to lecture. In fact,
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that's my motivation. We invented schools to go to lecture and we don't say, oh, I have the
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Minister of Education, I published this book, you read it. And this is a book for this year,
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this book for this year. We spend a lot of our treasury in educating our kids and in person,
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educating, go to class, interact with each other on the blackboard and chalk on my time. Now we can
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have, you know, whiteboard and presumably you're going to have actually these magic pens and a
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display instead. But the idea is that interactively you can convey truth much more efficiently.
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And we knew this psychologically. It's better to hear an explanation than just to belabor some paper,
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right? Same thing. So interactive proofs is a way to do the following. Rather than doing
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in some complicated, very long papers and possibly infinitely long proofs, exponentially long proofs,
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you say the following. If this theorem is true, there is a game that is associated to the theorem.
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And if the theorem is true, this game, I have a winning strategy that I can win half of the
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time, no matter what you do. Okay. So then you say, well, is the theorem true? You believe me?
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Why should I believe you? So, okay, let's play. So, and if I prove that I have a strategy that,
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and I win the first time, and I win the second time, then I lose the third time, but I win
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more than half of the time, or I win, say, all the time if the theorem is true and at least
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at the most half of the time, if the theorem is false, you statistically get convinced you can
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verify this quickly. And therefore, when the game typically is extremely fast,
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so you generate a miniature game in which if the theorem is true, I win all the time,
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in the theorem is false, I can win at most half of the time, and if I win, win, win, win, win,
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win, win, win, you can deduce either the theorem is true, which most probably is the case on this week,
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or I've been very, very unlucky because it's like if I had 100 coin tosses and I got 100 heads,
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very improbable. So that is a way, and so this transformation from the formal statement of a
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proof into a game that can be quickly played, and you can draw statistics on many times you win,
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and is one of a big conquest of modern complexity theory, and in fact, actually as highlighted,
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the notion of a proof has really given us a new insight of what to be true means, and what
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what truth is, and what proofs are. So these are legitimately proofs. So what kind of mysteries
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can it allow us to unlock and prove? You said truth. So what does it allow us, what kind of truth
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does it allow us to arrive at? So it enlarges the realm of what is provable, because in some sense
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of the classical way of proving things was extremely inefficient from the very fire point of view.
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Yes. Right. So 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, minutes, verify something that is the correctness of an assertion,
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that otherwise would have taken a lifetime to belabor and check all the passages of a very,
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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 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
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false statement. And that at the end says events of proof, proof can be beautiful, should be,
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should be elegant, but at the end says is true or false. If you want to be able to differentiate,
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it is possible to prove the truth and it should be impossible or statistically extremely hard
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to prove something false. And if you do this, you can prove way, way more once you understand this.
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And on top of it, we got some insight, like in this zero knowledge proofs, that is in
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something which you took for granted, where the same knowledge and verification
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are actually separate concepts. So you can verify that an assertion is correct
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without having any idea of why this is so. And so people felt to say, if you want to verify
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something yet to have the proof, once you have the proof, you know why is true, you have the proof
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itself. So somehow you can totally differentiate knowledge and verification validity. So totally,
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you can decide if something is true and still have no idea. Is a good example in your mind?
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Oh, actually, you know, at the beginning, we labored to find the first knowledge,
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zero knowledge proof, then we found the second, then we found the third. And then a few years later,
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actually, we proved a theorem which essentially says every theorem, no matter what about,
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can be explained in a zero knowledge way. Okay. So it's not a class of theorem, but old theorems.
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And it's a very powerful thing. So we were really, for thousands of years,
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bought this identity between knowledge and verification, to be hand in hand together,
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and for no reason at all. I mean, we had to develop a way of technology, as you know,
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and very big technology, because it makes us more human and make us understand more things
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than before. And I think that is a good thing. So this interactive proof process,
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there's power in games. And you've recently gotten into, recently, I'm not sure you can
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correct me, mechanism design. Yeah. So it's, I mean, first of all, maybe you can explain
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what mechanism design is and the fascinating space of playing with games and designing games.
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Mechanism design is that you want to, you want a certain behavior to arise, right? If you want
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to organize, you know, a societal structure or something, you want to have some orderly
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behavior to arise, right? Because it is important for your goals. But you know that people,
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they don't care what my goals are, they cares about maximizing their utility. So put it crossly,
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making money, the more money, the better, so to speak. But I'm exaggerating.
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Self interest in what?
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Self interest. Whatever way then. So what you want to do is ideally, what you want to do is to
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design a game so that while people played, so to maximize their self interest,
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they achieve the social goal and behavior that I want. That is really the best type of thing.
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And it is a very hard science and art to design these games. And it challenges us to
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actually come up with a solution concept for way to analyzing the games that need to be broader.
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And I think the game theory has developed a bunch of very compelling
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ways to analyze the game that if the game has a best property, you can have a pretty good guarantee
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that is going to be played in a given way. But as it turns out, and not surprisingly,
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these tools have a range of action like anything else. All these so called the
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technically solution concept, the way to analyze the game like
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dominant strategy, something comes to mind to be very meaningful.
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But as a limited power, in some sense, the games that can be
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admit 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. So if you want to reason, if there is a way say
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that you can analyze a restricted class of games this way. But most games don't fall
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into this restricted class. Then what do I do? Then you need to enlarge away what a rational
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player can do. So for instance, in my opinion, at least in some of my, I played with this for
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a few years and I was doing some exoteric things, I'm sure in the space that were not exactly
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mainstream. And then I changed my interest and blockchain. But when I'm saying for a while,
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I was doing that. So for instance, to me, is a way in which I design the game and you don't
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have the best move for you. The best move is the move that is best for you, no matter what the
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other players are doing. Sometimes a game doesn't have that. Okay, it's too much to ask. But I can
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design the game, such of it, given the option in front of you say, oh, these are really stupid
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for me, take them aside. But these, these are not stupid. So if you design them, the game,
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so that in any combination of non stupid things that the player can do, I achieve what I want,
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I'm done. I don't care to find the very unique equilibrium. I don't give a damn. I want to say,
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well, as long as you don't do stupid things and nobody else does stupid things, good social
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things, outcome arise, I should be equally happy. And so I really believe that this type of analysis
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is possible. And as a bigger radius, so it reaches more games, more classes of games.
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And after that, we have to enlarge it again. And it's going to be, we are going to have fun,
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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, you're basically this
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mechanism design, design the game such that it's scalable, secure and decentralized, right?
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Yes. Yes. And very often yet to say, and very, and you must also design so that the incentives
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are, are, are, and then, then you have a tool for whatever little I learned from my venture
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in mechanism design is that incentives are very hard to design, because people are very complex
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creatures. And so, and so somehow the way we design Algorand is a totally different way,
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essentially with no incentives, essentially. And, and, but, but technically speaking,
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there is a notion that is actually believable, right? So that to say,
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people want to maximize their utility, yes, up to a point. Let me, let me tell you, assume that
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if you are honest, you make a hundred bucks. But if you are dishonest, no matter how dishonest
link |
you are, 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 hundred? If I'm devious, and if I'm a criminal,
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one hundred bucks and one cent, you know, I might as well be honest. Okay. So that essentially is
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called, you know, epsilon utility, equilibrium, but I think it's good. And, and, and, and that's
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what we designed. Essentially means that, you know, there is an, uh, having no incentives is
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actually a good thing because to prevent people from reasoning how else I'm going to gain the system.
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But why can we achieve an algorithm to have no incentives and in Bitcoin instead yet to pay
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the miners because they do tremendous amount of work? Because if you have to do a lot of work,
link |
then you demand to be paid accordingly. Because you, right? But if I're going to say,
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you had to add the two and two equal to four, how much you want to be paid for this? Or if you
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don't give me this, I don't add the two and two. I would say you can add two and two in your sleep.
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You don't need to be paid to add the two and two. So the idea is that if we make the system so
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efficient, so that generating the next block is so damn simple, it doesn't hit the universe,
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let alone my computer, let alone take some micro signal computation, I might as well
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not being received incentives for doing that and try to incentivize some other part of the system,
link |
but not the main consensus, which is a mechanism for generating and adding block to the chain.
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Since you're Italian, Sicilian, I also heard rumors that you are a connoisseur of food.
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You know, if I said today is the last day you get to be alive, I'm Russian. You shouldn't
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have trusted me. You never know whether you're going to make it out or not. If you had one last
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meal, you can travel somewhere in the world. Either you make it or somebody else makes it.
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What's that going to look like? All right. If it's one last meal, I must say,
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you know, in this era of COVID, I've not been able to see my mom and my mom was a fantastic chef,
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okay? And they had this very traditional food. As you know, the very traditional food are great
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for a reason because they survived hundreds of years of culinary innovation. So there is one
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very laborious thing, which is, and you heard of a name, which is Parmigiana,
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but to do it is a piece of art. There were so many hours, but only my mom could do it.
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If I had one last meal, I want Parmigiana, okay? What is the laborious process? Is it the ingredients?
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Is it the actual process? Is it the atmosphere and the humans involved?
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And the latter. The ingredients, like in any other Italian cuisine,
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believes in very few ingredients. If you take, say, quintessential Italian recipe,
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spaghetti pesto, okay? Pesto is olive oil, very good extra virgin olive oil,
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basil, pine nuts, pepper, a clove of garlic, not too much. Otherwise, you overpower everything.
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And then you have to do either two schools of thought, Parmesan or pecorino or a mix of the two.
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I mentioned six ingredients. That is typical Italian. I understand that there are other
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cuisines, for instance, a French cuisine, which is extremely sophisticated and extremely combinatorial,
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or some Chinese cuisine, which has a lot of, many more ingredients than this. And yet the
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artists, to put them together, a lot of things. In Italy, it's really the striving for simplicity.
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Yet to find few ingredients, but the right ingredients to create something. So in Parmigiana,
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the ingredients are eggplants, they are tomatoes, they are basil. But how to put them together
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and the process is an act of love, okay? Labor and love. It's that you can spend the entire day
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when I'm 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.
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I don't know if you've seen Georgians of sushi, but there's a mastery to that that's propagated
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through the generations. It's fascinating. You know, people love it when I ask about books.
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I don't know if books, whether fiction, nonfiction, technical or completely nontechnical,
link |
had an impact in your life throughout, if there's anything you would recommend,
link |
or even just mention as something they gave you an insight or moved you in some way.
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So, okay. So I don't know if I recommend because in some sense, you almost had to be Italian or
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to be such a scholar, but being Italian, one thing that really impressed me tremendously
link |
is the divine comedy. It is a medieval poem, a very long poem divided in three parts,
link |
hell, purgatory and paradise. And that is the non trivial story of a middleman man
link |
gets into a crisis, personal crisis. And then out of this crisis, he purifies,
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when he's a catastrophe, purifies himself more and more and more until he's become capable
link |
of actually meeting God. Okay. And this is actually a complex story. So you had to get some very
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sophisticated language, maybe Latin at that point that we were talking about 1200s in Italy,
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in Florence. This guy instead, he chose his own dialect, not spoken outside his own immediate
link |
circle, right? A Florentine dialect. Actually, Dante really made Italian. How can you express
link |
such a sophisticated things and so forth? And then the point is that these words that nobody
link |
actually knew because they were essentially dialect, and plus a bunch of very intricate rhymes
link |
in which you had to rhyme with the things and turns out that by getting meaning from the things that
link |
you rhyme, you essentially guess what the word means. And you invent Italian and you communicate
link |
by almost osmosis what you want is a miracle of communication in a dialect, a very poor language,
link |
very unsophisticated to express very sophisticated situation. I love it. People who love it and
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Italians and not Italian. But what I got of it is that very often limitations are our strength.
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Because if you limit yourself at a very poor language, somehow you get out of it and you
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achieve even better form of communication if you're using a hyper sophisticated and literary
link |
language with lots of resonance from the prior books so that you can actually instantaneously
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quote, he couldn't quote anything because nothing was written in Italian before him. So I really felt
link |
that limitations are our strength. And I think that rather than complaining about the limitations,
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we should embrace them because if we embrace our limitation, limited as we are, we find
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very creative solutions that people with less limitation we have, we would not even think
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about it. Well, the limitation is a superpower if you choose to see it that way. Since you speak
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both languages, is there something that's lost in translation to you? Is there something you
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can express in Italian that you can't in English and vice versa maybe? Is there something you
link |
could say to the musicality of the language? I've been to Italy a few times and I'm not sure if it's
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the actual words, but the people are certainly very, there's body language too. There's just the
link |
whole being is language. So I don't know if you miss some of that when you're speaking English in
link |
this country. Yes. In fact, actually, certainly I miss it and somehow it was a sacrifice that I
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made consciously by the time I arrived, I knew that this I was not going to express myself
link |
at a better level. And it was actually a sacrifice because given you have also your
link |
mother tongue is Russian, so you know that you can be very expressive in your mother tongue
link |
and not very expressive as a new language. And then what people think of you in the new language
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because when the precise of expression of things, it generates, it shows elegance or it shows
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knowledge or it shows as a sense or it shows as a caste or education, whatever it is. So all of a
link |
sudden I found myself on the bottom. So I had to fight all my way up back up. But what I'm saying,
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I go back to the limitations are actually our strength. In fact, it's a trick to limit yourself
link |
to exceed. And there are examples in history. If you think about or Hernán Cortés goes to
link |
invade Mexico, he has what? A few hundred people with him and he has a hundred thousand people
link |
in arms on the other side. First thing he does, he limits himself. He sinks his own ship. There is
link |
no return. Okay. And I'm very proud of the actual manager. That's really profound. I actually,
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first of all, that's inspiring to me. I feel like I have quite a few limitations, but more
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practically on the Russian side, I'm going to try to do a couple of really big and really tough
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interviews in Russian. Once COVID lifts a little bit, I'm traveling to Russia. And I'll keep your
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advice in mind that the limitations is a kind of superpower. We should use it to our advantage,
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because you do feel less like you're not able to convey your wisdom in the Russian language.
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Because I moved here when I was 13. So you don't, you know, the parts of life you live under a
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certain language are the parts of life you're able to communicate. You know, I became, I became a
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thoughtful, deeply thoughtful human in English. But the pain from World War II, the music of the
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people, that wasn't still with me in Russian. So I can carry both of those and there's limitations
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in both. I can't say philosophically profound stuff in Russian, but I can't in English express
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like that melancholy feeling of like the people. And so combining those two all 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 this space of science, in a space of technology,
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a space of theory and engineering. Do you have advice for somebody young, an undergraduate student,
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somebody in high school or anyone who just feels young about life or about career,
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about making their way in this world? So I was telling before that I believe in emotion and
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my thing is to be true to your own emotion. And that I think that if you do that, you're doing
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well because it's a life well spent and you are going never tire because you want to solve all
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these emotional knots that have always intrigued you from the beginning. And I really believe that
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to live meaningfully, creatively, and yet to live your emotional life. So I really believe
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that whether you're a scientist or an artist even more, but a scientist, I think of them as
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artists as well. If you are a human being, so you are really to live fully your emotions and
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to the extent possible, sometimes emotions can be overbearing. And my advice is try to
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express them with more and more confidence. Sometimes it's hard, but you are going to be
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much more fulfilled by suppressing them. What about love? One of the big ones? What role does
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that play? That's the bigger part of emotions. It's a scary thing. It's a lot of vulnerability
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that comes with love, but there is also so much energy and power and love in all senses,
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and in the traditional sense, but also in the sense of a broader sense for humanity,
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this feeling, this compassion that makes us one with other people and the suffering of other
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people. I mean, all of this is a very scary stuff, but it's really the fabric of life.
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Well, the sad thing is it really hurts to lose it.
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Yes, that's why the vulnerability that comes with it.
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That's the thing about emotion is it's up and down, and the down seems to come always with up,
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but the up only comes with the down. Let me ask you about the ultimate down, which is,
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unfortunately, we humans are mortal or appear to be for the most part. Do you think about your
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own mortality? Do you fear death? I hope so, because without death there is no life,
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so at least there is no meaningful life. Death is actually, in some sense, our ultimate motivator
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to live a beautiful and meaningful life. I myself felt as a young man, unless I got something that
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I wanted to do and I don't know why I got the idea of something to say. If I'm not able to say,
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I would suicide. Maybe it was a way to motivate myself, but you don't need to motivate it because
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in some sense, unfortunately, death is there. You better get up and do your thing,
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because death is the best motivation to live fully. What do you hope your legacy is?
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Do you imagine you have two kids? Yes. I really feel that on one side is
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my biological legacy, and that is my two kids and their kids, hopefully, and that is one fine.
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The other thing is this common enterprise, which is society, and I really feel that my legacy would
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be better by providing security and privacy. Actually, for me, our metaphorical, to say I want
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to give you the ability to interact more and take more risks and reach out to more and more people
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as difficult and dangerous as they may seem, but my own scientific work is about to guarantee
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privacy and give you the security of interaction. Not only in a transaction, like it would be a
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blockchain transaction, but that is really one of the hardcore of my emotional problems. I think
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of it and these are 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 beings create
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cool stuff along the way. Is there a deeper meaning? If it is, what is it? Well, meaning of life.
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Actually, there are three meanings of life. Great. That's great. One, to seek. Two, to seek, and three,
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to seek. To seek what? Or is there no answer to that? There's no answer to that. I really think
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that the journey is more and more important than the destination, whatever that be. I think that
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is a journey and in my opinion, at the end of the day, it must admit meaningful in itself.
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We must admit that maybe whatever your destination might be, we may never get there,
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but hell was a great ride. Well, I don't think there's a better way to end this,
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Silvio. Thank you for wasting your extremely valuable time with me today, joining on this journey
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of seeking something together. We found nothing, but it was very fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank
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you so much for talking to us today. Thank you, Alex. It was really special for me to be interviewed
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by you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Silvio McCauley, and thank you to our
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sponsors, Athletic Greens Nutrition Drink, the Information in Depth Tech Journalism website,
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FourSigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor links to
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get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from
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Henry David Thoreau. Wealth is the ability to fully experience life. Thank you for listening,
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and hope to see you next time.