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Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 | Lex Fridman Podcast #188


small model | large model

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The following is a conversation with Vitalik Buterin,
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his second time on the podcast.
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Vitalik is the cofounder of Ethereum
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and one of the most influential people
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in cryptocurrency and technology broadly defined.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed,
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Four Sigmatic, and BetterHelp.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that Ethereum, Bitcoin,
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and many other cryptocurrencies
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have been taking a wild ride of prices going up and down
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in the past few months.
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To me, the prices were never as important as the ideas,
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both technical and philosophical.
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Cryptocurrency has the potential to empower billions
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of people to participate in the global economy
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in a way that resists the manipulation
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by centralized power.
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Also with smart contracts, layer two technologies,
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data pools, NFTs, and of course,
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integration of artificial intelligence
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into the whole thing, we have the opportunity
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to build tools and worlds that transform physical
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and digital life as we know it,
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hopefully minimizing the suffering in the world
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and maximizing the fun.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast
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and here is my conversation with Vitalik Buterin.
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Let's first talk about Shiba Inu, if we can.
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Also known as Shiba Token, code SHIB,
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for context, Shiba Inu was created in August 2020,
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modeled off of Dogecoin by the anonymous founder
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known as Ryoshi.
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On May 10th this year, it had a market capitalization
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of over 13 billion.
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And maybe you can explain this, but in a crazy move,
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you were given half of SHIB's total supply.
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You burned, a.k.a. destroyed 90% of it.
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That's worth $6.7 billion.
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And you donated 10%, that's worth 1.2 billion at the time
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to an India COVID 19 relief fund,
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saying you don't want to be the locus of this much power.
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This is fascinating.
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Why and how were you able to walk away
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from this much money and this much power?
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So I should probably start by giving some of the backstory
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around these coins and this concept of giving me coins.
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So first of all, Shiba Inu, as you said,
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is this kind of knockoff of Dogecoin, right?
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And Dogecoin was this initial kind of fun coin
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that was created back, I think, around 2014 or so.
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And it was just created by Jackson Palmer
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who put it out as a joke for a couple of hours
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and a community formed around it.
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And at the beginning, people didn't take it very seriously.
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I actually remember putting about $25,000 into Doge
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sometime around 2016.
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And I just remember thinking to myself,
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okay, how am I going to explain to my mom
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that I just invested $25,000 into Dogecoins?
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And what even are Dogecoins?
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The only interesting thing about this coin
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is that there's a logo of a dog somewhere.
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But of course, that ended up being one of the best
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investments I've ever made and it did really well.
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And then at the end of 2020, Elon Musk, of course,
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started talking about Dogecoin and the market cap
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just shot up to about $50 billion.
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Actually, it shot up multiple times, right?
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Like the first time it went up from about 0.8 cents
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to about like 7 cents.
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And this just happened all in one day.
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And I remember this was when I was still in Singapore
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in the middle of COVID and I saw that the price
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just went up by 1000% and I was like,
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oh my God, my Doge is worth like a lot.
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And so I immediately called up some of my friends
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and told them to like drop everything and scramble.
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And I sold half the Doge and I got $4.3 million,
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donated the proceeds to give directly.
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And a few hours after I did this,
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the price dropped back down from about 7 cents to 4 cents.
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So I managed to sell the Doge at the top
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and I remember just that feeling
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like I was such an amazing trader.
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But then of course, the price went up from 4 cents
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then to 7 and then 50 and just like Doge becoming
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this big phenomenon where there's even a lot of people
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that have heard of Doge that have not heard of Ethereum
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is just like something even I wasn't predicting, right?
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And so after that, of course, we have Doge
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and then people are thinking, well,
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if the leading DOG token is worth $50 billion,
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then surely the second largest DOG token deserves
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at least seven or 8 billion, right?
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Like, I feel like that's the kind of what the mindset
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of these Shiba people is.
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So that of course, they did this other gimmick, right?
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Where they gave me half the Shiba token supply.
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They were actually not the first projects to do this.
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So around the end of 2020,
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there was this weird project called Teller.
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It's like T E L L O R.
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I think they're a chain link competitor
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or something like this.
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But I remember they just like dumped $50,000
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worth of their token into my wallet.
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And then they had their Twitter army
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just like basically run around saying,
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look, look at Vitalik's wallet, Vitalik holds Tellers.
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He's one of us, he's a supporter.
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And as soon as I discovered this,
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I just like publicly sold the Teller tokens on Uniswap.
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And this created a bit of a Twitter splat.
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Now, the Shiba people were more clever.
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The Shiba people, instead of dumping to that wallet,
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they dumped to my cold wallet, right?
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So in a cryptocurrency, right,
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there's this concept of like cold wallets and hot wallets.
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Basically, like the thing that actually owns your money
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is like this 80 digit number called a private key, right?
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And a hot wallet is when that private key
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is just stored in memory on your computer,
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on your phone, really easy to access.
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Cold wallet means it's either written down
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on a piece of paper or it's on a computer
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that's just never accessed the internet, right?
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So cold is very inconvenient,
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but cold is also much more secure, right?
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Because even if that computer has some viruses on it,
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like it's like air gapped,
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it's not actually going to be able to upload it.
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So this cold wallet and like all the money
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is out of the cold wallet,
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so it's safe for me to talk about my setup now, right?
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But it was a laptop that was sitting in Canada.
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And I also had two pieces of paper
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where I wrote down two numbers
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on those two pieces of paper.
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One was with me, one was in Canada.
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And if you add those two numbers together,
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you get the private key.
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So because of COVID travel restrictions,
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and this cold wallets in Canada,
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like it's very difficult for me to actually access it, right?
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And I'm not sure if they knew this,
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maybe they just got lucky,
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but basically they sent a lot of these dog tokens
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into this wallet where it was very difficult
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for me to access it.
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But then I saw these dog tokens,
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I saw more and more people talking about them.
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And then at some point I realized that like,
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hey, these things are worth billions of dollars.
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And like, no, there's lots of really good things
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that you could do with that amount of money.
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And it would actually be a waste to just like see it go.
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So I made the decision that like,
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I would actually power through
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and figure out how to like safely,
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like basically get my private key.
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I actually had to call up my family,
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tell them to read out their number
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off of their piece of paper.
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I entered that into a fresh laptop
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that I bought from Target.
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Then I put in my other number on my piece of paper,
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added the two numbers together on the computer,
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there's the key.
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And at the same time, like just scrambled for two days,
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setting up a new wallet
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where I could move my ETH to safely,
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like getting people to be multisig partners,
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just like doing all sorts of like stuff
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that 10 years ago you would expect
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to just be part of a cyberpunk science fiction novel,
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but now it's all real.
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So you're doing this all by yourself, essentially.
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Most of it by myself.
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So you have to keep it secret.
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Right, and I needed my family to actually like go
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and read the number on their piece of paper.
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And then in my new multisig wallet,
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like there's other people that are signatories,
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but I'm obviously not gonna reveal any details beyond that.
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So I did this, right?
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And I actually managed to like get the private key,
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make the first transaction that would just move all my ETH
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to the multisig wallet so it's safe.
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And then second transact,
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put the private key on my main computer,
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then started going in and just selling some
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of the dog tokens and then just like giving them
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to these different charities.
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Now, at the time I actually did not even like have any idea
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of how much you would be able to get, right?
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Because like on paper, the dog tokens are $7 billion,
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but like in reality, it's a very liquid market.
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Are you gonna crash it after you sell 1 million worth
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or are you gonna crash it after 10 million?
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Might you actually be able to get like an entire 200 million?
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I had no idea.
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So I definitely was just over the mindset,
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like, okay, I mean, I'll sell a bit,
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maybe I get some ETH and then donated some ETH
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to give well, donated some to other groups.
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And then, okay, have some dog tokens.
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Like I don't have an easy ability to sell more myself,
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but then I'll just like give them to these groups
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and like, hopefully they'll do good things with them.
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It was actually, I actually donated at 20%
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then dumped 80%.
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Yeah, so the COVID India group got one batch
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and then there's another group that got another batch.
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And I don't wanna say who they are
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cause I think that they wanna announce themselves
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at some point.
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Sure.
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Yeah, but you can see the fact
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that these transactions were made on the blockchain,
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but it was just very interesting and unexpected
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and just an insanely crazy situation.
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It's been a couple of weeks.
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First of all, thank you for helping me hang up some curtains.
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This is a first for the podcast
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and shows that you're a truly a special person
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to be willing to help.
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But now a couple of weeks later,
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do you regret any aspect of that decision?
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I'm sure there is some things
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that I probably could have done better.
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Like I was actually talking to some of these charities
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and I was impressed by just how much money they managed
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to get out of selling some of these coins.
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So I probably could have done better
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by just talking more with the traders
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and actually ensuring that they can do a better job
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of maximizing the value of all of them.
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But it was a very stressful time
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and I did have to act quickly.
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Like I did manage to make a lot of the donations
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before, a few days before the great crypto crash happened.
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So it was, it's difficult to,
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obviously there's parallel universes in which I did better,
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but at the same time,
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there's also lots of parallel universes
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where because I hesitated more
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and tried to spend more time thinking I missed
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the opportunity.
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So on that, it's like a luck of the draw
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and I'm just happy that everything was able to turn out
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as well as it did.
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But psychologically, you mentioned stress.
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How hard was it?
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It was stressful, right?
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I think, well, one of the really stressful parts
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was just the fact that I had to basically move
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all of my funds, including the 325,000 ether
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from one cold wallet into another hot wallet,
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or sorry, into another multi SIG wallet.
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And maybe the multi SIG wallet had a bug in it.
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Maybe there's like some mistake I'll make in the middle
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that causes the funds to get lost.
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You know, that part was stressful.
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And I was definitely stressing out for two days.
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I mean, triple checking the new wallet.
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I even did a bit of an audit of the code myself.
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I wrote my own JavaScript to DAP to make confirmations
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because Gnosis Safe didn't work with the status wallet well.
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So there was definitely,
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that whole thing was definitely a bit of a marathon.
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I was also a kind of definitely a bit worried
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about or uncertain, I guess, how the public
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and including the coin communities
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would perceive the whole thing.
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But I was actually impressed.
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Like I, for every poster that was saying like,
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no, you know, why did Vitalik like rug pull on us?
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He was, his wallet was supposed to be a burn address.
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You know, there's like 10 people that are like,
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oh, you know, I thought I was just in this
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because it's a fun pyramid gambling thing.
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But instead I ended up being part of this, you know,
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great public good thing for humanity.
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And that's like even more amazing.
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So the amounts of that that I got was very impressive.
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So, you know, all in all, you know,
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I think the dog people did great.
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The dog people.
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Is there something you can extend
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to the bigger picture of it
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in the principles you apply to making this decision?
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Is there some principles, philosophies
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that you apply also to the decisions you make
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around Ethereum?
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I think a big one for me is just this idea
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that crypto, you know, isn't just an opportunity
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to give people like slightly better ways
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to save value in all of these things.
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Like it's also an opportunity to like basically create
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these like new digital institutions
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that could serve the public good in new ways.
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And that's something that I've been interested in
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for a long time.
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I actually even have this article in Bitcoin Magazine
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back in 2014, where I basically suggested this idea
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that, you know, you would have coins that represent causes
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and like people would just like buy and accept those coins
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because they support those causes.
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So I think it's called markets, institutions, and currencies,
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a new form of social incentivization or something like that.
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And I'm sure you can find it and throw it in the links.
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So that was interesting to kind of see becoming real.
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And like in general, I think, you know,
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public goods are very important
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and on the internet, public goods are even more important.
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Like every single Lex Friedman podcast is just on YouTube
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and no anyone can go and see it.
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Like there's no way for you to like, you know, sell it
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and so that some people can see it,
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but then other people can't see it.
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Like, you know, you could do that,
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but then you'd obviously be reducing your impact.
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So thank you for making the amazing Lex Friedman podcast
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so freely available.
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Well, that's actually a tense thing is how do you do it
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in a way that's not controlled in a centralized fashion?
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Cause actually YouTube feels free and open,
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but it nevertheless is one company
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making centralized decisions.
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And the first time I realized YouTube is not forever
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is when a lot of the Joe Rogan experience library
link |
00:15:10.020
was pulled from YouTube as part of the Spotify deal.
link |
00:15:13.460
And it made me realize we need to,
link |
00:15:17.080
it's like the realization that fiat money is centralized
link |
00:15:20.860
is realizing that, you know, this is not forever
link |
00:15:25.740
and you might want to come up with schemes to distribute it,
link |
00:15:28.740
to decentralize the control of it
link |
00:15:31.480
in a way that audio for podcasts is just an RSS feed.
link |
00:15:34.620
Exactly.
link |
00:15:35.460
And I think one of the kind of philosophical things
link |
00:15:38.080
that I hope to achieve is kind of decouple
link |
00:15:40.860
the concept of public goods,
link |
00:15:42.720
which are incredibly important
link |
00:15:44.460
and are the lifeblood of modern civilization
link |
00:15:46.820
from the idea that there is or can be
link |
00:15:50.980
one central organization that represents the public
link |
00:15:53.780
and like perfectly understands and can impose their idea
link |
00:15:57.540
of what is the good, right?
link |
00:15:58.960
Like it's, when people talk about public goods,
link |
00:16:02.340
it just often comes with this baggage of, you know,
link |
00:16:05.260
either centralization or conformism.
link |
00:16:07.380
And I think like it doesn't have to, right?
link |
00:16:09.460
Like often the most important public goods
link |
00:16:12.260
are the ones that are created by, you know,
link |
00:16:14.380
the crazy individualists that disagree with everyone else.
link |
00:16:17.560
So trying to make this kind of synthesis
link |
00:16:21.260
where you combine the values of decentralization
link |
00:16:24.740
and the values of open source,
link |
00:16:26.420
but you're not naive about it.
link |
00:16:29.100
And like, you know, you realize that
link |
00:16:31.700
for these things to be produced,
link |
00:16:33.700
there needs to be a way for it to be sustainable.
link |
00:16:36.060
There needs to be some way of supporting people
link |
00:16:38.340
who are working these projects.
link |
00:16:39.900
But at the same time,
link |
00:16:40.940
you want to avoid that turning into
link |
00:16:44.300
a vector of centralization,
link |
00:16:45.780
like trying to sort of get all of the good things
link |
00:16:49.980
without the bad things.
link |
00:16:50.940
To me, that's a big part of sort of
link |
00:16:55.480
what my grand experiment in crypto is about.
link |
00:16:58.100
And like, we are doing things
link |
00:17:00.060
in different kinds of things for this, right?
link |
00:17:02.540
Like there's the Gitcoin Grants quadratic funding
link |
00:17:05.620
in the Ethereum ecosystem.
link |
00:17:07.500
There's obviously these dog coins
link |
00:17:10.380
that just happens, I guess, accidentally.
link |
00:17:14.040
There's other projects that, like for example,
link |
00:17:17.740
you know, Uniswap has their Uniswap DAO
link |
00:17:21.020
that just has a huge amount of funding.
link |
00:17:22.620
And like, we haven't seen yet how that's going to be deployed,
link |
00:17:25.620
but, you know, it could be potentially deployed
link |
00:17:28.540
to do lots of really good and amazing things.
link |
00:17:31.640
Do you see Ethereum as essentially a mechanism
link |
00:17:36.020
to fight for social causes?
link |
00:17:41.160
I definitely see Ethereum as being a mechanism
link |
00:17:46.700
to fight for definitely some specific things
link |
00:17:52.180
that are social causes.
link |
00:17:54.900
Like just, you know,
link |
00:17:57.100
the fact of creating an open financial system
link |
00:17:59.600
that anyone can participate in
link |
00:18:00.920
no matter where they are in the world,
link |
00:18:02.280
that's a social cause.
link |
00:18:03.660
Just, you know, giving people the ability
link |
00:18:05.760
to organize and create projects,
link |
00:18:08.180
even if it's five people in five different countries.
link |
00:18:10.580
I think that kind of inclusiveness,
link |
00:18:12.260
I think that's a social cause
link |
00:18:14.140
and it's a core crypto value.
link |
00:18:18.820
But then at the same time, like the other important
link |
00:18:21.860
and if part of the magic of Ethereum
link |
00:18:23.740
that you have to balance that against
link |
00:18:25.100
is that it is also this open platform
link |
00:18:27.820
where ultimately, you know,
link |
00:18:29.220
the things that are on Ethereum
link |
00:18:31.900
is just the things that the community makes of it.
link |
00:18:35.540
Well, you kind of briefly opened the door,
link |
00:18:37.660
so let's go there.
link |
00:18:39.580
When it comes to government regulation of crypto,
link |
00:18:44.780
what's the best case scenario?
link |
00:18:46.140
What's the worst case scenario?
link |
00:18:48.460
In terms of, you know, as you've kind of mentioned,
link |
00:18:52.580
Ethereum challenges the power centers of the world
link |
00:18:57.020
and how do you see the interplay between governments
link |
00:19:01.980
and this new technology that resists centralized power?
link |
00:19:06.220
Best case and worst case.
link |
00:19:08.080
The best case is that, you know,
link |
00:19:14.460
blockchains continue to prosper
link |
00:19:17.020
and we figure out scalability
link |
00:19:18.700
so that people can actually start doing things on block,
link |
00:19:22.380
like, you know, all of the amazing use cases
link |
00:19:24.660
that people have been talking about
link |
00:19:25.820
instead of today where a lot of the great stuff
link |
00:19:28.420
gets priced out because, you know,
link |
00:19:29.860
transaction fees are at five to $10
link |
00:19:32.140
and then we see a lot of different amazing applications
link |
00:19:36.420
happening on blockchains.
link |
00:19:37.500
You know, it could be like DAO is creating new ways
link |
00:19:41.820
for people to interact and organize with each other
link |
00:19:44.900
and new ways for artists to get funded
link |
00:19:46.580
and just all sorts of these amazing things
link |
00:19:50.120
and there's just enough public support
link |
00:19:55.900
and just enough people that see that, you know,
link |
00:19:57.820
look, crypto is clearly doing a lot of good things
link |
00:20:01.300
and, you know, there are definitely areas
link |
00:20:03.620
where there's tensions,
link |
00:20:04.700
but in those areas where there's tensions,
link |
00:20:08.200
like, there could be some kind of creative
link |
00:20:10.500
and interesting approaches that get figured out, right?
link |
00:20:13.060
Like, you know, the concept of corporate taxes,
link |
00:20:16.300
for example, right?
link |
00:20:17.140
Like, you know, that would disappear as a revenue stream
link |
00:20:21.060
if theoretically corporations just all get replaced by DAOs
link |
00:20:23.780
but, you know, like maybe there's some other creative way
link |
00:20:28.220
by which DAOs themselves can kind of be code,
link |
00:20:34.680
you know, have some kind of encoded governance
link |
00:20:36.480
that ensures that they have at least some kind of bias
link |
00:20:41.120
towards serving the global public good
link |
00:20:43.260
and, you know, maybe DAOs can do enough of that
link |
00:20:47.660
that people are happy with it.
link |
00:20:48.900
And, you know, there are going to be things
link |
00:20:51.100
that people are unhappy about.
link |
00:20:52.220
There's always gonna be the people
link |
00:20:53.420
that, you know, wants to surveil everyone
link |
00:20:55.700
but if the kind of effect of crypto
link |
00:21:01.380
from just empowering people is greater than that
link |
00:21:04.300
and greater than that in a way
link |
00:21:05.360
that people can just easily see,
link |
00:21:07.200
then, you know, that would be a good scenario, right?
link |
00:21:09.280
And we'll just become kind of incorporated and accepted
link |
00:21:13.580
the same way as happened with the internet.
link |
00:21:16.500
But in the worst case scenario would, of course,
link |
00:21:19.820
be just like people suddenly, you know,
link |
00:21:23.340
flipping and going into moral panic mode
link |
00:21:25.460
and just, you know, oh my God,
link |
00:21:27.000
like this technology is used by like, you know,
link |
00:21:29.500
insert bad group over the day.
link |
00:21:31.180
And then I don't think governments have the ability
link |
00:21:33.780
to ban crypto to the extent of just complete
link |
00:21:36.940
like preventing blockchains from existing
link |
00:21:39.340
but they definitely have the ability
link |
00:21:40.740
to really marginalize it, right?
link |
00:21:42.460
Like if you just ban all exchanges,
link |
00:21:45.300
like in ban all links from the Fiat ecosystem to crypto
link |
00:21:48.380
and, you know, you ban all kind of mainstream employers
link |
00:21:51.420
from accepting or paying in cryptocurrency,
link |
00:21:54.660
then like you can successfully like turn it into a,
link |
00:22:01.100
like, you know, a fairly kind of niche countercultural thing
link |
00:22:03.940
that has much less impact than otherwise would.
link |
00:22:07.540
So it's somewhere between the good scenario
link |
00:22:09.860
and the bad scenario.
link |
00:22:10.680
I'm obviously hoping for the good.
link |
00:22:12.460
Well, that's interesting also the tension
link |
00:22:14.020
between governments and companies.
link |
00:22:17.620
Like if you have a bunch of billionaires
link |
00:22:19.300
or a bunch of companies like Tesla investing in Bitcoin
link |
00:22:22.100
and then governments resisting that,
link |
00:22:24.700
it's interesting who wins out in that worst case scenario.
link |
00:22:27.740
And almost when companies and rich, quote unquote,
link |
00:22:34.020
respectable people embrace cryptocurrencies,
link |
00:22:37.840
Bitcoin, Ethereum, so on, even the dot coins,
link |
00:22:41.780
it's almost sends a signal to everybody else
link |
00:22:44.180
that this is a revolution that's here to stay.
link |
00:22:49.300
On this one little tangent that you brought up,
link |
00:22:52.500
this is almost an outdated idea, but it's still with us,
link |
00:22:55.900
which is cryptocurrencies are used for illegal activity,
link |
00:22:59.740
for drugs, for crime, and so on.
link |
00:23:02.940
Is there some sense that worries you
link |
00:23:05.820
that if cryptocurrency, if Ethereum runs the world,
link |
00:23:11.900
then making money from crime will be easier?
link |
00:23:17.060
There's always that possibility, but like at the same time,
link |
00:23:20.320
I think if you look at, you know, the world as a whole
link |
00:23:23.180
and like the way all the other technological trends
link |
00:23:26.260
are going, like, you know, in person surveillance
link |
00:23:28.500
is just going up every year, right?
link |
00:23:30.420
Like if you commit a crime in, you know, meat space,
link |
00:23:34.260
it's getting harder and harder to get away with it.
link |
00:23:36.700
So like, you know, if you wants to do something,
link |
00:23:40.120
and this is something that's just like happening
link |
00:23:42.560
as a result of, you know, just better technology
link |
00:23:45.060
and information transparency,
link |
00:23:46.900
like a lot of it's hard to prevent even if you really tried.
link |
00:23:51.100
So the world where like things go dark to such an extent,
link |
00:23:57.820
you know, as the police hawks sometimes like to say,
link |
00:24:01.580
to such an extent that like, you know, oh my God,
link |
00:24:04.340
the criminals are committing crimes with impunity
link |
00:24:06.340
and we can't see anything, like that just seems unlikely.
link |
00:24:09.820
But, you know, on the other hand,
link |
00:24:11.540
like the world where there just, you know,
link |
00:24:16.540
is no privacy, for example, or the world where there just
link |
00:24:21.900
like is no ability to kind of act outside of the confines
link |
00:24:28.940
of, you know, mainstream institutions,
link |
00:24:30.740
like that's something that's more realistic
link |
00:24:34.860
and that seems like something that could lead
link |
00:24:37.940
to a lot of kind of a lot of scary things, right?
link |
00:24:40.820
And like, even from a government's point of view, right?
link |
00:24:42.820
Like I think governments over the last few years,
link |
00:24:45.220
a lot of them, they're very worried about sovereignty.
link |
00:24:47.860
You know, they're worried about like,
link |
00:24:49.020
if their country is economies and, you know,
link |
00:24:53.540
social environments are just completely dependent
link |
00:24:55.940
on basically foreign tech companies controlled
link |
00:24:58.180
by foreign governments, like, you know,
link |
00:24:59.620
governments are not on team government, right?
link |
00:25:01.220
It's like, you know, the Indian government is on,
link |
00:25:04.180
you know, team India, then the Russian government
link |
00:25:06.380
is on team Russia and so forth, right?
link |
00:25:08.140
So like, you know, they don't want the US to be able
link |
00:25:12.660
to like have this big backdoor into everything.
link |
00:25:14.980
So, I mean, I do think that a balance is needed,
link |
00:25:17.980
but at the same time, I do think,
link |
00:25:24.940
I guess I definitely like worry more
link |
00:25:28.700
about the possibility that just like without things
link |
00:25:35.220
to like crypto kind of acting outside of institutions
link |
00:25:38.740
becomes too impossible.
link |
00:25:40.860
And I don't even necessarily mean outside of governments,
link |
00:25:42.660
even just, you know, outside of corporations,
link |
00:25:44.260
like becomes too impossible.
link |
00:25:45.420
And there's just like terrible things
link |
00:25:46.580
that come as a result.
link |
00:25:48.340
I mean, if things going in the other direction,
link |
00:25:50.220
like it obviously is a risk, but no,
link |
00:25:54.460
at the same time, I think in the longterm,
link |
00:25:56.780
like a crypto can potentially even like offer defenses
link |
00:26:01.620
as much as attacks against that sort of thing.
link |
00:26:03.420
Yeah, many throughout history,
link |
00:26:05.460
many of the most destructive things came
link |
00:26:07.300
from centralized institutions versus sort of
link |
00:26:10.260
from the people operating in the shadows.
link |
00:26:13.100
And, you know, I've been talking to a bunch
link |
00:26:15.420
of psychedelics folks that people doing researches
link |
00:26:18.140
like Rick Doblin in Johns Hopkins,
link |
00:26:21.420
there's a lot of exciting research on psychedelics.
link |
00:26:23.780
And one thing you could say about operating
link |
00:26:26.380
at the edge of legality,
link |
00:26:28.420
it could actually accelerate the adoption
link |
00:26:32.460
of particular things like whether it's marijuana
link |
00:26:36.460
or psychedelics, they can help people out.
link |
00:26:39.220
It's almost accelerates the policy.
link |
00:26:41.460
It forces the policy to catch up
link |
00:26:43.340
to where the people stand.
link |
00:26:44.820
So there's a positive way of doing things
link |
00:26:47.180
that are in the gray area of legality
link |
00:26:49.460
and creating a market that allows people
link |
00:26:51.540
to in a safe way be able to participate
link |
00:26:55.540
in this gray area of legality.
link |
00:26:57.060
The other thing to keep in mind, of course,
link |
00:26:58.660
is that the set of like the kinds of things
link |
00:27:01.660
that just like payment processors as companies
link |
00:27:03.940
try to restrict you from is much larger
link |
00:27:06.700
than the set of things that's illegal, right?
link |
00:27:08.740
Like part of that is because they wanna be
link |
00:27:10.420
super conservative and like the more layers you have,
link |
00:27:12.780
the more they're like conservative
link |
00:27:14.700
because they're scared of what the layer below them
link |
00:27:17.300
will do to them.
link |
00:27:18.940
Sometimes they have their own moral opinions
link |
00:27:21.540
of various kinds.
link |
00:27:23.180
They go after lots of people, right?
link |
00:27:24.460
Like they make life really hard for sex workers,
link |
00:27:27.140
for example, psychedelics, as you mentioned,
link |
00:27:30.300
there's a lot of activity,
link |
00:27:34.660
even including stuff that is totally legal
link |
00:27:37.420
that just there's this like shadow
link |
00:27:40.940
like PayPal credit card governments
link |
00:27:42.700
or whatever you wanna call it.
link |
00:27:43.740
And that makes it just hard to participate in this stuff.
link |
00:27:47.980
So I think like reducing the number of intermediaries
link |
00:27:50.380
is definitely normally a good thing.
link |
00:27:54.740
All right, let's talk about one of the most exciting
link |
00:27:58.060
technologies like technically, philosophically,
link |
00:28:01.820
like socially, financially in every way,
link |
00:28:05.100
which is Ethereum 2.0.
link |
00:28:07.660
There's a million things to talk about,
link |
00:28:10.460
but step one is probably a good thing to do,
link |
00:28:14.020
which is can you briefly summarize your vision
link |
00:28:17.620
how Ethereum 2.0 will make Ethereum more scalable,
link |
00:28:21.020
secure and sustainable?
link |
00:28:23.300
Sure, so I think recently we've actually been
link |
00:28:27.140
kind of deemphasizing the ETH 2.0 branding, I guess.
link |
00:28:30.660
So the reason behind that was that originally
link |
00:28:33.620
we envisioned something more like a big grand event
link |
00:28:37.100
where all the good things would happen at the same time
link |
00:28:39.900
and it would be a new blockchain,
link |
00:28:41.860
and it would be a new protocol
link |
00:28:43.140
and people would have to take a lot of effort
link |
00:28:45.260
to migrate over.
link |
00:28:46.460
But later we've slowly changed the roadmap
link |
00:28:50.340
over to something that's much more incremental, right?
link |
00:28:53.220
So proof of stake happens kind of over time
link |
00:28:56.060
and then sharding gets added over time
link |
00:28:57.540
and all of these features get added over time.
link |
00:28:59.340
And so the experience for just a regular Ethereum user
link |
00:29:02.660
still feels very seamless, right?
link |
00:29:04.540
It's like maybe a little bit more complex
link |
00:29:06.700
than the hard forks that we've already done
link |
00:29:09.420
from a user's point of view, but not by that much, right?
link |
00:29:13.140
So the big two things that are happening, right?
link |
00:29:17.900
These are what used to be considered
link |
00:29:19.860
the two flagship features of ETH 2.0
link |
00:29:21.860
and now they're just the flagship features
link |
00:29:23.980
of the next devolution of Ethereum,
link |
00:29:27.780
as proof of stake and sharding.
link |
00:29:31.340
So proof of stake is a consensus algorithm.
link |
00:29:34.180
It's a, or a consensus mechanism, I should say.
link |
00:29:38.140
The difference is that like an algorithm
link |
00:29:40.380
is something that you run by yourself.
link |
00:29:41.820
A mechanism is like interactions between people
link |
00:29:45.500
and it could even include incentives and all of that.
link |
00:29:48.140
So a consensus mechanism,
link |
00:29:52.180
so by which nodes in the network agree on
link |
00:29:56.500
which blocks came in, which transactions came in,
link |
00:29:58.580
what order, make sure that once a block gets accepted,
link |
00:30:01.900
it can't get reverted and all of these things
link |
00:30:04.220
that we expect from a blockchain.
link |
00:30:06.220
So existing blockchains, including Bitcoin,
link |
00:30:08.860
including the Ethereum of today,
link |
00:30:10.340
and including a lot of them, they use proof of work, right?
link |
00:30:13.540
So the reason why we need proof of anything
link |
00:30:17.860
is because they serve this function that I call
link |
00:30:22.700
an economic civil resistance.
link |
00:30:25.420
So that's obviously a big word for,
link |
00:30:28.660
especially if you've never heard of symbols before,
link |
00:30:30.980
but like the basic idea is, right,
link |
00:30:32.540
that you have a network and you have lots of computers
link |
00:30:34.580
that agree on like which blocks to accept.
link |
00:30:36.900
And sometimes you get two blocks that get published
link |
00:30:39.340
at the same time and you just have to agree on an order.
link |
00:30:41.420
So there has to be some kind of voting game.
link |
00:30:44.220
But then the question is, well, in this voting game,
link |
00:30:46.820
who gets to vote, who gets to participate?
link |
00:30:49.380
Now, you can't say one person, one vote, right?
link |
00:30:52.140
The reason why you cannot say one person, one vote
link |
00:30:54.100
is because you need some kind of like authority
link |
00:30:57.060
or some kind of mechanism to say who the humans are.
link |
00:31:00.900
And if you don't have that,
link |
00:31:02.940
then a bad guy could just come in with a virtual machine
link |
00:31:05.900
or with a computer that has on it 10 billion virtual machines
link |
00:31:08.980
that have 10 billion virtual nodes.
link |
00:31:11.100
And then just like say, look, I'm 99% of the network,
link |
00:31:13.860
I should control everything.
link |
00:31:15.780
So to prevent this, what proof of work and proof of stake
link |
00:31:19.620
both do is they basically say, well, the weight of your vote,
link |
00:31:23.180
like how much influence your votes have in the consensus
link |
00:31:27.540
is proportional to like what quantity
link |
00:31:29.980
of economic resources you bring in.
link |
00:31:31.780
So in the case of proof of work,
link |
00:31:33.380
you prove what economic resources you have
link |
00:31:35.340
because your economic resources are computers
link |
00:31:37.460
and you prove that you have them
link |
00:31:38.780
by just running them 24 seven
link |
00:31:40.420
using these hash algorithms, right?
link |
00:31:42.740
So this does solve the problem, right?
link |
00:31:45.020
Because in order to attack the network,
link |
00:31:47.300
you have to come in with more computers
link |
00:31:50.180
and more money invested into computers and electricity
link |
00:31:53.300
than the rest of the network puts together.
link |
00:31:55.460
And that's extremely expensive.
link |
00:31:57.380
In proof of stake, instead of relying on people
link |
00:32:00.420
with computers that are just constantly cranking out
link |
00:32:03.060
hashes 24 seven, as you're like a unit of economic resources,
link |
00:32:08.780
you just use like holdings of coins inside the system, right?
link |
00:32:11.700
So all of these blockchains,
link |
00:32:12.780
they have some kind of coin in them.
link |
00:32:14.460
Bitcoin has Bitcoin, Ethereum has ether,
link |
00:32:17.380
they all have a coin.
link |
00:32:18.260
So why not just use that as the economic resource
link |
00:32:22.940
that you're using to measure participation.
link |
00:32:25.860
So that's like the core distinction
link |
00:32:29.220
between proof of work and proof of stake.
link |
00:32:31.900
I like proof of stake
link |
00:32:32.940
and I've liked proof of stake for many years,
link |
00:32:35.380
basically because like it just requires
link |
00:32:38.260
much less ongoing resource consumption, right?
link |
00:32:41.260
Like with proof of work,
link |
00:32:42.820
you have to like actually go and buy these physical computers
link |
00:32:45.700
and these days, they have specialized hardware,
link |
00:32:49.180
ASICs, application specific integrated circuits.
link |
00:32:51.940
You have to go produce them and you have to go buy them.
link |
00:32:54.140
And unless you have millions of dollars,
link |
00:32:56.660
you have to buy them from one of these other people
link |
00:32:58.500
who creates them and those other people often end up
link |
00:33:01.300
taking a huge cut of the profits themselves.
link |
00:33:03.660
And then you have to plug them in,
link |
00:33:06.860
you have to just burn all of this electricity
link |
00:33:09.820
that's just running 24 seven.
link |
00:33:11.820
So it consumes a huge amount of energy, right?
link |
00:33:14.300
And not just energy, it also,
link |
00:33:17.060
just to create the hardware, right?
link |
00:33:19.060
Like people focus a lot on energy,
link |
00:33:20.620
but like actually about half the cost of proof of work
link |
00:33:23.500
mining is the cost of the hardware.
link |
00:33:25.380
So hardware is a very big deal too.
link |
00:33:28.060
And you need this really big and powerful,
link |
00:33:32.060
very specialized hardware,
link |
00:33:33.340
another kind that fills up these big warehouses.
link |
00:33:35.620
So proof of stake,
link |
00:33:36.620
you don't really need that much electricity,
link |
00:33:38.980
you just need just a little bit to run a regular computer.
link |
00:33:42.980
You can run proof of stake validators on computers
link |
00:33:45.340
that you already have.
link |
00:33:47.220
So it's just much less resource intensive.
link |
00:33:52.100
And like, this is good for a few reasons, right?
link |
00:33:53.900
Like one is, you know,
link |
00:33:55.020
the kind of environmental rationale that, you know,
link |
00:33:57.380
you're not breaking the environment.
link |
00:33:59.500
The second is that you're not taking away electricity
link |
00:34:03.540
and like other resources from other people.
link |
00:34:06.060
I mean, like right now there's,
link |
00:34:07.860
I think just today I saw a story about like Iran
link |
00:34:10.620
wanting to shut down some Bitcoin mining
link |
00:34:12.580
because it was just grabbing up so much electricity
link |
00:34:15.220
that it was, you know, outbidding the nearby towns
link |
00:34:17.300
and they just didn't have enough.
link |
00:34:19.740
And then there was like Chia,
link |
00:34:22.140
the one that's doing proof of like hard disk mining
link |
00:34:24.700
basically is just like grabbing up so many hard disks,
link |
00:34:27.060
there's a shortage, right?
link |
00:34:28.940
So that's the second reason.
link |
00:34:29.900
And then the third more selfish reason is that
link |
00:34:32.540
because participating in consensus
link |
00:34:34.660
does not require so much energy expenditure,
link |
00:34:37.580
you don't need to pay people as much to participate, right?
link |
00:34:40.660
So like Bitcoin and Ethereum,
link |
00:34:42.100
they both issue somewhere around 4% of the total supply
link |
00:34:46.300
every year right now to miners.
link |
00:34:48.420
So Ethereum is about 4.7 million ether
link |
00:34:50.820
and the current supply is about 115 million.
link |
00:34:53.500
But with proof of stake,
link |
00:34:54.460
like we expect it'll be somewhere between 500,000
link |
00:34:58.380
and one million per year.
link |
00:35:00.260
So that means, you know,
link |
00:35:02.900
the supply doesn't have to increase so quickly.
link |
00:35:06.860
So.
link |
00:35:07.700
One of the pros that the people sort of argue for the proof
link |
00:35:12.340
of work is that it is secure
link |
00:35:14.820
because it's much more difficult to sort of,
link |
00:35:17.820
as you've highlighted, it's difficult to participate.
link |
00:35:19.980
Is there, what are your thoughts about the security
link |
00:35:25.180
of the proof of stake mechanism?
link |
00:35:28.980
Is there ways to make it secure?
link |
00:35:30.700
So I think proof of stake is very secure
link |
00:35:32.660
because in order to be able to attack the system,
link |
00:35:36.540
you needs to have like basically as much stake
link |
00:35:39.220
as the rest of the network, right?
link |
00:35:41.220
So that means like right now, for example,
link |
00:35:43.100
we have 5 million eth staking.
link |
00:35:44.620
So you have to come up with 5 million eth
link |
00:35:46.260
and then join the network.
link |
00:35:47.620
And then the other, so 5 million eth is a lot, right?
link |
00:35:51.980
It's like, how much is it now?
link |
00:35:53.700
Like $15 billion.
link |
00:35:55.220
So that's actually more than I believe the cost
link |
00:35:58.260
of attacking the Bitcoin network.
link |
00:36:00.420
And then the second thing is that recovering
link |
00:36:03.020
from attacks is much easier in proof of stake
link |
00:36:04.980
than in proof of work, right?
link |
00:36:05.940
Because in proof of stake, you have, like, first of all,
link |
00:36:08.980
we have for many kinds of attacks
link |
00:36:10.660
that you do against this network,
link |
00:36:12.140
we have this concept of like automatic slashing, right?
link |
00:36:14.660
Which basically means that in order
link |
00:36:16.700
to like revert a finalized block,
link |
00:36:19.340
so if there's one block that's like accepted by the network
link |
00:36:22.180
and you try to convince the network
link |
00:36:23.940
to kind of revert that block and accept a different block,
link |
00:36:26.940
in order to make that kind of attack,
link |
00:36:28.820
you basically have to have your validator,
link |
00:36:31.940
like a big portion of your validator
link |
00:36:33.540
assigned to conflicting messages.
link |
00:36:35.980
And this is something that like once these messages
link |
00:36:38.380
are on the network, like you can go and prove,
link |
00:36:39.940
like, look, these people did it.
link |
00:36:41.340
And so we have this feature in the protocol called slashing
link |
00:36:43.940
where you basically take all these people
link |
00:36:45.820
who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins, right?
link |
00:36:48.780
And you don't burn anyone else's coins.
link |
00:36:50.780
Now, there are other cases, like for example,
link |
00:36:53.660
if instead of reverting blocks,
link |
00:36:55.500
the attack just tries to censor everyone, right?
link |
00:36:57.740
Then everyone who got censored would just like
link |
00:37:01.020
basically create the minority chain
link |
00:37:02.980
and then the community would basically
link |
00:37:05.340
have to do a soft fork, right?
link |
00:37:06.500
They would just have to say like,
link |
00:37:07.460
look, this chain is clearly attacking us,
link |
00:37:09.060
this chain is the one not attacking us,
link |
00:37:10.780
and so we're gonna join this chain.
link |
00:37:12.340
And then what happens is that on that new chain,
link |
00:37:15.140
the attackers also lose a lot of coins, right?
link |
00:37:17.580
So the difference between proof of stake and proof of work
link |
00:37:20.660
is that in a proof of stake system,
link |
00:37:22.260
like you can identify specific participants
link |
00:37:24.660
and you can say, you know, these,
link |
00:37:26.540
and like this isn't like, you know,
link |
00:37:27.980
a human going in and saying, I don't like you,
link |
00:37:29.620
I don't like you, I don't like you,
link |
00:37:30.580
this is like automated, right?
link |
00:37:32.300
So the slashing process is automated.
link |
00:37:34.660
Yes.
link |
00:37:35.500
Is there ways it can go wrong?
link |
00:37:37.420
So that's a painful process where the coins are burned.
link |
00:37:41.300
It is painful, yes.
link |
00:37:42.540
I think, I mean, the one big unknown, of course,
link |
00:37:45.940
is like if an attack actually happens
link |
00:37:48.540
and like if an attack happens that requires the community
link |
00:37:51.340
to actually choose one of these minority forks,
link |
00:37:53.780
then like what would the community
link |
00:37:57.120
actually successfully coordinating on this look like, right?
link |
00:37:59.980
Like it's like, you know, we can talk about it
link |
00:38:03.220
and we can, you know, write like science fiction novels
link |
00:38:05.940
about it, but like until it's happened,
link |
00:38:07.900
you don't really know the details of like what it looks like
link |
00:38:09.980
and how difficult it is.
link |
00:38:11.020
What are the channels of communication for the community?
link |
00:38:13.540
If you can enlighten me a little bit, like what, you know,
link |
00:38:18.020
in many ways in the political realm,
link |
00:38:19.980
Twitter is often used as a way to kind of have
link |
00:38:22.540
these emerging phenomena of large groups of people
link |
00:38:25.400
coming to a consensus about a particular idea.
link |
00:38:28.300
And then there's battle for consensus.
link |
00:38:30.340
What's in the Ethereum community, how do people,
link |
00:38:35.140
what are the sources of natural language based communication
link |
00:38:39.380
that have an emergent belief structure that you would say?
link |
00:38:43.940
Or is it all through money?
link |
00:38:45.340
Is it all through trading that the communication happens?
link |
00:38:48.100
There's definitely talking as well.
link |
00:38:50.140
I mean, like we have to agree on protocol changes somehow,
link |
00:38:53.420
right, like there's Twitter, there's Reddit,
link |
00:38:55.380
there's GitHub, there's all of the various Ethereum forums,
link |
00:39:00.500
Ethereum magicians, Ethereum research.
link |
00:39:02.780
There's just in person communication.
link |
00:39:05.020
Then there's just kind of like the hidden web
link |
00:39:06.860
of everyone talking to everyone on Telegram or Signal.
link |
00:39:11.220
So it's like some of everything, right?
link |
00:39:14.020
But I think like the thing to emphasize around like,
link |
00:39:17.540
can you actually come to consensus on, you know,
link |
00:39:19.660
whether or not to fork the chain
link |
00:39:21.500
because the attacker is censoring everyone,
link |
00:39:23.520
just for example, is like everyone who's running a node
link |
00:39:27.820
is going to see almost the same thing, right?
link |
00:39:30.380
Like they're gonna be off by a few seconds
link |
00:39:32.440
and like maybe they'll be off by a few minutes,
link |
00:39:34.140
they'll disagree by a few minutes.
link |
00:39:35.460
But like if it's a serious attack, you know,
link |
00:39:37.680
people are gonna know, right?
link |
00:39:38.780
It's not like one of those things where, you know,
link |
00:39:40.900
oh, we're trying to agree on like, I don't know,
link |
00:39:43.900
did Epstein kill himself or like some random political fact
link |
00:39:48.100
where like in reality, no one knows a single thing
link |
00:39:50.060
about what's actually going on and they're all speculating.
link |
00:39:52.580
Like it is much more visible, right?
link |
00:39:54.340
So we do have that, but you know, at the same time,
link |
00:39:57.300
I'm happy to admit that like,
link |
00:39:59.160
these are fairly untested mechanisms,
link |
00:40:02.080
but like at the same time,
link |
00:40:03.340
they're also untested mechanisms in Proof of Work, right?
link |
00:40:05.820
And like in Proof of Work, it's even harder
link |
00:40:07.460
because in Proof of Work, you don't have the ability
link |
00:40:09.940
to like identify and say, like, you know,
link |
00:40:12.260
I'm going to these miners attacked
link |
00:40:14.300
and so we're not gonna let these miners in,
link |
00:40:17.180
these miners did not attack, so we're gonna keep them in.
link |
00:40:20.220
Like you have to pretty much, you know,
link |
00:40:21.500
either take out none of the miners
link |
00:40:23.740
or you do a fork that changes the Proof of Work algorithm
link |
00:40:26.460
which takes out all of the miners, right?
link |
00:40:28.020
So the economics of like recovering from attacks
link |
00:40:32.140
in Proof of Work, at least to me,
link |
00:40:33.540
actually do seem like more unfavorable,
link |
00:40:36.960
but you know, I'm sure the Proof of Work people you talk to
link |
00:40:39.740
will give a very different and contradictory opinions
link |
00:40:42.460
and that's totally fine and amazing.
link |
00:40:44.620
Some people describe MEV, minor extractable value,
link |
00:40:48.740
as an existential risk to Ethereum.
link |
00:40:51.680
What is MEV?
link |
00:40:52.820
How important is it to solve MEV?
link |
00:40:55.020
If it's important, what ideas do you have?
link |
00:40:57.180
Sure, how about after this one,
link |
00:40:58.760
we'll also talk about sharding because it's amazing
link |
00:41:01.060
and it's part of you too.
link |
00:41:01.900
Yes, we'll return back to sharding
link |
00:41:03.660
which is, we'll return to the big picture
link |
00:41:06.060
of the scaling problem as you mentioned.
link |
00:41:07.980
I love this conversation, you know,
link |
00:41:09.740
depth first search instead of breadth first.
link |
00:41:11.740
So basically, okay, MEV, minor extractable value,
link |
00:41:16.740
it is not different in Proof of Work and Proof of Stake,
link |
00:41:19.160
right, so like if you want to call it, you know,
link |
00:41:21.120
block proposer extractable value,
link |
00:41:22.880
like it sounds a lot sexy, but you know,
link |
00:41:24.280
we can call it BPEV instead of MEV, who cares?
link |
00:41:27.360
So this is a problem in both Proof of Work
link |
00:41:30.040
and Proof of Stake?
link |
00:41:30.880
Yes, so the basic idea is that if you have the ability
link |
00:41:36.960
to choose which transactions go into a block
link |
00:41:39.800
and in what order, then you have the ability
link |
00:41:42.720
to like take advantage of that position for economic gain
link |
00:41:45.720
and for economic gain in a lot more ways
link |
00:41:48.000
than just collecting transaction fees, right?
link |
00:41:50.080
Like for example, there's decentralized exchanges on chain
link |
00:41:52.880
like Uniswap and like let's say the price
link |
00:41:56.020
of ETH versus USDC was 2,700 the previous block,
link |
00:42:01.960
but then there was a bit of a market drop
link |
00:42:03.480
and now it's 2,680 where you can go on Uniswap
link |
00:42:05.960
and you can just like gobble up the entire part of,
link |
00:42:09.060
you know, the automated order book
link |
00:42:10.960
that's like between 2,700 and 2,680, right?
link |
00:42:13.520
And that's, and then at the same time, you like run a bot
link |
00:42:16.640
and you know, you buy some ETH back at 2,680
link |
00:42:19.480
and you've just like made about $10 of profit, right?
link |
00:42:21.760
So, or well, $10 times, you know, whatever the depth is.
link |
00:42:25.120
Right, so there's lots of little things like that.
link |
00:42:28.520
There's also things that involve like front running
link |
00:42:31.560
other people's transactions.
link |
00:42:33.240
So one example of this would be that if someone sends
link |
00:42:37.060
a transaction that says, I don't know,
link |
00:42:39.920
buy me five ETH for whatever price that you can get,
link |
00:42:45.760
then, but with a maximum of, let's say $15,000,
link |
00:42:50.920
then you can go and like, you can send each,
link |
00:42:53.680
put a transaction right in front of that transaction
link |
00:42:55.800
and you can like buy up that ETH first
link |
00:42:57.600
and then you resell it to him at, you know,
link |
00:42:59.120
$15,000 minus one, you know?
link |
00:43:00.920
So there's.
link |
00:43:02.480
Then you get to make a little bit of money that way.
link |
00:43:03.880
Exactly, so there's a lot of these different
link |
00:43:05.600
like arbitrage, front running, back running,
link |
00:43:07.360
these different tricks that allow block proposers to.
link |
00:43:11.120
To get some percentage on top, like overhead.
link |
00:43:13.560
Exactly, and the reason why this is a challenge
link |
00:43:17.480
is because it's, I mean, like first of all,
link |
00:43:21.680
it sometimes degrades user experience
link |
00:43:24.340
because users get no less favorable trades,
link |
00:43:27.440
but there are sometimes ways to like mitigate that
link |
00:43:30.560
for applications, sometimes it's not that bad,
link |
00:43:32.960
but like the bigger risk that I think some people consider
link |
00:43:35.800
more existential is that there's just much more
link |
00:43:38.960
economies of scale in figuring out
link |
00:43:41.080
how to extract all this revenue, right?
link |
00:43:43.020
Because if you're just collecting transaction fees,
link |
00:43:45.200
there aren't really economies of scale,
link |
00:43:47.400
there aren't really benefits to centralizing, right?
link |
00:43:49.240
Because it's a very simple formula,
link |
00:43:50.600
you just like grab up the transactions that pay you the most.
link |
00:43:53.320
But with MEV, there's all these sophisticated algorithms
link |
00:43:57.760
and if you have lots of money,
link |
00:43:59.940
then you can hire really smart people
link |
00:44:01.400
to make amazing algorithms and then you can use
link |
00:44:03.160
the other half of your money to get a lot of mining power
link |
00:44:06.080
or a lot of stake and you get a lot of opportunities
link |
00:44:08.160
to use your even better algorithms.
link |
00:44:09.940
So there's this risk that like as a result of this,
link |
00:44:14.480
mining is basically, or even validating proof of stake
link |
00:44:18.600
is going to centralize.
link |
00:44:20.860
So I think the ecosystem is best replied
link |
00:44:23.920
to this sort of risk and it's the direction
link |
00:44:25.840
where projects like Flashbots are going already
link |
00:44:28.880
is if you can't eliminate the centralization,
link |
00:44:33.500
then you try to firewall it, right?
link |
00:44:35.200
And the way that you firewall it is you basically say,
link |
00:44:39.080
we're going to try to deliberately create a marketplace
link |
00:44:42.000
where people can just do the complicated work
link |
00:44:45.320
of creating what are called bundles,
link |
00:44:47.080
like bundles of transactions that are very profitable, right?
link |
00:44:51.880
And then at the other side of the market,
link |
00:44:54.200
you just have like block proposes reminders
link |
00:44:56.600
that are just dumb notes.
link |
00:44:57.760
And they go and ask the what are called searchers,
link |
00:45:00.840
the bundle creators, and they just ask like,
link |
00:45:02.800
hey, like how much can you give me if I put in your bundle?
link |
00:45:05.560
And then they just take the highest offer, right?
link |
00:45:07.560
So you sort of separate out the task
link |
00:45:09.360
and you have the easy part and then you have the hard part
link |
00:45:12.640
and you have like this special class of actor
link |
00:45:14.580
called a searcher that does the hard part
link |
00:45:16.080
and then the easy part, the people doing the easy part,
link |
00:45:19.440
which is just miners and validators,
link |
00:45:20.720
they kind of just talk to all the different people
link |
00:45:24.540
doing the searching and they just accept the highest bidder.
link |
00:45:27.720
So this is also just like an interesting example
link |
00:45:33.160
of like economic design philosophy, right?
link |
00:45:35.240
Like sometimes you can't just like make centralization
link |
00:45:38.320
go away, sometimes it's inevitable,
link |
00:45:39.860
but no, at least you can try to kind of contain it,
link |
00:45:43.200
you can direct it or you can even sort of firewall it away
link |
00:45:47.340
from core consensus,
link |
00:45:49.280
the parts that really do need to be decentralized.
link |
00:45:51.960
But you don't see it as an existential risk,
link |
00:45:53.760
it's just a bit of a problem
link |
00:45:56.280
that it has to be constantly dealt with.
link |
00:45:57.960
It's a risk, like there's obviously a risk
link |
00:46:00.960
that it's a very severe problem
link |
00:46:04.080
and that even this flash bots approach
link |
00:46:06.040
has some fatal flaw or whatever.
link |
00:46:08.120
But we're definitely approaching it
link |
00:46:12.080
with the mindset of this is a problem
link |
00:46:14.340
and like, yes, we do have to do some work to solve it,
link |
00:46:16.400
but we're doing it and so far it's being solved.
link |
00:46:20.220
Okay, let's talk about the other really, really fascinating
link |
00:46:23.360
part of the future of Ethereum.
link |
00:46:26.720
Let's not call it Ethereum 2.0,
link |
00:46:28.880
but the future of Ethereum
link |
00:46:30.440
that also may require a hard fork,
link |
00:46:32.580
I don't know, you can correct me on this,
link |
00:46:34.920
is well, broadly ideas for scaling.
link |
00:46:39.640
Yes.
link |
00:46:40.480
And more specifically sort of layer two
link |
00:46:44.000
or layer one and two intersection ideas
link |
00:46:48.440
of how to achieve scaling.
link |
00:46:50.000
And at the core of that is the idea of sharding.
link |
00:46:52.680
So first, what is sharding?
link |
00:46:55.240
Okay, so there's two major paradigms
link |
00:46:59.720
for scaling blockchains, right?
link |
00:47:01.000
As you said, layer one and layer two.
link |
00:47:03.000
And layer one basically means
link |
00:47:05.160
make the blockchain itself capable
link |
00:47:07.940
of processing more transactions
link |
00:47:09.840
by having some mechanism by which it can do that
link |
00:47:13.600
despite the fact that there's a limit
link |
00:47:15.600
to the capacity of each participant in the blockchain.
link |
00:47:18.040
And then layer two says,
link |
00:47:19.080
well, we're gonna keep the blockchain as is,
link |
00:47:21.300
but we're gonna create clever protocols
link |
00:47:23.840
that sit on top of the blockchain
link |
00:47:25.500
that still use the blockchain
link |
00:47:26.920
and then still kind of inherit things
link |
00:47:28.720
like the security guarantees of a blockchain.
link |
00:47:31.000
But at the same time, a lot of things are done off chain.
link |
00:47:33.840
And so you get more scalability that way.
link |
00:47:36.660
So in Ethereum, the most popular paradigm
link |
00:47:39.720
for layer two is rollups
link |
00:47:40.920
and the most popular paradigm for layer one is sharding.
link |
00:47:43.280
So one way to achieve layer one scaling
link |
00:47:46.240
is to increase the block size.
link |
00:47:48.080
Yes.
link |
00:47:48.920
Block size wars, quote, unquote.
link |
00:47:51.880
And you actually tweeted something about,
link |
00:47:55.800
people are saying that Vitalik changed his mind about,
link |
00:47:58.520
he went from being a small blocker to a big to small.
link |
00:48:05.880
But you said, I've been a medium blocker all along.
link |
00:48:09.320
So maybe you can also comment on where,
link |
00:48:11.760
on the very basic aspect before we even get to sharding
link |
00:48:14.840
of where you stand on this block size debate.
link |
00:48:17.400
Sure.
link |
00:48:18.240
So the way that I think about the trade off
link |
00:48:20.080
is I think about it as a trade off
link |
00:48:21.580
between making it easy to write to the blockchain
link |
00:48:24.200
and making it easy to read the blockchain.
link |
00:48:26.440
So when I say read, I just mean,
link |
00:48:28.480
have a node and actually verify it
link |
00:48:30.160
and make sure that it's correct and all of those things.
link |
00:48:32.280
And then by write, I mean send transactions.
link |
00:48:34.680
So I think for decentralization,
link |
00:48:37.240
it's important for both of these tasks to be accessible.
link |
00:48:40.220
And I think that they're about equally importance.
link |
00:48:43.040
If you have a chain that's too expensive to read,
link |
00:48:45.120
then everyone will just trust a few people
link |
00:48:46.800
to read for them.
link |
00:48:48.360
And then those people can change the rules
link |
00:48:49.920
without anyone else's permission.
link |
00:48:51.680
But if on the other hand,
link |
00:48:53.360
it becomes really expensive to write,
link |
00:48:55.200
then everyone will move on to basically
link |
00:48:58.680
second layer systems that are incredibly centralized.
link |
00:49:01.640
And that takes away from decentralization
link |
00:49:04.660
and self sovereignty as well.
link |
00:49:06.380
So this has been my viewpoints
link |
00:49:08.280
pretty much the whole time, right?
link |
00:49:09.440
It's like, you need this balance
link |
00:49:11.000
and going in one direction or the other direction
link |
00:49:12.760
is very unhealthy.
link |
00:49:14.340
In the Bitcoin case, basically what happened
link |
00:49:16.680
was that Bitcoin originally,
link |
00:49:19.720
at the very beginning, it didn't really have a block size.
link |
00:49:22.100
It just had an accidental block size of 32 meg,
link |
00:49:25.040
or block size limit of 32 megabytes
link |
00:49:27.200
because that just happens to be the limit
link |
00:49:29.360
of the peer to peer messages.
link |
00:49:31.360
But then...
link |
00:49:32.200
Interesting, I didn't even know that part.
link |
00:49:33.580
Yeah, but then Satoshi back in 2010
link |
00:49:36.800
was worried that even 32 megabyte blocks
link |
00:49:38.760
would be too hard to process.
link |
00:49:39.880
So he put the limit down to one megabyte.
link |
00:49:42.600
And I think the...
link |
00:49:44.920
I put, you mean sneaked in there.
link |
00:49:47.240
Yeah, just like made an update to the Bitcoin software
link |
00:49:49.960
that made blocks bigger than one,
link |
00:49:51.480
I think it's a million bytes invalid.
link |
00:49:54.240
And I think the impression that most people had at the time
link |
00:49:58.420
is that this is just a temporary safety measure.
link |
00:50:01.380
And over time, as we become more confident in the software,
link |
00:50:05.880
that limit would be raised somewhat.
link |
00:50:10.760
But then when the actual usage of the blockchain
link |
00:50:16.320
started going up, and then it started going up
link |
00:50:19.000
first to 100 kilobytes per block,
link |
00:50:21.200
then to 250 kilobytes per block,
link |
00:50:22.640
then to 500 kilobytes per block,
link |
00:50:25.080
there started coming out of the woodworks this opinion
link |
00:50:28.480
that no, that limit should just not be increased.
link |
00:50:31.120
And then there are all of these attempts at compromising.
link |
00:50:36.120
First, there was a proposal for 20 megabyte blocks.
link |
00:50:40.960
Then there was the 248 proposal,
link |
00:50:43.120
which is a bit ironic because the 248 proposal
link |
00:50:46.180
started off being a small block negotiating position.
link |
00:50:49.480
But then when the big block people came back and said,
link |
00:50:52.040
hey, aren't we gonna do this?
link |
00:50:53.680
They're like, oh, no, no, no, we don't want them.
link |
00:50:55.040
We don't want the block size increases anymore.
link |
00:50:57.920
So there were these two different positions,
link |
00:51:01.600
the small blockers.
link |
00:51:02.680
I think they valued one megabyte blocks for two reasons.
link |
00:51:06.080
One is that they just really, really believe
link |
00:51:08.360
in the importance of being able to read the chain.
link |
00:51:10.980
But two is that a lot of them really believe
link |
00:51:14.360
in maintaining this norm of never hard forking, right?
link |
00:51:18.560
So the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork
link |
00:51:21.200
is basically that in a soft fork,
link |
00:51:26.360
any block that's valid under the new rules
link |
00:51:28.240
was still valid under the old rules.
link |
00:51:30.040
So if you have a client that verifies
link |
00:51:31.740
according to the old rules,
link |
00:51:33.000
then you'll still be able to accept the chain
link |
00:51:35.440
that follows the new rules.
link |
00:51:37.360
Whereas with a hard fork,
link |
00:51:38.720
you have to update your code in order to stay on the chain.
link |
00:51:43.160
And look, they have this belief that soft forks
link |
00:51:48.080
are kind of either less coercive than hard forks,
link |
00:51:51.040
which by the way, I completely disagree with.
link |
00:51:53.400
I actually think soft forks are more coercive
link |
00:51:55.320
because basically they force everyone who disagrees
link |
00:51:57.720
to sort of go along by default.
link |
00:51:59.320
But, or they have this opinion that there's like,
link |
00:52:06.760
it's more difficult to abuse soft forks
link |
00:52:09.680
to do really mean things like,
link |
00:52:11.040
or that like completely violate people's expectations,
link |
00:52:13.560
like increasing the supply, which is like,
link |
00:52:16.240
I think there is some truth to that.
link |
00:52:18.840
So because of these reasons,
link |
00:52:20.560
they just say we're only going to do soft forks
link |
00:52:22.440
and we want to just not do any hard forks.
link |
00:52:25.500
And they eventually discovered this idea
link |
00:52:27.880
called segregated witness that allows for like
link |
00:52:29.720
a very tiny block size increase
link |
00:52:31.880
to like the equivalent of about two megabytes
link |
00:52:34.880
with a soft fork.
link |
00:52:36.160
It's this really like weird and devious trick.
link |
00:52:41.840
Like basically what they do is they take the signatures
link |
00:52:45.080
of transactions and then they put them outside of the block.
link |
00:52:48.160
And then they add an extra rule that says that like every,
link |
00:52:51.240
for a block to be valid,
link |
00:52:52.400
the block has to come with a separate,
link |
00:52:54.440
like basically extension block
link |
00:52:56.000
that contains all of the transaction signatures, right?
link |
00:52:58.840
So when you measure it, according to the old rules,
link |
00:53:01.140
like, hey, it adds up to less than a million,
link |
00:53:02.840
but actually there's this extension block
link |
00:53:04.500
that the old protocol doesn't even know about.
link |
00:53:06.960
So.
link |
00:53:07.800
It's a hack that seemed to work to in a small way
link |
00:53:10.600
extend the size of the block size.
link |
00:53:12.200
So the small block side was like happy
link |
00:53:14.560
with these very low levels of block size.
link |
00:53:16.120
And then the big block side wanted to expand to,
link |
00:53:19.360
at the very least go to four megabytes,
link |
00:53:21.080
then maybe go maybe eight, 20.
link |
00:53:23.280
There's disagreements within there as well.
link |
00:53:26.520
I definitely was favoring the big side
link |
00:53:29.960
the whole way through, as you can probably tell, but.
link |
00:53:33.960
Even though, so the argument against the big
link |
00:53:36.960
is that it makes things more centralized.
link |
00:53:40.920
Yes, because fewer people can run a note
link |
00:53:43.080
that verifies the chain.
link |
00:53:44.280
And also because any of these things
link |
00:53:46.200
would require a hard fork
link |
00:53:47.320
and hard forks are inherently risky.
link |
00:53:49.320
Do you think there's truth to that?
link |
00:53:51.800
I'm pro hard fork.
link |
00:53:52.760
I think hard forks are actually like
link |
00:53:54.720
in a political economic sense,
link |
00:53:57.440
they're better than soft forks.
link |
00:53:59.240
Well, let's, okay, okay.
link |
00:54:00.760
I think that's a beautiful principle as stated
link |
00:54:05.020
that soft forks may be more coercive than hard forks.
link |
00:54:10.680
This is not just about cryptocurrency.
link |
00:54:13.040
This is about politics and life.
link |
00:54:16.280
That's fascinating.
link |
00:54:17.100
So you're okay with hard forks.
link |
00:54:20.320
In fact, you think hard forks is the right way
link |
00:54:23.480
to make changes because then everybody's forced
link |
00:54:26.320
to make a decision.
link |
00:54:27.720
Do you accept this change or not
link |
00:54:29.100
as opposed to ideas being sneaked in behind the door
link |
00:54:32.480
and that decision is forced on you?
link |
00:54:34.840
Exactly, yeah.
link |
00:54:36.140
Okay, so, but hard forks, some people say,
link |
00:54:39.760
this is when they talk about sort of Ethereum,
link |
00:54:42.240
is there's some aspect to a hard fork
link |
00:54:44.120
where you're trying to upgrade a,
link |
00:54:46.860
what is it, airplane while it's flying.
link |
00:54:49.440
And.
link |
00:54:50.760
I think soft forks are also upgrading an airplane
link |
00:54:52.800
while it's flying.
link |
00:54:53.640
But it's a smaller upgrades.
link |
00:54:56.200
That's, there's some truth to that.
link |
00:54:58.680
Like there's definitely a bit more risk of like a split
link |
00:55:03.920
as a result of a hard fork than as a result of a soft fork.
link |
00:55:07.200
And the split is highly undesirable, right?
link |
00:55:10.620
Well, it depends.
link |
00:55:11.460
Like if it's a split because of a bug, then that's horrible.
link |
00:55:14.160
If it's a split as a result of political differences,
link |
00:55:16.680
then I think like a split is better than, you know,
link |
00:55:19.760
one side being forced to basically just like suck it up
link |
00:55:23.240
and accept the majority position even if it really hates it.
link |
00:55:27.200
Well, there's also political connections
link |
00:55:28.800
throughout the history of the United States.
link |
00:55:30.400
It's like sometimes groups of people
link |
00:55:33.120
that strongly disagree with each other
link |
00:55:35.680
should be forced to work it out.
link |
00:55:38.840
Even if they, even when a split seems like an easy thing
link |
00:55:41.560
in the short term.
link |
00:55:42.640
It depends.
link |
00:55:43.480
And I think like, well, for blockchains in particular,
link |
00:55:46.000
the costs of people being able to like peacefully do their,
link |
00:55:50.080
go off and do their own thing are much lower, right?
link |
00:55:52.280
Like, you know, okay, if you have a country
link |
00:55:54.240
and you have two groups, then like often enough,
link |
00:55:58.400
like fighting out the new rules requires, you know,
link |
00:56:01.160
a civil war requires everyone to move and so forth.
link |
00:56:03.120
But no, on a blockchain, like, you know,
link |
00:56:05.040
the costs are lower and so.
link |
00:56:07.640
So if you were to look at the way things worked out
link |
00:56:09.880
with the block size wars and there was a split,
link |
00:56:13.000
what is it, Bitcoin Cash and all this?
link |
00:56:15.560
In Bitcoin.
link |
00:56:16.380
Yeah.
link |
00:56:17.220
Would you, like you looking, putting on your historian hat,
link |
00:56:21.640
you mentioned offline you like Dan Carlin.
link |
00:56:23.980
So if Dan Carlin wanted to do an episode
link |
00:56:26.460
on the block size wars, do you think it could've turned out
link |
00:56:32.480
better or do you, are you okay with the way it turned out?
link |
00:56:37.680
I'm definitely disappointed with what happens
link |
00:56:40.860
with the block, with the big block side.
link |
00:56:44.200
I think the source of my disappointment is that like,
link |
00:56:46.960
one of the things that you notice when just looking at
link |
00:56:50.120
like this political disagreements generally,
link |
00:56:52.560
especially when you have environments where, you know,
link |
00:56:55.440
they're authoritarian or like single party dominated
link |
00:56:57.920
and then there's some opposition party
link |
00:57:00.280
and the opposition often has like very legitimate grievances.
link |
00:57:03.420
But at the same time, the thing you notice is that often
link |
00:57:05.680
enough the opposition just sucks, right?
link |
00:57:07.200
Like it just doesn't have, you know, political capacity.
link |
00:57:10.280
It doesn't have like the ability to come up with policy
link |
00:57:13.320
because it's entire culture is like designed around
link |
00:57:17.720
resisting much more than it's designed around like,
link |
00:57:19.960
you know, actually debating serious policy trade offs.
link |
00:57:23.240
And I worry or I guess not so much worry
link |
00:57:27.200
because it's already happened.
link |
00:57:28.280
I unfortunately think that Bitcoin Cash ended up
link |
00:57:31.920
being a victim of this, right?
link |
00:57:34.040
Like first, no, there was a split with Bitcoin Cash.
link |
00:57:37.120
And then of course, Craig Wright came in
link |
00:57:39.160
and you know, Craig Wright was this basically scammer
link |
00:57:43.240
who just keeps on pretending that he is Satoshi Nakamoto,
link |
00:57:46.280
the inventor of Bitcoin.
link |
00:57:47.920
Hey, Craig Wright's legal team, do you hear me?
link |
00:57:49.960
Yes, I still think your client is a scammer.
link |
00:57:52.200
So sue me.
link |
00:57:53.240
This is definitely gonna be death for a search
link |
00:57:55.160
because I gotta ask you about Craig.
link |
00:57:56.960
I guess these people have been contacting me
link |
00:57:58.800
and I'm trying to figure out like,
link |
00:58:00.200
what is up with this human being?
link |
00:58:02.520
So for people who don't know, there's somebody who is,
link |
00:58:05.460
let's start this Satoshi Nakamoto, who is the creator
link |
00:58:09.920
of Bitcoin, who's anonymous.
link |
00:58:11.720
And actually most really big people
link |
00:58:14.760
in the cryptocurrency space do not like yourself
link |
00:58:20.120
and others do not dare claim that they are even
link |
00:58:23.240
for fun Satoshi Nakamoto.
link |
00:58:25.200
In fact, if Satoshi Nakamoto is still alive
link |
00:58:27.320
and is like, if say you were Satoshi Nakamoto,
link |
00:58:29.800
it seems like the thing he would do is probably
link |
00:58:32.000
or she is trying to remain anonymous.
link |
00:58:35.760
On the flip side of that, there's a guy named Craig Wright
link |
00:58:39.320
who continually keeps claiming that he is in fact
link |
00:58:42.120
Satoshi Nakamoto and keeps suing a lot of people.
link |
00:58:45.920
So on him, if we could just linger on him,
link |
00:58:49.420
what do you make of this character?
link |
00:58:52.120
What are we supposed to make of this character?
link |
00:58:54.420
Should he be ignored?
link |
00:58:56.120
Is there any possible truth to his claims?
link |
00:58:59.880
What do you make of him?
link |
00:59:01.120
The analogy that's at the top of my head
link |
00:59:03.600
will get a bit political, but that's fine.
link |
00:59:06.000
You've had Michael Malice.
link |
00:59:07.600
So I guess I view Craig Wright
link |
00:59:10.160
as being kind of like a Donald Trump figure
link |
00:59:12.480
in that he's not very intellectual,
link |
00:59:15.160
but I think he gets a big audience
link |
00:59:17.320
because he says things that play to the resentments
link |
00:59:23.480
that people have and he says things
link |
00:59:25.080
that people wants to hear.
link |
00:59:27.840
Like in the wake of this block size war,
link |
00:59:30.120
the big blockers did feel very disenchanted.
link |
00:59:32.640
They felt that Bitcoin always had this vision
link |
00:59:35.360
that we were supposed to just keep increasing
link |
00:59:37.000
the block size and Bitcoin is peer to peer cash.
link |
00:59:39.200
It says so in the white paper.
link |
00:59:40.520
And then this elitist clique of core devs
link |
00:59:43.480
just came in and said, no, no, no,
link |
00:59:45.560
we're gonna impose this totally different vision.
link |
00:59:47.720
And if you ever want your scalability,
link |
00:59:49.240
you'll have to wait for us to create
link |
00:59:51.000
this totally unproven fancy technology
link |
00:59:53.400
called the lightning network
link |
00:59:54.400
that works under completely different principles.
link |
00:59:56.920
And they were very angry at this.
link |
00:59:58.440
And I mean, I think a lot of that anger is justified,
link |
01:00:01.880
but at the same time, when people are in that mental state,
link |
01:00:07.520
like it's very easy for you to just kind of like latch on.
link |
01:00:10.320
And if you find someone who expresses anger
link |
01:00:13.720
at the same things that you're angry at,
link |
01:00:15.760
and also like it seems like someone who's strong
link |
01:00:19.720
and seems like someone who might be good to rally around,
link |
01:00:22.880
it's very easy to just like get behind that.
link |
01:00:24.920
But that extra part about it where he's
link |
01:00:26.720
Satoshi Nakamura, I don't understand why that's necessary.
link |
01:00:29.480
I think that's, he could have done it without that,
link |
01:00:33.200
but that just, it's a marketing strategy.
link |
01:00:36.720
Like it sort of gives him more salience.
link |
01:00:38.440
Like there's other big block personalities, right?
link |
01:00:40.800
Well, what's the difference with Craig Wright?
link |
01:00:43.000
He's not just a big block personality,
link |
01:00:45.800
he's potentially Satoshi.
link |
01:00:48.640
And he did say all the big block things, right?
link |
01:00:52.000
Like he talked about how,
link |
01:00:53.560
oh, the concept of a fee market is fundamentally
link |
01:00:56.040
like economically wrong and it should be a free market
link |
01:01:00.160
and you should be able to have blocks as big as you want.
link |
01:01:02.000
So like he repeated all the talking points.
link |
01:01:03.560
And so a lot of people were kind of sucked into that, right?
link |
01:01:07.560
And so he unfortunately was able to basically dominate
link |
01:01:12.280
a big part of the Bitcoin cash community for a long time.
link |
01:01:15.240
And then eventually, of course,
link |
01:01:18.520
more and more people started to catch on.
link |
01:01:20.960
He would just say technical things
link |
01:01:22.600
that are completely wrong, right?
link |
01:01:24.080
Like one example of this that I remember
link |
01:01:27.720
is that he mixed up the concept of 256 bits
link |
01:01:32.880
and two to the power of 256 bits, right?
link |
01:01:36.360
So the difference is, it's like the difference
link |
01:01:38.640
between 80 and the concept of 80 digit numbers, right?
link |
01:01:42.640
And because of this, like he made this arguments
link |
01:01:46.720
that said that Bitcoin's elliptic curve
link |
01:01:50.520
is friendly to cryptographic pairings.
link |
01:01:52.480
Like you don't have to understand what that is,
link |
01:01:54.440
but if you want to know,
link |
01:01:55.560
I have articles on both at Vitalik.ca.
link |
01:01:58.280
But basically he made this like technical argument
link |
01:02:01.400
that really hedged on this point.
link |
01:02:03.280
And then when people pressed him on,
link |
01:02:04.800
it was like, yes, but no, no, like what?
link |
01:02:06.960
Look, exactly, the height is like what?
link |
01:02:09.520
Two to the 256 bits.
link |
01:02:11.160
That's a very tiny amount of information.
link |
01:02:14.560
No, no, no, no, two to the 256 bits
link |
01:02:17.000
is more than the amount of information in the universe.
link |
01:02:19.440
And like he equivocated and kind of like preyed
link |
01:02:22.680
on people's inability to understand
link |
01:02:25.480
that mathematical nuance.
link |
01:02:26.640
And I called him out.
link |
01:02:27.840
And eventually I even called him out in person
link |
01:02:30.240
at this conference in Seoul.
link |
01:02:31.800
Like I just stood up and asked,
link |
01:02:34.600
hey, conference organizer,
link |
01:02:36.800
why are you letting this fraud speak at this conference?
link |
01:02:39.480
And I remember even some big blockers at the time
link |
01:02:42.920
getting angry at me.
link |
01:02:44.440
But eventually they did get rid of him.
link |
01:02:47.720
And then Craig, well, basically Craig Wright
link |
01:02:50.760
was forced to split off
link |
01:02:52.800
because the rest of the community refused
link |
01:02:54.680
to accept some network change that he wanted.
link |
01:02:56.800
And so then there was the BCH and BSP.
link |
01:02:59.040
And then in the Bitcoin Cash community,
link |
01:03:00.960
there was this drama of,
link |
01:03:02.640
are they going to add a developer fund
link |
01:03:04.880
where they redirect 12 and a half percent of the revenue
link |
01:03:07.080
from the miners to the devs?
link |
01:03:08.640
And according to the libertarian not aggression principle,
link |
01:03:11.320
is this technically theft?
link |
01:03:12.720
Like his understanding of the technical depths
link |
01:03:18.200
of cryptocurrency was lacking in a way
link |
01:03:20.600
that Satoshi Nakamoto certainly would not.
link |
01:03:23.200
Yes, exactly.
link |
01:03:24.080
But the point is that even after Craig Wright got expunged,
link |
01:03:27.560
the Bitcoin Cash community kept having these disagreements.
link |
01:03:30.440
And now after this development funds dispute,
link |
01:03:34.000
there was a further split between Bitcoin Cash and ABC.
link |
01:03:37.800
So the branch continues to extend.
link |
01:03:41.560
So in that way, it's disappointing
link |
01:03:43.800
to see those kinds of splitting that was never resolved.
link |
01:03:46.240
It is.
link |
01:03:47.080
I would have definitely like wanted to see more
link |
01:03:49.800
of a kind of like the principled coin
link |
01:03:54.000
with like tries to be Bitcoin,
link |
01:03:56.560
but follows consistent big block values.
link |
01:03:59.800
But I know maybe I should just like stop expecting projects
link |
01:04:03.600
that I have no involvement in to care at all
link |
01:04:06.160
about what my values are.
link |
01:04:07.160
And like maybe Ethereum just like is.
link |
01:04:09.360
I think you have a powerful voice
link |
01:04:13.320
and you can inspire other projects
link |
01:04:14.760
to live up to their best possible selves.
link |
01:04:19.000
Okay, so that's the layer one approach.
link |
01:04:25.640
The other layer one within Ethereum
link |
01:04:28.080
is the idea of sharding.
link |
01:04:29.320
Yes.
link |
01:04:30.160
What the heck is sharding?
link |
01:04:31.920
Okay.
link |
01:04:32.760
What does the future of sharding look like?
link |
01:04:33.600
Right, so to summarize that big long tangent
link |
01:04:36.320
that we just went into.
link |
01:04:37.160
It's a beautiful tangent by the way.
link |
01:04:38.960
It's the basic tangent.
link |
01:04:40.040
And I think like crypto is just one
link |
01:04:42.800
of the most underrated aspects of crypto
link |
01:04:44.720
is I think how you can like analyze the sociology
link |
01:04:48.240
and the politics and the anthropology.
link |
01:04:49.960
And I'm sure Dan Carlin would have fun exploring
link |
01:04:53.000
the space at some point.
link |
01:04:54.080
But like the core trade off, right?
link |
01:04:56.160
Is that if you scale blockchains the dumb way
link |
01:04:58.200
just by increasing the parameters,
link |
01:04:59.960
then eventually you just make it harder and harder
link |
01:05:01.840
to participate as a node and you end up with a system
link |
01:05:04.960
where there's like 20 computers running the whole thing.
link |
01:05:07.880
And it's just very centralized.
link |
01:05:09.600
So sharding basically says, well,
link |
01:05:11.760
instead of just increasing the parameters,
link |
01:05:13.680
what we're going to do is we're going to change
link |
01:05:15.600
the blockchain architecture in such a way
link |
01:05:19.080
that each individual node in the blockchain
link |
01:05:22.720
only needs to store a small portion of the data
link |
01:05:25.640
and only needs to process a small portion
link |
01:05:27.280
of the transactions.
link |
01:05:28.840
So you can think about it as being like inspired
link |
01:05:30.680
by BitTorrent, right?
link |
01:05:31.520
Like on BitTorrent, there's no such thing
link |
01:05:33.320
as a BitTorrent full node that has every movie, right?
link |
01:05:35.960
You know, the work is like split up among a huge number
link |
01:05:38.480
of computers and like that makes sense.
link |
01:05:40.600
That's, you know, the only sane way
link |
01:05:42.440
to scale a system like that.
link |
01:05:45.240
And if they actually tried making a version of BitTorrent
link |
01:05:47.960
that required full nodes that store every movie,
link |
01:05:50.360
then, you know, it would have like zero censorship
link |
01:05:52.760
resistance and it would just like, you know,
link |
01:05:54.720
be dead in an instant.
link |
01:05:56.280
So the challenge with taking that model
link |
01:05:59.320
and applying it to blockchains, right?
link |
01:06:01.040
Is that blockchains aren't just about like spreading data
link |
01:06:04.040
around, they're about agreeing on exactly what data
link |
01:06:07.840
was spread around and ensuring that everything
link |
01:06:10.440
that you agree on actually is correct.
link |
01:06:12.480
And so you have this paradox where let's say
link |
01:06:14.920
you want to have a system that supports 10,000 transactions
link |
01:06:18.600
a second, but each computer in the network
link |
01:06:20.760
can only personally verify a hundred transactions a second.
link |
01:06:25.000
So how can each computer get a guarantee
link |
01:06:28.800
about the other 9,900 without actually going
link |
01:06:31.760
and verifying them themselves?
link |
01:06:33.080
And it turns out that there are some,
link |
01:06:37.360
like a bundle of different tricks that can do that, right?
link |
01:06:40.320
So like one of them is just random sampling.
link |
01:06:43.720
So the idea behind random sampling is like,
link |
01:06:46.120
let's say for simplicity, this is a proof of stake chain
link |
01:06:49.520
and you have 10,000 validators, validators are like,
link |
01:06:53.320
you know, the stakers and like for simplicity,
link |
01:06:56.040
we'll assume they all have the same number of coins, right?
link |
01:06:57.920
If someone has more coins, we'll just kind of split them up
link |
01:06:59.880
and pretend they're 10 stakers.
link |
01:07:01.640
Then you do like some random shuffling
link |
01:07:05.720
and you basically say, these random hundred validators
link |
01:07:08.320
are assigned to validate this block.
link |
01:07:10.640
These random hundred validators
link |
01:07:11.920
are assigned to validate this block.
link |
01:07:13.120
These random hundred validators
link |
01:07:14.280
are assigned to validate this block.
link |
01:07:16.080
And so each individual computer only gets assigned
link |
01:07:19.640
to validate like a small piece,
link |
01:07:21.400
but then the way that the information
link |
01:07:23.520
about like what's valid gets passed around, right?
link |
01:07:25.560
Is that when these hundred participants validate a block,
link |
01:07:30.400
they all sign a message basically saying like,
link |
01:07:33.080
yes, we agree that this block is valid.
link |
01:07:35.200
And then like they combine that signature into one
link |
01:07:37.680
and then they broadcast that signature.
link |
01:07:39.480
And then everyone else,
link |
01:07:40.760
instead of verifying the blocks directly,
link |
01:07:42.400
just verifies that signature, right?
link |
01:07:44.280
And so if I see the signature,
link |
01:07:46.240
I'm not directly convinced that that block is valid,
link |
01:07:49.080
but what I am convinced of is that out of this committee
link |
01:07:52.520
of this randomly selected group of a hundred validators,
link |
01:07:56.000
let's say at least 70 of them agree
link |
01:07:58.320
that this block is valid.
link |
01:07:59.520
And so if I trust that the majority
link |
01:08:02.120
of these participants are all honest,
link |
01:08:04.200
then because it's all randomly selected,
link |
01:08:06.400
the attacker can't just like force themselves
link |
01:08:08.200
into one committee.
link |
01:08:09.280
And so the attacker is gonna be evenly spread out too.
link |
01:08:13.800
And so if the entire set of validators is mostly honest,
link |
01:08:17.760
every committee is gonna be mostly honest.
link |
01:08:19.400
And so like bad blocks are not gonna go through, right?
link |
01:08:22.480
So that's like one simple form of sharding.
link |
01:08:24.760
There was also other more clever things that you can do.
link |
01:08:26.920
So for example, there's this concept of a ZK snarks, right?
link |
01:08:29.960
I'll call it as your knowledge proofs.
link |
01:08:31.600
So this is the idea that you can make a cryptographic proof
link |
01:08:34.440
that says, I verified or I ran some complex computation
link |
01:08:40.880
on this piece of data and I got this answer.
link |
01:08:43.320
And so if you make these kinds of proofs,
link |
01:08:45.680
then like if you see a ZK snark
link |
01:08:47.640
that says some block is valid,
link |
01:08:49.120
then you're convinced that that block is valid.
link |
01:08:51.920
And even if everyone in that committee is evil,
link |
01:08:55.320
like they have no way of making a valid proof
link |
01:08:58.280
for a bad block, right?
link |
01:08:59.680
Like, because the proof itself,
link |
01:09:00.840
like it is a proof that you did the computation
link |
01:09:03.560
where that proof is much easier to verify
link |
01:09:05.920
than just running the computation yourself.
link |
01:09:08.800
And there's once again, super awesome mathematical
link |
01:09:14.440
or cryptographic magic behind making ZK snarks work.
link |
01:09:17.880
But it gives you a little bit of a leg up
link |
01:09:20.120
over the 51% honest assumption.
link |
01:09:23.280
So it's a little hack that improves upon the random
link |
01:09:25.520
sampling thing.
link |
01:09:26.440
Exactly.
link |
01:09:27.280
And like, there's other hacks, right?
link |
01:09:28.320
Like there is another hack called data availability
link |
01:09:30.760
sampling that allows you to make sure that the data
link |
01:09:32.800
in the blocks was actually published.
link |
01:09:35.080
But like, basically, like if you stack a couple
link |
01:09:37.960
of these tricks on top of each other,
link |
01:09:39.520
you can create a system where like I,
link |
01:09:41.560
as an individual participant can be convinced
link |
01:09:44.160
that everything that's going on in this distributed
link |
01:09:46.640
blockchain thing is correct without actually personally
link |
01:09:49.360
checking more than like a percent of it.
link |
01:09:51.000
So that's sharding.
link |
01:09:52.040
That's sharding.
link |
01:09:52.880
But the, as I understand, maybe correct me on this,
link |
01:09:58.120
is in the space of Ethereum, the sharding happens
link |
01:10:03.200
on some fixed number.
link |
01:10:05.360
Like the split is on some fixed number.
link |
01:10:07.920
I think it's 64 is the currently sort of proposed number.
link |
01:10:11.440
So how does that help scaling?
link |
01:10:15.760
Is it just the fixed constant scaling by 64?
link |
01:10:19.080
And is that a way to achieve those crazy,
link |
01:10:21.800
the crazy amount of scaling that seems to be required
link |
01:10:25.200
to use cryptocurrency for purchasing?
link |
01:10:28.320
So doing like competing with credit cards
link |
01:10:30.520
and Visa and so on.
link |
01:10:31.880
So first, I think like the 64 can be hard forked up
link |
01:10:34.640
over time.
link |
01:10:35.800
So we've set it so that like there's theoretically space
link |
01:10:39.920
in the data structure for 1024 shards,
link |
01:10:42.200
it's just that 64 of them are turned on.
link |
01:10:45.320
There are challenges with having more shards
link |
01:10:47.280
because like you have to have logic that just like checks
link |
01:10:49.560
and manages all of those shards.
link |
01:10:51.280
And if there's too many of them,
link |
01:10:52.560
then that becomes too expensive.
link |
01:10:54.720
But even still, you can improve quite a bit.
link |
01:10:57.600
And then the other thing that we're doing is
link |
01:11:00.440
if what we're getting maximum scalability
link |
01:11:03.000
by combining rollups and sharding.
link |
01:11:05.760
So this might be a good time to talk about rollups.
link |
01:11:07.800
What are rollups?
link |
01:11:09.320
Now we're moving into layer two ideas.
link |
01:11:11.680
Yes.
link |
01:11:12.520
So the idea behind a rollup is basically that,
link |
01:11:17.520
so instead of just publishing transactions
link |
01:11:23.000
directly on chain and having everyone do all of the checking
link |
01:11:27.520
of those transactions,
link |
01:11:28.960
what you do is you create a system
link |
01:11:31.080
where users send their transactions to some central party
link |
01:11:36.640
called an aggregator.
link |
01:11:37.960
And like, well, theoretically, you can have a system
link |
01:11:40.120
where like the aggregator switches around
link |
01:11:41.600
or where anyone can be an aggregator.
link |
01:11:43.160
So it's still like permissionless to send things.
link |
01:11:46.440
Then what the aggregator does is they strip out
link |
01:11:51.160
all of the transaction data that like is not relevant
link |
01:11:55.120
to helping people update the state.
link |
01:11:57.760
So when I say the state,
link |
01:11:58.680
this is a very important kind of technical term
link |
01:12:01.040
for blockchains.
link |
01:12:01.880
I mean, like account balances, code,
link |
01:12:06.280
like things that are like memory,
link |
01:12:08.680
internal memory of smart contracts,
link |
01:12:10.400
like basically everything the blockchain
link |
01:12:12.040
actually has to keep track of and remember, right?
link |
01:12:14.560
So you just put in,
link |
01:12:19.000
you take all these transactions,
link |
01:12:20.240
strip out all the data that's not relevant
link |
01:12:22.840
to telling people how to update the state.
link |
01:12:24.920
And then you take the data that's needed
link |
01:12:26.720
to update the state,
link |
01:12:27.560
and then you like really compress it, right?
link |
01:12:29.000
So like, for example, if we say,
link |
01:12:31.920
I, Vitalik, have an account that's 0xAB58,
link |
01:12:35.640
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's 20 bytes.
link |
01:12:37.720
Well, instead we can say,
link |
01:12:38.840
well, I have an account that is number 1874224 in the tree.
link |
01:12:44.800
And that goes down from 20 bytes
link |
01:12:46.360
to just like an index and a position,
link |
01:12:48.080
which is three bytes, right?
link |
01:12:49.120
So you use all sorts of these fancy compression tricks,
link |
01:12:51.480
and you basically just,
link |
01:12:53.160
instead of publishing all these transactions,
link |
01:12:55.600
you publish this like tiny compressed blob, right?
link |
01:12:58.480
So the amount of data that goes on chain
link |
01:13:00.280
goes down by maybe about a factor of 10, right?
link |
01:13:02.720
And then the second thing is that
link |
01:13:04.160
you don't do the computation on chain,
link |
01:13:06.200
instead you do the computation off chain,
link |
01:13:08.520
and there's one of two ways to do this, right?
link |
01:13:11.200
One is called a ZK rollup,
link |
01:13:12.520
which is you just provide a ZK SNARK that basically says,
link |
01:13:15.800
hey, look, I did this computation,
link |
01:13:17.840
and I have this proof that here's, you know,
link |
01:13:21.240
some hash of the result and it's correct.
link |
01:13:23.400
And then you stick it on chain,
link |
01:13:24.800
and everyone verifies this one proof
link |
01:13:26.720
instead of verifying all these transactions.
link |
01:13:29.120
And then the other approach is called an optimistic rollup,
link |
01:13:31.600
which is basically made of the scheme where,
link |
01:13:33.960
like, first someone says like,
link |
01:13:36.480
hey, this is what I think the result of applying
link |
01:13:39.520
these transactions is.
link |
01:13:40.800
And then someone else can say,
link |
01:13:41.880
I disagree, the result is different.
link |
01:13:43.680
And only if two people disagree,
link |
01:13:45.720
do you actually just like publish all of the data
link |
01:13:50.040
and run that whole block on chain.
link |
01:13:52.440
So if there's disagreements,
link |
01:13:53.640
then you just like run everything on chain
link |
01:13:55.960
and whoever was wrong, like loses a lot of money, right?
link |
01:13:58.720
So like disagreements are very rare
link |
01:14:00.360
and they're very expensive.
link |
01:14:01.640
And then a ZK rollup,
link |
01:14:02.760
you don't even rely on this like challenging game at all,
link |
01:14:05.160
you just rely on a proof.
link |
01:14:06.840
So the core principle is basically that
link |
01:14:09.760
instead of lots of transactions
link |
01:14:11.920
and everyone verifies every transaction,
link |
01:14:14.680
it is you take the transactions,
link |
01:14:16.720
you strip them down and compress them as much as possible,
link |
01:14:20.360
then stick that on the blockchain.
link |
01:14:22.440
You do need to stick something on the blockchain
link |
01:14:24.520
just so that everyone else can like keep up to date
link |
01:14:27.520
with the state so they know what all the contracts are,
link |
01:14:30.080
what all the balances are and all of this,
link |
01:14:31.400
but it's a very small amount of data.
link |
01:14:33.440
And then you use one of these other off chain games,
link |
01:14:36.560
could be this optimistic game, could be a ZK snark
link |
01:14:39.840
to just prove that somebody out there did the computation
link |
01:14:43.080
and the result is correct, right?
link |
01:14:44.600
So you're pushing like 90% of the work off chain
link |
01:14:47.640
and then, well, 90% of the data
link |
01:14:50.160
and 99% of the computation off chain,
link |
01:14:52.720
and then you still have 10% of the data
link |
01:14:54.360
and 1% of the computation on chain.
link |
01:14:56.280
And so your scalability goes up by a factor of about 100.
link |
01:14:59.960
So these systems are already alive
link |
01:15:02.440
for some applications, right?
link |
01:15:05.480
So there's something called loopering,
link |
01:15:07.320
which is just a ZK roll up for payments, right?
link |
01:15:10.160
So you can have assets inside of the loopering system
link |
01:15:15.320
and you can go around and transfer them,
link |
01:15:21.360
and you get like much lower transaction fees, right?
link |
01:15:24.560
Like instead of $5, you'd have to pay like less than 5 cents.
link |
01:15:28.400
But the only problem is that this only supports
link |
01:15:31.560
a couple of applications right now,
link |
01:15:33.000
like making one that supports anything
link |
01:15:35.560
that you can do on Ethereum just takes a bit more work,
link |
01:15:37.760
but that's being done as well, right?
link |
01:15:40.040
So like within a few months, I'm expecting fully Ethereum
link |
01:15:44.480
capable roll ups to be available as well.
link |
01:15:48.760
So roll ups, just summarizing,
link |
01:15:51.800
do most of the work off chain,
link |
01:15:53.120
put only a little bit on chain, factor of 100 scaling,
link |
01:15:55.920
sharding, another factor of 100 scaling,
link |
01:15:57.960
100 times 100 factor of 10,000,
link |
01:16:00.520
hundreds of thousands of transactions a second,
link |
01:16:02.360
and like, you know, there's your scalability.
link |
01:16:04.200
Okay, so you achieve scalability,
link |
01:16:05.680
you can do a large number of transactions very quickly
link |
01:16:08.120
and the cost of doing those transactions are much lower.
link |
01:16:11.480
You wrote that in the long term ZK roll ups
link |
01:16:15.800
are going to win in terms of layer two technology.
link |
01:16:18.680
Specifically you wrote, in general,
link |
01:16:20.960
my own view is that in the short term,
link |
01:16:23.800
optimistic roll ups, as you were saying,
link |
01:16:25.800
are likely to win out of general purpose EVM computation
link |
01:16:28.880
and ZK roll ups are likely to win out for simple payments,
link |
01:16:35.000
exchange and other application specific use cases,
link |
01:16:37.720
just as you were saying.
link |
01:16:39.240
But in the medium to long term,
link |
01:16:40.880
ZK roll ups will win out in all use cases
link |
01:16:45.040
as ZK SNARK technology improves.
link |
01:16:49.000
Why do you think ZK roll ups are going to win
link |
01:16:53.080
the big picture battle over layer two technologies?
link |
01:16:55.960
So I think ZK roll ups, like once you accept
link |
01:16:59.400
that the technology works are just like conceptually simpler
link |
01:17:03.120
and they have nicer properties.
link |
01:17:04.640
The reason is that they do not have this concept
link |
01:17:07.200
of a challenge game, right?
link |
01:17:08.040
Like, as I mentioned in an optimistic roll up,
link |
01:17:10.480
the way that you ensure that the results are correct
link |
01:17:13.680
is that you let one person submit
link |
01:17:15.200
and like they just submit with no proof.
link |
01:17:16.760
They just say, here's what I think the result is.
link |
01:17:18.960
And then if someone else disagrees,
link |
01:17:20.880
they make their own submission.
link |
01:17:22.200
And then if you have two disagreeing submissions,
link |
01:17:23.920
then you actually publish it on Chase.
link |
01:17:25.720
And then you see who's right.
link |
01:17:27.520
But for this to work, like you need to actually wait
link |
01:17:30.760
for someone to disagree, right?
link |
01:17:32.240
So like, for example, if I have an asset inside
link |
01:17:34.400
of an optimistic roll up and I wants to withdraw it,
link |
01:17:37.000
then I actually have to wait a week to withdraw it.
link |
01:17:38.960
Because like, if the block that contains my withdrawal
link |
01:17:43.360
turned out to be invalid,
link |
01:17:44.600
then there needs to be space for someone
link |
01:17:46.000
to disagree with it, right?
link |
01:17:47.520
Whereas with a ZK roll up,
link |
01:17:48.720
like you don't need time for disagreeing
link |
01:17:50.200
because you just have a proof, right?
link |
01:17:51.320
As soon as a block is submitted,
link |
01:17:52.920
there's a proof and you know it's correct.
link |
01:17:55.880
So if disagreements, especially in the longterm are sparse,
link |
01:17:59.320
then you don't want to do the optimistic,
link |
01:18:03.360
the game theoretic thing, you wanna do the ZK stock.
link |
01:18:05.960
Right, the ZK stuff is just,
link |
01:18:08.120
like you can win a ZK roll up,
link |
01:18:09.800
you can withdraw immediately.
link |
01:18:11.640
You don't have to like worry about the economics
link |
01:18:14.480
of proving as much, right?
link |
01:18:15.960
There's just like fewer issues.
link |
01:18:18.360
The reason why ZK roll ups are not winning everywhere today
link |
01:18:21.720
is because ZK stocks are still a crazy new technology,
link |
01:18:24.800
right, like this is something that 10 years ago,
link |
01:18:27.880
it existed only in theory and there was none in practice.
link |
01:18:31.240
Then, eight years ago,
link |
01:18:32.920
people were just getting excited about it
link |
01:18:34.520
in Bitcoin conferences for the first time.
link |
01:18:37.040
Like four years, starting four years ago
link |
01:18:40.760
or three and a half years ago even,
link |
01:18:42.360
that was the first time you were able to make
link |
01:18:43.960
any ZK stock based anything on Ethereum.
link |
01:18:46.760
And then people started making them
link |
01:18:48.560
and ZK technology has only really become efficient enough
link |
01:18:52.080
to do a lot of things within the past
link |
01:18:53.760
maybe one and a half years.
link |
01:18:55.800
So it's new technology, it's crazy technology,
link |
01:19:00.280
it's admittedly scary technology.
link |
01:19:02.840
If you wanna learn more,
link |
01:19:03.840
I also have an article about this on Vitality.ca.
link |
01:19:06.320
It's actually really, really good.
link |
01:19:07.880
You're, most of your writing, it goes,
link |
01:19:12.200
it's technical but it's accessible.
link |
01:19:14.000
I highly, highly recommend to check out Vitality's articles
link |
01:19:17.360
and blogs, whatever you call them on the website.
link |
01:19:20.360
It's brilliant summary of the work.
link |
01:19:22.600
Actually, Ethereum documentation period is really good.
link |
01:19:25.640
I think that's somewhat crowdsourced.
link |
01:19:28.000
That documentation is really, really accessible
link |
01:19:30.440
and brilliant.
link |
01:19:32.560
But let me ask about sort of other approaches
link |
01:19:36.240
to layer two, like side chains.
link |
01:19:39.440
So the one popular one is Polygon.
link |
01:19:42.400
What are your thoughts about Polygon,
link |
01:19:43.920
which is a layer two network?
link |
01:19:48.000
Is it positive?
link |
01:19:49.720
Is it negative for Ethereum?
link |
01:19:51.200
Is it both?
link |
01:19:52.040
Does it have a future?
link |
01:19:53.280
Which is its own chain, but it's using Ethereum.
link |
01:19:58.160
It's like based on Ethereum essentially.
link |
01:20:00.920
Or maybe you can describe what it is.
link |
01:20:02.840
So I think there's a really big and important difference
link |
01:20:06.240
in security models between rollups and side chains,
link |
01:20:09.000
which is basically that rollups inherit
link |
01:20:11.600
from the security of Ethereum, right?
link |
01:20:13.160
So if I have coins inside of Loopring or Optimism
link |
01:20:17.120
or Arbitrum or ZK Sync,
link |
01:20:19.920
then even if everyone else in the world
link |
01:20:22.880
who is participating in these ecosystems
link |
01:20:25.000
hates me and wants to steal my money,
link |
01:20:27.520
I can still personally make sure
link |
01:20:30.040
that no matter what happens, I get my money out.
link |
01:20:33.560
It might be a bit expensive for me to get my money out
link |
01:20:35.440
and I have to do transactions on the main chain,
link |
01:20:37.800
but I'll be able to do it.
link |
01:20:39.480
Whereas in Polygon, which is a side chain,
link |
01:20:42.320
and so instead of being secured by Ethereum,
link |
01:20:45.080
it's also in part secured by its own
link |
01:20:48.040
proof of stake consensus with its own token.
link |
01:20:50.280
So if 70% of the whole,
link |
01:20:53.520
or even 51% of the holders of Polygon tokens
link |
01:20:56.560
wanted to take my money in Polygon, they can, right?
link |
01:20:59.400
So that's the, and like, to be fair,
link |
01:21:03.440
like there aren't even, like the supply,
link |
01:21:06.440
I don't think is even that widely distributed, right?
link |
01:21:08.640
So like potentially you could,
link |
01:21:11.800
this idea of 51% of the token holders
link |
01:21:14.640
coming together and stealing everything,
link |
01:21:16.080
like it's not impossible, right?
link |
01:21:19.400
Where does the scaling of Polygon come from?
link |
01:21:21.600
Like why is it able to process much more transactions
link |
01:21:26.280
than the Ethereum main chain?
link |
01:21:28.200
What's the idea there?
link |
01:21:29.560
I think in part, like I imagine,
link |
01:21:32.440
I'm not sure exactly what its capacity level is,
link |
01:21:34.520
but like I imagine it has a higher capacity
link |
01:21:36.720
because it's a bit more willing
link |
01:21:38.680
to take centralization trade offs.
link |
01:21:40.600
And then another thing is that like,
link |
01:21:43.000
if the Ethereum ecosystem,
link |
01:21:44.880
like even if it did not do that, right?
link |
01:21:46.520
If you think about an Ethereum ecosystem
link |
01:21:48.080
hypothetically scaling with side chains,
link |
01:21:49.920
then you would have a hundred copies of Polygon
link |
01:21:52.480
and they would each have their own tokens,
link |
01:21:54.280
they would each have their own chains.
link |
01:21:55.520
And so even if each one of those chains
link |
01:21:57.600
was only as scalable as Ethereum,
link |
01:22:00.040
you could still, like the total sum of them
link |
01:22:02.920
would still be a hundred times more than Ethereum.
link |
01:22:05.120
Okay.
link |
01:22:07.640
The thing that I want to say in Polygon's favor
link |
01:22:09.640
just to be very fair to them,
link |
01:22:11.480
like I really, you know,
link |
01:22:14.000
I definitely really, you know,
link |
01:22:15.400
respect the work that they're doing.
link |
01:22:16.920
So, you know, start with a bit with that word
link |
01:22:20.560
of not criticism caution, right?
link |
01:22:23.560
Like it's that they made this kind of deliberate trade off
link |
01:22:28.880
for very pragmatic reasons,
link |
01:22:30.440
which is that the Ethereum ecosystem needs to scale now.
link |
01:22:33.160
And there are applications that want to do something now.
link |
01:22:35.880
And, you know, if there aren't Ethereum friendly options
link |
01:22:38.960
for them, then like, they're not going to just wait
link |
01:22:40.960
peacefully and do nothing for 12 months.
link |
01:22:42.640
And they're going to go to, you know,
link |
01:22:44.520
either Binance Smart Chain or, you know,
link |
01:22:47.480
one of some other system or potentially something
link |
01:22:51.000
that just has totally no alignment
link |
01:22:52.920
with Ethereum values whatsoever.
link |
01:22:55.200
But whereas, you know, with Polygon,
link |
01:22:58.080
like the best thing that you can say in Polygon's favor
link |
01:23:00.800
and against optimism is that, you know,
link |
01:23:02.720
optimism is not live and Polygon is live, right?
link |
01:23:05.440
Like it just takes more work to create a system
link |
01:23:08.440
that has these extra rollups, security features.
link |
01:23:12.320
And so Polygon just said, we're going to be the system
link |
01:23:14.920
that makes the pragmatic trade off.
link |
01:23:16.320
We're going to go, you know, functionality first,
link |
01:23:19.520
and then, you know, we can talk about adding back
link |
01:23:21.800
the security later.
link |
01:23:22.960
So I've talked to them and like, in principle,
link |
01:23:25.080
I think they're very, you know, open to the idea
link |
01:23:28.840
of like adding more security and like becoming more,
link |
01:23:33.400
becoming a rollup or at least, you know,
link |
01:23:36.040
adding a Polygon chain that's a rollup
link |
01:23:38.480
at some point in the future,
link |
01:23:39.880
which is definitely something I think they, you know,
link |
01:23:41.960
absolutely should follow through on.
link |
01:23:44.080
But like the fact that like they exist now,
link |
01:23:47.720
and so, you know, applications can kind of bootstrap now
link |
01:23:51.040
on a chain that, you know,
link |
01:23:52.200
even though its security isn't perfect,
link |
01:23:53.680
at least it exists and people can go use it.
link |
01:23:55.480
And then over time, you know, the chain matures
link |
01:23:58.760
as the applications mature.
link |
01:24:00.000
Like, you know, it's, I think a very reasonable strategy
link |
01:24:03.360
and I'm definitely really happy
link |
01:24:04.840
that they're part of the ecosystem.
link |
01:24:08.000
Yeah, it's kind of interesting.
link |
01:24:09.760
The history of cryptocurrency has this tension
link |
01:24:14.000
of really good ideas that are hard to implement.
link |
01:24:17.160
So they take longer to implement
link |
01:24:19.480
and ideas that are not as good, but are faster to implement.
link |
01:24:23.560
This is like the story of like, you have like JavaScript
link |
01:24:26.600
that basically took over the world
link |
01:24:28.400
because it was quick to implement within 10 days.
link |
01:24:31.600
And then like later kept fixing itself.
link |
01:24:35.120
I don't know what to make of that.
link |
01:24:37.960
Sort of from an engineering perspective,
link |
01:24:40.280
I'm more and more becoming comfortable
link |
01:24:42.440
and accepting the fact that our whole world
link |
01:24:44.400
will run a technology that's not as good
link |
01:24:47.160
as it could have been.
link |
01:24:48.800
Just because the crappy solution is faster to implement
link |
01:24:52.080
and it sticks.
link |
01:24:53.200
What do you make of that tension?
link |
01:24:55.240
I think the compromise that we've been taking
link |
01:24:57.880
within Ethereum is like when we have to take
link |
01:25:00.680
the crappy solution, we look for crappy solutions
link |
01:25:03.600
that are forward compatible with becoming good over time.
link |
01:25:07.560
When you build the quick and dirty thing,
link |
01:25:10.240
you would still already have ideas in your head
link |
01:25:13.120
about what the more complete thing
link |
01:25:15.640
with all the security features added on would look like.
link |
01:25:18.200
Even if it requires a hard fork?
link |
01:25:20.560
Yes.
link |
01:25:23.160
For example, with sharding, I think it's likely
link |
01:25:26.520
that the first version of sharding that comes out
link |
01:25:29.000
is not going to have zkstarks and data availability sampling,
link |
01:25:31.960
for example.
link |
01:25:32.800
But we know what these technologies are.
link |
01:25:34.920
We feel like we have wrapped our heads around them.
link |
01:25:37.800
And so we know how to build a system
link |
01:25:40.800
where we can put all the pieces in place
link |
01:25:42.640
so that it becomes very easy to bolt those components
link |
01:25:45.000
on in the future.
link |
01:25:46.640
So if you do things that way, then at the beginning,
link |
01:25:50.200
you can have your system that has the functionality,
link |
01:25:53.000
but say has less security or less sustainability
link |
01:25:56.600
or less of something else.
link |
01:25:58.240
But then over time, it's designed in such a way
link |
01:26:02.360
that it has this easy on ramp to adding those things.
link |
01:26:05.560
And if you don't think explicitly
link |
01:26:07.080
about being future compatible,
link |
01:26:08.680
then you do often end up with a quick and dirty solution
link |
01:26:12.600
that backs you into a corner.
link |
01:26:14.120
And then there are definitely cases
link |
01:26:16.000
where I think the Ethereum ecosystem has suffered from that.
link |
01:26:18.360
And we have had to expand pretty significant effort
link |
01:26:22.920
on, for example, removing features that we didn't realize
link |
01:26:26.880
that we actually can't sustain.
link |
01:26:29.760
Like one big example is just increasing the gas costs.
link |
01:26:32.920
So like making some operations more expensive
link |
01:26:36.560
because they should be expensive
link |
01:26:37.760
because they actually take a lot of time in the process.
link |
01:26:40.480
So that's making something more expensive,
link |
01:26:44.120
kind of like taking some functionality away.
link |
01:26:46.760
So if you can like be cognizant
link |
01:26:49.840
of where you're likely going into the future,
link |
01:26:52.200
and if you don't know, like even be cognizant
link |
01:26:54.000
of both the most likely paths that you'll take in the future
link |
01:26:56.800
and coming, like thinking about your roadmap
link |
01:26:59.280
and coming up with a roadmap where you know
link |
01:27:01.520
that like if you wants to do either of those things,
link |
01:27:04.440
then you have a clean path toward it.
link |
01:27:06.600
That's probably the best kind of practical way
link |
01:27:09.000
to get the best of both worlds that we have.
link |
01:27:12.000
Okay, let's talk about this wonderful process of merging.
link |
01:27:19.120
Okay, so there's the main net,
link |
01:27:22.280
which is the Ethereum 1.0 chain,
link |
01:27:25.200
or the, what should we say,
link |
01:27:27.400
the chain that uses proof of work
link |
01:27:29.140
as a consensus mechanism.
link |
01:27:30.800
And then there's, what is it called?
link |
01:27:33.520
The beacon chain that uses the proof of stake mechanism.
link |
01:27:40.720
And I believe the beacon has been deployed successfully,
link |
01:27:45.240
is working, so that was in December of 2020.
link |
01:27:49.160
There's a bunch of questions around that
link |
01:27:50.440
that's fascinating as well,
link |
01:27:51.560
but I think the most fascinating question
link |
01:27:54.340
is about merging those two.
link |
01:27:58.600
When do the two chains, one that's proof of work,
link |
01:28:03.400
one that's proof of stake, merge?
link |
01:28:06.360
And what are the most difficult parts of this process?
link |
01:28:10.280
Right, so as you've said, right,
link |
01:28:12.040
the way that we have set up this proof of stake transition
link |
01:28:15.680
is that at first, the proof of stake chain
link |
01:28:18.280
just launches on its own, right?
link |
01:28:19.600
And this is the thing that happened in December.
link |
01:28:22.180
And the proof of stake chain has been running
link |
01:28:25.080
for close to six months now.
link |
01:28:28.600
I mean, by the time people watch this,
link |
01:28:30.360
it might actually be six months.
link |
01:28:33.080
But it isn't actually coming to consensus
link |
01:28:35.440
on anything except for itself, right?
link |
01:28:37.480
So the idea behind that is to just
link |
01:28:40.040
give the proof of stake chain time to mature,
link |
01:28:43.360
time for people to build the ecosystem around it,
link |
01:28:45.480
time to make sure that there aren't any bugs,
link |
01:28:48.160
and just like prove to the community
link |
01:28:49.640
that no proof of stake actually is real,
link |
01:28:51.520
and a full transition is realistic,
link |
01:28:55.560
because the thing that you're transitioning to
link |
01:28:57.560
already exists and already works.
link |
01:28:59.480
And then at some point in the future,
link |
01:29:01.200
you have this event called the merge,
link |
01:29:03.040
where you basically take the activity
link |
01:29:05.960
that's being done inside of the proof of work chain,
link |
01:29:08.040
and you actually move it over into the proof of stake chain,
link |
01:29:10.360
so you get rid of the proof of work side completely.
link |
01:29:13.460
So the way that the merge will work is,
link |
01:29:18.460
it's definitely gone through a few different iterations.
link |
01:29:22.000
Like the earlier versions of this
link |
01:29:24.880
actually required more work for users
link |
01:29:26.800
and more work for clients.
link |
01:29:27.840
It was much more like,
link |
01:29:29.180
oh, there's this new chain, there's this old chain,
link |
01:29:31.160
and then everyone has to migrate
link |
01:29:33.600
from the old chain to the new chain,
link |
01:29:34.920
and then at some point we'll forget about the old chain.
link |
01:29:37.400
The new version is designed
link |
01:29:39.000
to be much more seamless for users, right?
link |
01:29:43.480
So basically what actually happens is that
link |
01:29:45.960
the old chain basically becomes embedded
link |
01:29:49.320
inside the new chain, right?
link |
01:29:50.960
So starting from the merge transition block,
link |
01:29:54.640
every proof of stake chain block
link |
01:29:56.800
is going to contain a block of the,
link |
01:29:59.680
what we consider now to be,
link |
01:30:01.480
what we consider to be the Ethereum chain today,
link |
01:30:03.660
but we'll call it the execution chain.
link |
01:30:05.600
And then at the same time, to create one of these blocks,
link |
01:30:08.520
you're not going to need proof of work anymore, right?
link |
01:30:10.880
So basically at the same time,
link |
01:30:12.360
you would both get rid of the proof of work requirements
link |
01:30:15.000
for one of these blocks to be valid,
link |
01:30:16.560
but instead you require these blocks
link |
01:30:18.840
to be embedded inside of the proof of stake blocks, right?
link |
01:30:21.560
So you basically have like a chain inside a chain.
link |
01:30:24.000
And this is, from an architecture perspective,
link |
01:30:28.200
you might think it's a little bit suboptimal,
link |
01:30:30.080
but it actually has some nice properties
link |
01:30:32.240
and makes it easier to kind of think about the consensus
link |
01:30:35.140
and think about what we call the execution layer,
link |
01:30:38.080
like transactions and contracts kind of separately
link |
01:30:40.680
and upgrade them separately.
link |
01:30:42.120
And it also just means that the upgrade process
link |
01:30:46.500
is extremely seamless, right?
link |
01:30:47.740
Because from the point of view of a client
link |
01:30:49.780
that's following the chain,
link |
01:30:50.880
you basically have to update nothing, right?
link |
01:30:53.400
You're still following the same chain
link |
01:30:55.680
and follows the same rules,
link |
01:30:56.960
except instead of checking proof of work,
link |
01:30:58.780
you'll switch to checking that these blocks
link |
01:31:01.020
are embedded inside of blocks of the proof of stake chain.
link |
01:31:03.300
So there'll be this merge block
link |
01:31:06.000
that will mark this transition.
link |
01:31:08.080
And over time, I guess the new chain
link |
01:31:11.140
will contain the full record
link |
01:31:13.480
of all the transactions that's ever happened
link |
01:31:15.320
on the previous chain, on the old chain.
link |
01:31:17.600
So maybe I'm asking a dumb question here,
link |
01:31:20.840
but in this process, is the new chain going to have
link |
01:31:25.560
all the information of the past transactions?
link |
01:31:29.040
The new chain is not going to hold information
link |
01:31:33.340
from what happened in the Ethereum chain before the merge,
link |
01:31:36.720
right, so Ethereum clients that people are going to use
link |
01:31:43.520
around the time of the merge and soon after the merge,
link |
01:31:45.880
they're probably just going to sync
link |
01:31:48.060
and check the proof of work chain up to the merge,
link |
01:31:50.560
and then they're gonna check the proof of stake chain.
link |
01:31:52.400
But at some point in the future,
link |
01:31:53.520
I think people will just stop bothering
link |
01:31:55.080
checking the proof of work before the merge.
link |
01:31:57.220
Got it, so that old history information is not important
link |
01:32:01.360
for the future, like if you're operating actively
link |
01:32:03.880
on the new chain, that history is not important to you.
link |
01:32:08.840
It's not important, so it's not strictly important
link |
01:32:12.360
for just like any smart contract
link |
01:32:17.800
or just like applications that run on the blockchain.
link |
01:32:19.920
It can be important to users,
link |
01:32:21.640
and it can be important for some applications,
link |
01:32:24.160
but we're basically saying that like maintaining
link |
01:32:27.080
and serving that is not going to be a simultaneous
link |
01:32:29.960
with the responsibility of every Ethereum node.
link |
01:32:32.240
If you want that information, there can be separate
link |
01:32:34.640
protocols for backing it up.
link |
01:32:36.340
And like these other protocols actually exist, right?
link |
01:32:38.440
Like there's something called the graph,
link |
01:32:40.180
which is doing some history retrieval.
link |
01:32:42.120
Potentially, you can just take that entire chain
link |
01:32:43.960
and stake it on BitTorrent.
link |
01:32:45.160
Like there's lots of ways to like archive it
link |
01:32:48.600
and create kind of customized search protocols for it.
link |
01:32:51.200
So what's your sense why, so there's a Python 2
link |
01:32:54.520
and Python 3, and it took forever for people to switch.
link |
01:32:58.840
What's your sense why this merge has been taking longer
link |
01:33:02.880
than perhaps was expected?
link |
01:33:05.360
I think the biggest reason is just we've been
link |
01:33:08.760
underestimating the technical complexity.
link |
01:33:11.000
There's a lot of technical complexity
link |
01:33:12.480
in making a successful proof of stake chain.
link |
01:33:14.520
There's a lot of technical complexity
link |
01:33:17.120
in actually figuring out the transition process.
link |
01:33:20.740
There's...
link |
01:33:22.320
So that's bigger than social complexity.
link |
01:33:24.800
So the technical complexity you would say
link |
01:33:27.240
is the bigger reason for any delays
link |
01:33:29.760
than the social complexity?
link |
01:33:31.160
I actually think so.
link |
01:33:32.400
I think we've been very fortunate
link |
01:33:35.080
to not have too much social complexity around the merge.
link |
01:33:37.720
So not much drama.
link |
01:33:38.960
No.
link |
01:33:40.320
I think the biggest part of the reason
link |
01:33:42.560
is just because we have been talking
link |
01:33:44.760
about proof of stake and sharding
link |
01:33:46.040
as being part of the roadmap
link |
01:33:47.200
since almost the very beginning of the project, right?
link |
01:33:49.960
Like the very first proof of stake blog post
link |
01:33:52.400
is from January 2014, which was two months
link |
01:33:56.360
after the project started
link |
01:33:57.760
and maybe even a day after the announcement.
link |
01:34:01.680
So proof of stake was not something
link |
01:34:06.000
that we kind of put on anybody by surprise.
link |
01:34:09.040
And then when the Dow fork happened
link |
01:34:11.160
and the people on the ETC side split off,
link |
01:34:13.840
I think it also just happens that a lot of the people
link |
01:34:16.680
that were not willing to stomach the Dow fork
link |
01:34:18.840
and then join the ETC side,
link |
01:34:20.400
they were the more Bitcoiny types.
link |
01:34:23.120
And the more Bitcoiny types do also tend to like proof
link |
01:34:26.000
of work more.
link |
01:34:26.840
And so like that also sort of ended up,
link |
01:34:29.160
sort of like purifying the communities on both sides,
link |
01:34:32.600
I guess.
link |
01:34:33.440
So Ethereum Classic is not switching to proof of stake
link |
01:34:35.760
and they're happy with their setup.
link |
01:34:38.600
And by the time that it came
link |
01:34:43.680
to the beacon chain launching into now,
link |
01:34:45.880
I think the community is very strongly in favor
link |
01:34:48.360
of the proof of stake switch.
link |
01:34:50.920
But let me ask the question that no engineer wants to hear,
link |
01:34:55.760
which is the question of timeline.
link |
01:35:00.000
When do you think the merge will happen?
link |
01:35:03.480
Do you have a sense it might happen this year?
link |
01:35:06.240
Do you have a sense it might be pushed
link |
01:35:07.760
towards next year, 2022 or even beyond?
link |
01:35:14.600
I think early 2022 is the most realistic.
link |
01:35:20.720
There's definitely still like an optimistic case
link |
01:35:22.840
of it happening this year,
link |
01:35:23.800
but the realistic thing to count on is definitely
link |
01:35:27.600
the very early part of next year.
link |
01:35:31.400
Is there specific things that stand out to you
link |
01:35:33.400
that will make you feel good about progress
link |
01:35:37.920
if you see it happening?
link |
01:35:40.480
So the thing that we had last month
link |
01:35:43.760
is we had this online hackathon called Rayanism,
link |
01:35:46.800
where basically a bunch of the different client developers
link |
01:35:50.600
that are going to be part of the transition,
link |
01:35:52.520
like hacks together some test nets
link |
01:35:54.880
of the post merge Ethereum chain.
link |
01:35:57.520
So these were only test nets
link |
01:35:59.440
of what would happen after the merge.
link |
01:36:01.080
They were not test nets of the transition itself.
link |
01:36:03.320
So the thing that people are working on now actually
link |
01:36:06.640
is the transition.
link |
01:36:08.240
So having a full specification
link |
01:36:12.320
of both the transition and post transition,
link |
01:36:14.520
and we have specifications now,
link |
01:36:16.120
but in a realistic way,
link |
01:36:18.720
they'll probably needs to have a couple of changes
link |
01:36:20.680
and have things that continue to be ironed out,
link |
01:36:23.200
and then have a test net
link |
01:36:25.560
that does both the transition and the post transition.
link |
01:36:27.960
And then once you have a test network,
link |
01:36:30.080
then you just have to do a lot of testing and audit it,
link |
01:36:33.000
and then do some runs on not just a specialized test network
link |
01:36:38.200
but on say an existing test network
link |
01:36:39.880
like a Robson or Rinkeby
link |
01:36:41.160
that Ethereum people already significantly use.
link |
01:36:45.520
And if it works,
link |
01:36:46.360
then you can deploy the transition on mainnet.
link |
01:36:49.520
Just as a quick comment,
link |
01:36:50.920
because this is fascinating.
link |
01:36:52.200
In August of last year,
link |
01:36:54.320
there was this Medalla.
link |
01:36:57.520
I believe it's pronounced Medasha.
link |
01:36:59.440
It's a South American subway station.
link |
01:37:02.080
I forget where.
link |
01:37:03.000
But spelled with two Ls.
link |
01:37:04.520
Yeah, yeah,
link |
01:37:05.360
because that's how Spanish works, right?
link |
01:37:07.160
Like the two Ls have a...
link |
01:37:09.480
Medasha.
link |
01:37:10.320
Yeah. Okay, cool.
link |
01:37:11.280
Anyway, but I read about it in middle of August, August 14th,
link |
01:37:15.520
there was an incident on that test net.
link |
01:37:17.800
How does this process work?
link |
01:37:22.040
What do you learn from those kinds of incidents
link |
01:37:23.880
when stuff goes wrong in the test process?
link |
01:37:27.720
I think that incident was that
link |
01:37:30.320
there was a consensus failure of some kind as I remember.
link |
01:37:33.760
Basically just different clients
link |
01:37:35.680
interpreting things in different ways,
link |
01:37:37.080
and then one of them getting kicked off the network.
link |
01:37:39.360
And then it ended up taking a while
link |
01:37:41.960
to actually get everyone to get back online.
link |
01:37:45.320
A big part of the reason why it took weeks to resolve
link |
01:37:47.760
is because it's on a test network,
link |
01:37:50.920
like the coins are valueless.
link |
01:37:52.200
And so there's not really this big push of any kind
link |
01:37:55.560
for people to actually go and download the new clients
link |
01:37:58.560
so they can start participating again.
link |
01:38:00.480
And so it definitely took a while
link |
01:38:02.840
until the chain started finalizing again.
link |
01:38:06.000
And then also there was, I think,
link |
01:38:08.520
another round of just not finalizing in October,
link |
01:38:12.040
as I remember.
link |
01:38:15.720
There were definitely things that we learned.
link |
01:38:17.280
Like there were a lot of things,
link |
01:38:18.720
especially that client developers
link |
01:38:20.880
just learned about like optimization
link |
01:38:22.840
and how to build their clients
link |
01:38:25.800
in a way that they can process things efficiently.
link |
01:38:28.520
There's a lot that we learned
link |
01:38:30.360
from just like seeing the full life cycle
link |
01:38:32.360
of what happens when more than a third of the validators
link |
01:38:34.920
go offline and then finalization stops.
link |
01:38:37.000
And then that kind of weird unusual state
link |
01:38:42.000
of the chain continues for a while.
link |
01:38:43.520
And then eventually everyone who is not participating
link |
01:38:46.600
just gets enough of their stake.
link |
01:38:48.920
Like we don't use the word slashed,
link |
01:38:50.680
we use the word leaked for this,
link |
01:38:51.920
but like basically also burned
link |
01:38:53.400
until the people who are participating
link |
01:38:56.080
go back up to two thirds
link |
01:38:57.080
and then the chain goes back to finalizing.
link |
01:38:59.640
So just seeing all of those edge cases play out live,
link |
01:39:03.080
I think actually helped a lot
link |
01:39:04.440
and probably helped to really contribute
link |
01:39:05.840
to making us feel better about Mainnet.
link |
01:39:08.960
I mean, there's also an incident just recently
link |
01:39:11.400
in April 24th of 2021
link |
01:39:15.040
where this was on Beacon, I guess.
link |
01:39:18.440
There was a bug discovered in the software client Prism
link |
01:39:22.680
that prevented roughly 70% of validators
link |
01:39:25.480
on the network from producing blocks.
link |
01:39:28.560
I mean, maybe you can comment on what happened,
link |
01:39:30.800
but broadly like the big picture,
link |
01:39:34.360
what kind of stuff are you worried about
link |
01:39:36.680
in terms of problems that might arise?
link |
01:39:39.440
Are we talking about small bugs?
link |
01:39:41.280
Are we talking about like emergent social,
link |
01:39:45.440
unexpected social bugs?
link |
01:39:48.080
What are the things that worry you
link |
01:39:49.240
about the future of Ethereum
link |
01:39:50.640
that you want to make sure you construct mechanisms
link |
01:39:53.360
that prevent those things from happening?
link |
01:39:55.400
So one of the lucky things there was
link |
01:39:57.600
that this particular bug only prevented
link |
01:40:00.160
proposed self blocks.
link |
01:40:01.400
It did not prevent attestations.
link |
01:40:03.400
So attestations is just a mechanism for voting on blocks.
link |
01:40:06.280
And it's the attestations that are actually responsible
link |
01:40:08.680
for the chain finalizing.
link |
01:40:09.880
So like coming to this more permanence agreements on blocks.
link |
01:40:12.960
So the chain was actually quite stable all the way through.
link |
01:40:19.080
I think the thing that we generally learned
link |
01:40:21.080
from these experiences is just how valuable it is
link |
01:40:26.120
to have this multi client network.
link |
01:40:28.520
So this is one of these areas where I think Ethereum
link |
01:40:30.760
distinguishes itself from like Bitcoin, for example.
link |
01:40:33.680
That in Ethereum, we don't have one single client
link |
01:40:38.400
that everyone just runs, right?
link |
01:40:41.640
There's multiple implementations of the protocol.
link |
01:40:44.520
And these multiple implementations,
link |
01:40:46.120
they all process and verify the blocks
link |
01:40:49.440
that each other can verify, right?
link |
01:40:52.560
So they all speak the same language.
link |
01:40:54.280
Now, sometimes when there's a bug, they disagree.
link |
01:40:56.760
And when two clients disagree because of a bug,
link |
01:40:59.240
we call this a consensus failure.
link |
01:41:01.120
And consensus failures are pretty serious, right?
link |
01:41:03.200
And when you have a client's monoculture like Bitcoin does,
link |
01:41:08.760
then it's more rare to have consensus failures.
link |
01:41:12.640
Though you still have them actually.
link |
01:41:13.840
Bitcoin had a consensus failure
link |
01:41:15.200
between two different versions of the same client
link |
01:41:17.240
back in 2013, but they're less likely to happen.
link |
01:41:21.880
But the interesting thing is that the multi client
link |
01:41:25.000
architecture has actually, I think, saved Ethereum
link |
01:41:28.320
much more than it's heard it.
link |
01:41:30.040
So even in this most recent incident, right?
link |
01:41:31.960
Like Prism was not producing blocks,
link |
01:41:33.440
but all the other clients were still producing blocks.
link |
01:41:36.920
There's four others, right?
link |
01:41:38.080
Yes, it's a Prism, Nimbus, Teku, and the Lighthouse.
link |
01:41:43.280
And then also Ethereum back in 2016 had this fun events
link |
01:41:47.320
that we call the Shanghai DOS attacks.
link |
01:41:49.440
They're called that because the attacks started
link |
01:41:52.840
right on the first day of our annual conference at DEF CON
link |
01:41:56.960
that happens to be in Shanghai that year.
link |
01:41:59.320
So what happened basically was that someone came up
link |
01:42:03.680
with a way to create blocks that were very slow
link |
01:42:07.320
for one client to process, but not the other client.
link |
01:42:10.160
So at that time, there were basically two Ethereum clients.
link |
01:42:12.880
They were called Geth and Parity.
link |
01:42:15.040
Right now, I think the top three ones are Geth,
link |
01:42:18.400
Nethermind, and Basu.
link |
01:42:20.720
But what happened as a result of us having two clients
link |
01:42:23.600
is that the attacker was just not able to come up
link |
01:42:26.280
with blocks that both clients were completely failing
link |
01:42:31.280
at processing.
link |
01:42:32.240
And so a lot of the miners and a lot of network participants,
link |
01:42:35.080
they just kept on switching between the two implementations
link |
01:42:37.760
depending on which one worked.
link |
01:42:39.040
And that actually really helped the chain survive
link |
01:42:44.880
through that month of attacks as the attacker just kept
link |
01:42:47.400
on hammering at our system and identifying all
link |
01:42:50.040
of the weaknesses and just forcing our clients
link |
01:42:53.080
to do this rapid sprint of just optimizing the hell
link |
01:42:56.480
out of everything and make sure there aren't any
link |
01:42:58.640
of those DOS blocks or DOS bugs remaining.
link |
01:43:02.520
So that was another example.
link |
01:43:04.760
And then as a counter example,
link |
01:43:07.360
so something that also shows the point from the other side,
link |
01:43:11.240
Bitcoin had this bug in 2010, the balance overflow bug.
link |
01:43:15.640
Basically someone created a transaction that had two outputs
link |
01:43:20.280
and those outputs were both of a few billion Bitcoin.
link |
01:43:24.720
So like about two to the power of 63 Satoshis.
link |
01:43:27.920
And then if you add those numbers together,
link |
01:43:29.440
you'll go above two to the power of 64.
link |
01:43:31.800
And of course, computers like once you go above
link |
01:43:35.000
to the power of 64, you wrap around.
link |
01:43:36.920
And so the Bitcoin nodes thought that there was enough money
link |
01:43:40.680
to pay for the transaction because it was asking for,
link |
01:43:42.680
let's say like a billion Satoshis or something,
link |
01:43:44.400
but actually it was asking for two to the power
link |
01:43:46.520
of 64 plus a billion.
link |
01:43:48.120
And so the attacker just managed to create like billions
link |
01:43:51.400
of Bitcoin out of thin air.
link |
01:43:53.120
And this was not only discovered and fixed
link |
01:43:57.320
after something like 12 hours,
link |
01:43:59.800
but if there had been,
link |
01:44:02.360
if Bitcoin had been a multiple implementation system,
link |
01:44:05.040
then what would have almost certainly happened
link |
01:44:08.160
is like one of the clients would have bugged out,
link |
01:44:10.680
but the other clients would have probably
link |
01:44:13.280
actually had a check for that, right?
link |
01:44:15.040
And so there would have been a consensus failure,
link |
01:44:17.440
but at least that would have like alerted everyone
link |
01:44:21.440
that there is a problem very quickly.
link |
01:44:24.080
And it also would have given everyone
link |
01:44:25.680
just like obvious social permission to go and, you know,
link |
01:44:28.440
pick whichever one of the chains is correct
link |
01:44:30.480
and solve the problem.
link |
01:44:31.960
So like, that's, I think a big learning that we've had
link |
01:44:36.920
from multiple of our experiences in the Ethereum ecosystem,
link |
01:44:40.240
just like validating this multi client model.
link |
01:44:43.240
And like, to be fair,
link |
01:44:44.080
it's a model that we get criticized for a lot, right?
link |
01:44:46.160
Like Bitcoin people talk about, you know,
link |
01:44:48.280
the risk of consensus failures that this creates.
link |
01:44:51.120
VC types are like, well, you know,
link |
01:44:53.160
isn't it expensive and wasteful to fund three software teams
link |
01:44:55.840
where you could just be making, you know,
link |
01:44:57.080
one quote focused effort, you know,
link |
01:44:59.480
they love the word focused.
link |
01:45:00.640
And like, you know, Ethereum is not that,
link |
01:45:02.480
but it's amazing despite not being that.
link |
01:45:04.520
Yeah.
link |
01:45:08.560
Basically, yeah, so that was interesting.
link |
01:45:12.600
And then there have definitely been other learnings as well,
link |
01:45:16.680
just from like seeing the chain live
link |
01:45:18.640
and seeing what actually is the staking experience like,
link |
01:45:23.160
what are the actual incentives
link |
01:45:24.920
for all the different participants.
link |
01:45:26.480
So I definitely feel like we're gaining a lot
link |
01:45:28.960
from this sort of one year of trial running the chain
link |
01:45:31.920
before we actually make all of Ethereum depend on it.
link |
01:45:35.640
Let me ask perhaps a strange question,
link |
01:45:37.640
but you know, proponents of Bitcoin will say things like,
link |
01:45:41.320
Bitcoin fixes everything.
link |
01:45:44.080
So why do we need Ethereum?
link |
01:45:47.880
Versus like Bitcoin plus lightning network for scalability
link |
01:45:54.520
and then using Bitcoin for,
link |
01:45:56.320
with this proof of work for security.
link |
01:45:58.600
So in this kind of, it is perhaps sort of a strange question,
link |
01:46:02.840
but it's a high level question.
link |
01:46:04.080
Why do we need another technology?
link |
01:46:07.360
Yes, it has a bunch of nice features,
link |
01:46:09.560
but like doesn't Bitcoin fix everything already?
link |
01:46:13.120
So the thing that always attracted me about Bitcoin
link |
01:46:17.280
is these values of decentralization,
link |
01:46:20.520
creating these open provisional systems
link |
01:46:22.960
that anyone can participate in
link |
01:46:24.720
and that aren't just going to flop over and die
link |
01:46:27.200
if whoever created them gets bored
link |
01:46:28.840
and that are resistant to like whoever runs them
link |
01:46:33.640
breaking the rules and all of these things.
link |
01:46:35.400
And I think that pretty strongly that these principles
link |
01:46:38.680
are like really valid in importance
link |
01:46:40.640
to much more things than just money, right?
link |
01:46:42.520
Like Bitcoin is the blockchain for money
link |
01:46:45.040
and Ethereum was built from the start
link |
01:46:47.040
as a general purpose blockchain, right?
link |
01:46:49.720
There is ether the asset on Ethereum,
link |
01:46:51.560
but then you can also make decentralized financial things,
link |
01:46:56.040
what we call DeFi today.
link |
01:46:58.400
You can make like ENS, the decentralized domain name system.
link |
01:47:02.280
You can put, make prediction markets on it.
link |
01:47:05.000
You can make totally nonfinancial systems
link |
01:47:09.200
that just like keep track of whether or not
link |
01:47:11.960
some certificate was signed
link |
01:47:13.400
or whether or not some like cryptographic key got revoked.
link |
01:47:16.720
There's this big long list of like just interesting things
link |
01:47:21.280
that you could use about blockchains to do, right?
link |
01:47:23.440
Like basically they are sort of the missing piece
link |
01:47:26.480
that where without them,
link |
01:47:29.320
the kinds of things that a decentralized computer network
link |
01:47:31.600
can do is very limited.
link |
01:47:32.760
And once you have them,
link |
01:47:33.600
a lot of those limitations end up going away.
link |
01:47:36.440
And so Ethereum was like always from the beginning
link |
01:47:42.120
about that, right?
link |
01:47:43.040
It's about like, hey, this isn't just money.
link |
01:47:45.160
There's so much more that you could do
link |
01:47:48.200
if you could just go ahead and make any infrastructure
link |
01:47:51.560
or digital institution or DAO
link |
01:47:54.080
or whatever you wanna call it,
link |
01:47:55.560
where the kind of the base layer of the logic
link |
01:47:58.640
is just executed in this open and transparent way
link |
01:48:00.920
where everyone can see what's going on
link |
01:48:03.400
or if you like your zero knowledge proofs,
link |
01:48:05.360
at least everyone can see proofs that prove to you
link |
01:48:07.360
that what's going on follows the rules
link |
01:48:09.560
and you don't need to just constantly keep trusting
link |
01:48:13.640
centralized actors.
link |
01:48:16.080
Hence the smart contracts
link |
01:48:18.120
as being a sort of a core technology as part of Ethereum.
link |
01:48:21.520
Yes, exactly.
link |
01:48:22.360
Smart contracts, the computer programs
link |
01:48:24.760
that are running on Ethereum,
link |
01:48:25.840
they are like the core
link |
01:48:26.960
of what makes Ethereum general purpose.
link |
01:48:29.080
Yeah, so I do think that there's a lot more wrong
link |
01:48:35.520
with the world than just money, right?
link |
01:48:37.360
Like I'm not one of these people who thinks that
link |
01:48:40.080
if you get rid of fiat currency
link |
01:48:42.160
and you replace it with cryptocurrency,
link |
01:48:43.560
then suddenly wars are gonna go away, right?
link |
01:48:45.440
Because like, first of all,
link |
01:48:48.080
like say your average revenue
link |
01:48:49.120
is only a small portion of government revenue, right?
link |
01:48:51.480
It's like what, 5%, 10%, something like that.
link |
01:48:54.400
Second of all, like if you are the sort of,
link |
01:48:58.920
this is one of the things
link |
01:48:59.760
I don't even get about their philosophy.
link |
01:49:01.000
Like, let's say you're the sort of person
link |
01:49:02.840
who is an extreme and very distrusting libertarian
link |
01:49:06.600
and you think that these governments are terrible, right?
link |
01:49:09.320
Like we know today that governments
link |
01:49:11.440
find a combination of things like welfare
link |
01:49:15.080
and things like the military
link |
01:49:17.520
that goes and like bombs people in Afghanistan, right?
link |
01:49:21.000
And so the question you have to ask is like, okay,
link |
01:49:24.240
you with your new, you know, magic newfangled cyber currency
link |
01:49:30.560
that takes over the world,
link |
01:49:32.160
take away the government's ability
link |
01:49:33.560
to have seniorized revenue
link |
01:49:34.960
and so you reduce the government's revenue by 10%.
link |
01:49:37.760
If the government is that evil,
link |
01:49:39.440
which portion of its expenses
link |
01:49:41.720
is it gonna take that 10% from?
link |
01:49:43.680
Is it gonna stop the bombing people in Afghanistan
link |
01:49:45.840
or is it gonna cut welfare?
link |
01:49:47.680
If you think it's the first,
link |
01:49:48.640
you have a very optimistic view of the government, right?
link |
01:49:51.560
So that's, I guess, my perspective
link |
01:49:55.920
on like why the whole, you know,
link |
01:49:58.480
we're going to save the world and create peace
link |
01:50:02.840
by like denying governments the right
link |
01:50:04.760
to stealth taxation kind of perspective
link |
01:50:07.680
doesn't really make much sense for me.
link |
01:50:09.520
And I do think that there is real value
link |
01:50:11.200
that comes from a decentralized and open currency.
link |
01:50:14.920
Like just the fact that there is a financial infrastructure
link |
01:50:18.320
that anyone in the world can go ahead and use, right?
link |
01:50:21.680
It's, that's something that can easily be
link |
01:50:24.600
a big boon for people, right?
link |
01:50:25.680
There's a lot of places where the currency
link |
01:50:29.840
and is much less stable than the dollar.
link |
01:50:32.640
And, you know, these people like they don't like,
link |
01:50:35.880
well, if they use Bitcoin,
link |
01:50:37.520
their only option is to get Bitcoins, right?
link |
01:50:39.240
Which, you know, are also pretty volatile.
link |
01:50:42.120
If they use Ethereum, then, you know, they can get ether,
link |
01:50:44.280
but then they can also get stable coins, right?
link |
01:50:46.000
And you might think that, you know,
link |
01:50:47.800
oh, you're not being ideologically pure.
link |
01:50:49.840
Now you're giving them stable coins,
link |
01:50:51.160
which are mirroring dollars.
link |
01:50:52.360
And obviously dollars are going to collapse too.
link |
01:50:54.320
But the reality is that dollars are vastly more stable
link |
01:50:56.720
than the Venezuelan Bolivar.
link |
01:50:58.440
So like, there are really meaningful and beneficial things
link |
01:51:04.520
that you can give to people by having a global
link |
01:51:07.800
and open financial system.
link |
01:51:09.080
But I think if you want to actually do that,
link |
01:51:11.680
like you have to have much more than just a currency, right?
link |
01:51:14.120
And then if you want to go beyond financial things,
link |
01:51:16.280
then, you know, you have to obviously have much more
link |
01:51:19.880
than a currency and then, you know,
link |
01:51:21.680
you also have to actually take scalability seriously
link |
01:51:24.960
because the nonfinancial applications,
link |
01:51:26.640
like nobody's going to pay $5 a transaction for them.
link |
01:51:31.160
Can we return to dogs?
link |
01:51:33.840
Sure.
link |
01:51:34.680
Woof, woof.
link |
01:51:35.520
No, no, no, no, no.
link |
01:51:40.200
The other one's categorically forbidden.
link |
01:51:41.840
Yeah, categorically forbidden.
link |
01:51:43.320
Is there any cryptocurrency based on cats actually?
link |
01:51:45.960
I think there are.
link |
01:51:46.880
Like, there was cat coin, there was nan coin.
link |
01:51:49.600
For some reason, they just didn't catch on as much
link |
01:51:51.600
as the dog coins did.
link |
01:51:53.160
Okay, so let's talk about Dogecoin and Elon Musk.
link |
01:51:57.840
Elon said that, quote, ideally,
link |
01:52:01.480
Doge speeds up block time 10x,
link |
01:52:04.680
increases block size 10x, and drops fee 100x.
link |
01:52:10.520
Then it wins hands down, end quote.
link |
01:52:14.160
You said in a blog post, partially responding to that,
link |
01:52:18.320
that there are subtle technical reasons
link |
01:52:20.600
why this is not possible.
link |
01:52:23.800
To this, Elon said that you, quote, fear the Doge.
link |
01:52:30.400
So let's talk about this.
link |
01:52:31.600
What are the technical hurdles for Dogecoin
link |
01:52:34.600
that prevent it from becoming
link |
01:52:35.920
one of the primary cryptocurrencies of the world?
link |
01:52:38.880
And do you, in fact, fear the Doge?
link |
01:52:41.320
I definitely feel obligated to correct the record.
link |
01:52:43.640
I definitely do not fear the Doge.
link |
01:52:45.440
Okay.
link |
01:52:46.280
No, I love the Doge.
link |
01:52:47.200
I actually visited the Doge in Japan a few years back.
link |
01:52:51.680
She's an amazing dog, she's still alive.
link |
01:52:54.000
Wait, the original Doge?
link |
01:52:55.160
Yeah.
link |
01:52:56.000
Oh, wow.
link |
01:52:58.480
So, you know, we accept Doge every year
link |
01:53:02.920
for our annual DEF CON conferences.
link |
01:53:05.640
So, I definitely don't think Ethereum
link |
01:53:09.280
is opposed to Doge coins.
link |
01:53:11.480
I kind of want to feel like Ethereum
link |
01:53:13.760
is at least a little bit in spirit itself a Dogecoin.
link |
01:53:16.000
And then, as I mentioned, I love Doge,
link |
01:53:18.920
I bought a bunch of Doge, I still hold a bunch of Doge.
link |
01:53:24.000
On the scalability question,
link |
01:53:25.560
the challenge basically is the limits to scalability
link |
01:53:29.760
and the trade offs with centralization, right?
link |
01:53:31.920
If you just increase the parameters
link |
01:53:33.920
without doing anything else,
link |
01:53:34.760
then it just becomes more and more difficult
link |
01:53:37.280
for people to validate the chain
link |
01:53:38.640
and it just becomes more likely that the chain
link |
01:53:41.960
becomes centralized and becomes vulnerable
link |
01:53:44.320
to all kinds of capture.
link |
01:53:45.960
So, does it need like some of the layer two technologies
link |
01:53:48.800
that we've been talking about?
link |
01:53:50.960
I personally think that if Doge wants to somehow bridge
link |
01:53:55.080
through Ethereum and then people can trade Doge
link |
01:53:57.400
thousands of times a second inside of a loop ring,
link |
01:53:59.760
then that would be amazing.
link |
01:54:01.640
If they want to just like take ZK roll up style technology
link |
01:54:05.280
and just have thousands of transactions a second
link |
01:54:07.520
on their own chain, then that would be a great outcome
link |
01:54:10.800
as well.
link |
01:54:11.640
So, is there ways for Ethereum and Dogecoin
link |
01:54:15.160
to work together?
link |
01:54:16.880
Okay, so there's a power behind a person like Elon Musk
link |
01:54:22.040
pushing the development of a cryptocurrency.
link |
01:54:25.600
Is there ways to leverage that power and that momentum
link |
01:54:30.000
to improve Ethereum, to improve some of the sort of
link |
01:54:33.480
cryptocurrencies that are already technologically advanced
link |
01:54:38.120
and pushing forward that kind of technology?
link |
01:54:41.440
I definitely think there's room for...
link |
01:54:45.320
You know that meme of Doge like taking over,
link |
01:54:48.840
like that storm?
link |
01:54:49.880
I've seen it.
link |
01:54:50.720
Is there a way to ride that storm, that wave of the Doge
link |
01:54:56.080
that's taking over?
link |
01:54:57.200
I think if we can have a secure Doge to Ethereum bridge,
link |
01:55:00.360
then that would be amazing.
link |
01:55:02.040
And then when Ethereum gets its scalability,
link |
01:55:04.400
any scalability thing that works for Ethereum assets,
link |
01:55:07.600
you would be able to also trade wrapped Doge
link |
01:55:10.400
with extremely low transaction fees
link |
01:55:11.880
and very high speed as well.
link |
01:55:13.320
Is there precedence for building secure bridges
link |
01:55:16.640
between cryptocurrencies?
link |
01:55:18.520
Is that, I mean, how difficult is this kind of task?
link |
01:55:21.240
It's definitely something that's in its infancy.
link |
01:55:23.960
There definitely have been some cross chain interaction
link |
01:55:26.480
things that have been done before.
link |
01:55:28.200
So, the earliest is probably the concept of merge mining,
link |
01:55:30.920
right, when a chain just makes its entire
link |
01:55:34.200
proof of work algorithm dependent on
link |
01:55:36.480
the proof of work algorithm of another chain.
link |
01:55:38.960
So, I think famous Dogecoin actually merge mines
link |
01:55:41.840
to Litecoin, which is, I think in retrospect,
link |
01:55:44.160
not looking like a very good choice
link |
01:55:45.560
because now Dogecoin is bigger than Litecoin.
link |
01:55:49.000
But, you know, if there's potentially some way
link |
01:55:53.480
for Dogecoin to merge mine with an Ethereum proof
link |
01:55:57.680
of stake of some kinds,
link |
01:55:59.080
then that could be an interesting alternative.
link |
01:56:04.200
So, that's one type of chain interaction.
link |
01:56:06.600
As far as bridges, like one chain reading another chain,
link |
01:56:09.640
early in Ethereum's history,
link |
01:56:10.920
there was this project called BTC Relay.
link |
01:56:13.000
It's a smart contract on Ethereum
link |
01:56:14.640
that just verifies Bitcoin blocks.
link |
01:56:17.000
I think people stopped really caring about it
link |
01:56:20.160
and maintaining it because there just weren't enough
link |
01:56:22.320
applications that were actually interested
link |
01:56:24.720
in using it at the time.
link |
01:56:25.720
And then the transaction fees got too high
link |
01:56:27.560
to actually maintain it.
link |
01:56:28.920
So, I think if we want to make a BTC Relay 2.0,
link |
01:56:33.360
that becomes cheaper because, you know,
link |
01:56:35.520
it uses snarks or something like that,
link |
01:56:37.040
then you probably could.
link |
01:56:38.200
But maybe now's the time when you actually
link |
01:56:42.040
can do that sort of one way verification.
link |
01:56:44.360
But the one challenge though,
link |
01:56:45.440
is that if he wants to have a bridge
link |
01:56:47.760
that allows you to move assets between chains,
link |
01:56:49.920
then you don't just need one way verification,
link |
01:56:52.000
you need two way verification, right?
link |
01:56:53.920
And Ethereum can verify anything
link |
01:56:55.400
because Ethereum smart contracts
link |
01:56:57.000
can just run arbitrary code.
link |
01:56:58.760
But if you want Bitcoin to be able to do things
link |
01:57:02.040
based on what happens in Ethereum lands,
link |
01:57:03.800
then Bitcoin would have to basically,
link |
01:57:06.200
well, they can do everything with soft forks
link |
01:57:07.760
because that's their religion,
link |
01:57:10.000
but they'll do it that way.
link |
01:57:12.560
And if Doge wants to make a fork
link |
01:57:15.120
where that allows for two way transferability
link |
01:57:19.840
with Ethereum, then they could.
link |
01:57:22.000
I mean, I think that would be a lovely collaboration
link |
01:57:24.640
to make if there's interest.
link |
01:57:27.200
I think there might actually even be some multi SIG funds
link |
01:57:30.800
that has some funding.
link |
01:57:34.280
It's just a bounty for someone
link |
01:57:35.560
to make a bridge between the two.
link |
01:57:37.280
Oh, could you maybe try to psychoanalyze Elon Musk
link |
01:57:40.960
for a brief second?
link |
01:57:42.520
So what are your thoughts about Tesla and Elon Musk's
link |
01:57:47.240
journey through the cryptocurrency world?
link |
01:57:49.880
So first with Bitcoin and then with Dogecoin.
link |
01:57:53.040
So acquiring, holding a large amount of Bitcoin.
link |
01:57:57.400
And I believe, at least considering the acquiring
link |
01:58:01.440
and holding a large amount of Dogecoin.
link |
01:58:03.640
Positives, negatives, what do you think the future
link |
01:58:06.480
for Tesla and SpaceX in the cryptocurrency space looks like?
link |
01:58:10.040
Do you think they'll consider Ethereum?
link |
01:58:13.120
I'm sure that if they stay in the cryptocurrency system
link |
01:58:17.640
at all, then they have to at some point.
link |
01:58:19.480
Bitcoin number one, Dogecoin number,
link |
01:58:27.000
I mean, come on, it deserves to be number three.
link |
01:58:29.440
And then, or number two.
link |
01:58:31.280
And then Ethereum can be whatever that other number is.
link |
01:58:39.960
If Ethereum only becomes a Dogecoin somehow,
link |
01:58:42.680
maybe change the logo to incorporate a dog of some sort.
link |
01:58:46.440
Almost like Doge sneaking behind.
link |
01:58:50.320
Oh, that would be fascinating.
link |
01:58:52.200
For when the merge happens.
link |
01:58:53.120
And I think, Elon, you definitely,
link |
01:58:56.480
I think you would make a mistake
link |
01:58:58.160
if you were to kind of ascribe too much sophisticated,
link |
01:59:02.280
malevolent, or any deep intentionality to the whole process.
link |
01:59:07.280
I think he's just a human being and he likes dogs,
link |
01:59:10.160
just like I like dogs.
link |
01:59:11.280
Yeah, I think that is literally the reasoning
link |
01:59:14.120
behind the whole Dogecoin thing.
link |
01:59:16.240
There is some aspect to which,
link |
01:59:18.400
I mean, the guy helped launch a car into space, right?
link |
01:59:24.240
Like you could ask, like, what is the purpose of that?
link |
01:59:27.560
I think the purpose of that is fun.
link |
01:59:31.280
I think he truly is more and more, especially lately,
link |
01:59:35.160
embodying the whole idea that the most entertaining outcome
link |
01:59:39.760
is the most likely and he's fully embracing
link |
01:59:42.320
the most entertaining outcome.
link |
01:59:44.040
And in many ways, Dogecoin is the most
link |
01:59:46.240
entertaining cryptocurrency.
link |
01:59:48.320
As cryptocurrency becomes more and more impactful
link |
01:59:50.840
in the world, people are getting
link |
01:59:52.520
more and more serious about it.
link |
01:59:53.920
And so he's selecting the cryptocurrency
link |
01:59:56.000
that is the least serious and the most fun.
link |
01:59:59.280
And there's something to that,
link |
02:00:01.520
like coupling fun with technological sophistication
link |
02:00:06.720
and somehow figuring out a way to do that well.
link |
02:00:10.360
I want the world to be fun.
link |
02:00:12.400
I think the world being fun is great.
link |
02:00:15.960
Okay, let me ask about a couple
link |
02:00:17.840
of other technologies if it's okay.
link |
02:00:19.680
Sure.
link |
02:00:20.520
What are your thoughts about Chainlink
link |
02:00:22.720
and hybrid smart contracts that utilize
link |
02:00:24.800
off chain external data sources?
link |
02:00:28.560
And I think it's definitely necessary for a smart contract
link |
02:00:32.480
so that do a lot of things to use off chain data
link |
02:00:35.920
of some kind, right?
link |
02:00:36.760
Like if you want to have a stable coin,
link |
02:00:38.520
you need a price oracle so you know
link |
02:00:39.880
what price you're targeting.
link |
02:00:41.440
If you want to have some fancy no crop insurance gadget,
link |
02:00:45.560
like I think EtherRisk has been doing
link |
02:00:47.960
a lot of good work with that.
link |
02:00:49.840
And I think it was either Kenya or Sri Lanka or both,
link |
02:00:53.280
like they're making a lot of good progress
link |
02:00:56.800
in some of those places.
link |
02:00:59.200
Like you need some kind of oracle to tell you,
link |
02:01:01.840
did it actually rain in this particular area?
link |
02:01:05.200
If he wants to have like assets that mirror
link |
02:01:07.280
other financial assets, you need an oracle.
link |
02:01:09.320
If you want to have a prediction market,
link |
02:01:10.600
you need an oracle.
link |
02:01:12.040
And so projects that provide oracles
link |
02:01:15.480
are definitely really important.
link |
02:01:18.320
There are definitely different kinds of use cases.
link |
02:01:20.400
Like Augur is more about events
link |
02:01:22.400
and the Augur oracle is designed,
link |
02:01:24.640
I think differently from Chainlink, right?
link |
02:01:26.120
Like Chainlink emphasizes the whole,
link |
02:01:29.160
we have a fast automated thing
link |
02:01:31.640
that just gives you data quickly.
link |
02:01:33.760
Whereas Augur is more, we don't give a crap about speed.
link |
02:01:38.200
And look, we don't need to give a crap about speed
link |
02:01:40.000
because if you want to get your money out
link |
02:01:41.440
on a prediction market that where in reality it's resolved,
link |
02:01:44.320
you can probably just sell your coins for 99 cents anyway.
link |
02:01:48.440
So I mean, I think Chainlink is definitely
link |
02:01:52.360
taking a good and important part of the oracle design space.
link |
02:01:58.480
And I'm definitely happy that there's
link |
02:02:00.960
that project taking the task on.
link |
02:02:02.720
I mean, at the same time, I do think that
link |
02:02:04.840
their frog army on Twitter can get a bit intense at times,
link |
02:02:07.240
but like.
link |
02:02:08.080
I mean, is there a way to incorporate
link |
02:02:10.560
sort of oracle network type of ideas into Ethereum?
link |
02:02:14.480
I personally would prefer the Ethereum base layer,
link |
02:02:17.920
like stay away from trying to provide too much functionality
link |
02:02:21.920
because like once you have the Ethereum base layer
link |
02:02:25.960
making a claim about like say the US dollar
link |
02:02:29.560
to Ethereum price, like at some sense,
link |
02:02:33.280
you're basically saying that like Ethereum
link |
02:02:35.000
as a base platform starts making
link |
02:02:38.440
what could be geopolitical statements, right?
link |
02:02:40.560
Like for example, imagine if there was some civil war
link |
02:02:44.400
and the US split up and you had two currencies
link |
02:02:46.440
that both claims to be the US dollar,
link |
02:02:47.920
well, Ethereum would have to pick one
link |
02:02:50.920
for the sake of everyone who was already using that oracle.
link |
02:02:53.040
So does that mean that the blockchain would be
link |
02:02:56.040
taking a position in this big mega political debate?
link |
02:02:59.400
So I think like for just those kinds of reasons,
link |
02:03:03.600
I would personally like prefer Ethereum itself
link |
02:03:08.240
to be more of this sort of pure platform
link |
02:03:11.400
that just analyzes transactions
link |
02:03:13.840
just mathematically using deterministic consensus rules.
link |
02:03:17.920
And then if you need the oracles, that can be layer twos.
link |
02:03:20.360
Like I think Ethereum like benefits
link |
02:03:23.600
from not trying to do everything at layer one
link |
02:03:26.320
and having this like very robust layer two ecosystem
link |
02:03:29.320
where you have all these projects doing interesting things.
link |
02:03:31.400
Yeah, focus on the basic technology avoid the politics.
link |
02:03:34.040
Gotcha.
link |
02:03:36.000
Let me ask a bit of a human question.
link |
02:03:40.320
Charles Hoskinson, someone you've worked with
link |
02:03:43.800
in the early days of Ethereum,
link |
02:03:46.000
there appears to my outsider view
link |
02:03:48.840
to have been a bit of a falling out.
link |
02:03:51.080
Is there positive inspiring human story
link |
02:03:54.020
to be told about why you two parted ways?
link |
02:03:56.640
I kind of want to let the various books
link |
02:04:01.760
about Ethereum speak for themselves,
link |
02:04:04.280
but I feel like since that time,
link |
02:04:09.240
I think Charles has clearly progressed
link |
02:04:14.720
and matured in a lot of ways.
link |
02:04:16.880
And people who follow Charles closely
link |
02:04:19.720
have definitely told me that like 2021 Charles
link |
02:04:22.280
is very different from a 2014 Charles.
link |
02:04:24.080
And I'm sure it's 2021 Vitalik is much different
link |
02:04:26.520
from 2014 Vitalik as well.
link |
02:04:28.520
I'm kind of interested how the 2030 and 2040 Vitalik
link |
02:04:32.400
and Charles look like as well.
link |
02:04:34.060
Oh, interesting.
link |
02:04:35.360
Like the progression of the humans.
link |
02:04:37.400
Is this going to be one of those things
link |
02:04:39.140
where like everyone comes full circle
link |
02:04:40.720
and then 2030 Vitalik and Charles are best friends?
link |
02:04:43.240
Yeah, not necessarily best friends,
link |
02:04:45.600
but some kind of are able to reminisce
link |
02:04:50.600
in ways that puts some of the tension of the past behind.
link |
02:04:55.480
I think such things are possible.
link |
02:04:58.400
I think people definitely absolutely have a right to,
link |
02:05:02.840
and I think should strive to just constantly change
link |
02:05:06.200
and reinvent themselves.
link |
02:05:08.880
Is there something you could say about your thoughts
link |
02:05:11.080
about the Cardano project that Charles Hoskinson leads?
link |
02:05:15.520
They've worked on some interesting ideas
link |
02:05:19.200
that mirror some of the ideas in Ethereum,
link |
02:05:22.680
proof of stake, working on smart contracts
link |
02:05:27.680
and all those kinds of things.
link |
02:05:28.880
Is there something, again, positive,
link |
02:05:31.440
inspiring that you could say?
link |
02:05:33.160
Are they a competitor?
link |
02:05:34.360
Is it complimentary technology?
link |
02:05:37.880
There's definitely interesting ideas in there.
link |
02:05:40.080
I do think Cardano takes a bit of a different approach
link |
02:05:43.080
than Ethereum in that they really emphasize
link |
02:05:45.600
having these big academic proofs for everything,
link |
02:05:48.800
whereas Ethereum tends to be more okay with heuristic arguments
link |
02:05:53.040
in part because it's just trying to do more faster.
link |
02:05:55.960
But there's definitely very interesting things
link |
02:05:59.680
that come out of IOHK research.
link |
02:06:03.760
Can you comment on that kind of idea?
link |
02:06:05.400
I, as sort of having a foot in research,
link |
02:06:08.840
enjoy Charles's kind of emphasis on papers
link |
02:06:12.120
and deep academic rigor.
link |
02:06:15.160
What's the role of deep research rigor
link |
02:06:18.760
in the world of cryptocurrency?
link |
02:06:20.520
Interesting.
link |
02:06:21.360
I'm actually the sort of person
link |
02:06:22.180
who thinks deep rigor is overrated.
link |
02:06:25.160
The reason why I think deep rigor is overrated
link |
02:06:27.320
is because I think in terms of why protocols fail,
link |
02:06:32.840
I think the number of failures that are outside the model
link |
02:06:37.000
is even more important, is bigger and more important
link |
02:06:39.320
than the failures that are inside the model.
link |
02:06:41.760
So if you take selfish mining, for example,
link |
02:06:43.880
that original discovery from 2013
link |
02:06:47.480
that showed how Bitcoin does,
link |
02:06:53.360
even if it has a 50% fault tolerance,
link |
02:06:56.200
assuming everyone's honest,
link |
02:06:57.280
it only has a zero to 33% fault tolerance,
link |
02:07:01.260
depending on your network model,
link |
02:07:02.800
if you assume rational actors.
link |
02:07:05.180
And to me, that was a great example
link |
02:07:08.520
of an outside the model failure, right?
link |
02:07:10.200
Because traditional consensus research,
link |
02:07:12.440
just up until or before the blockchain days,
link |
02:07:16.020
did not think about like incentivization much, right?
link |
02:07:19.440
There was a little bit of thought about incentivization.
link |
02:07:21.640
There's like a couple of papers
link |
02:07:23.360
on the Byzantine altruist rational model,
link |
02:07:25.220
but it wasn't that deep.
link |
02:07:26.860
It was mostly operating under the assumption
link |
02:07:28.840
that we're gonna make consensus
link |
02:07:31.480
between 15 participants and these are institutions.
link |
02:07:34.620
And if something goes wrong,
link |
02:07:36.280
then we can figure out whether or not
link |
02:07:38.840
it was deliberate offline.
link |
02:07:40.000
And if they did something evil, we can sue them.
link |
02:07:42.120
Whereas in the crypto world, you can't sue that, right?
link |
02:07:44.400
And so that whole discovery basically arose
link |
02:07:47.720
just because the model of traditional consensus research
link |
02:07:52.960
just didn't cover those possibilities.
link |
02:07:54.840
And then once you go out of the model,
link |
02:07:56.600
those other issues do exist, right?
link |
02:07:59.080
So, but then at the same time,
link |
02:08:01.600
there definitely are protocols that turn out to be,
link |
02:08:06.140
that do have failures inside the model.
link |
02:08:08.160
Like this reminds me of the time
link |
02:08:09.780
when I think I found a bug
link |
02:08:12.800
in a proposed consensus implementation
link |
02:08:16.160
from either BitShares or EOS.
link |
02:08:18.240
This happened around the end of 2017.
link |
02:08:21.160
So that was definitely inside the model
link |
02:08:23.440
because like they had a very clear idea
link |
02:08:25.480
of what they were trying to achieve.
link |
02:08:26.400
They had a very clear description
link |
02:08:27.960
and like there's a very clear mathematical argument
link |
02:08:30.840
for why the description doesn't lead
link |
02:08:32.080
to what they're trying to achieve.
link |
02:08:33.060
But ultimately what you're trying to achieve
link |
02:08:35.420
can never be fully described in formal language, right?
link |
02:08:38.380
Like I think this is the big discovery of,
link |
02:08:41.480
the AI safety people, for example, right?
link |
02:08:43.480
Like just having a specification of what you want
link |
02:08:48.080
is an insanely hard problem.
link |
02:08:49.800
And like the more powerful the optimizer
link |
02:08:52.780
that you're giving the instructions to,
link |
02:08:54.240
the more you have to be careful.
link |
02:08:55.800
And so, I think there are the kind of these two sides.
link |
02:09:02.680
And then the other thing is that
link |
02:09:05.800
a lot of the academic approach ends up
link |
02:09:09.260
basically optimizing for other people
link |
02:09:11.140
inside of the academic system.
link |
02:09:12.960
And it doesn't really optimize for like curious outsiders.
link |
02:09:17.840
Whereas like I personally totally optimize
link |
02:09:20.020
for curious outsiders, or at least I feel like I strive to.
link |
02:09:23.200
So I guess like that's my case for why I like
link |
02:09:29.120
tends to behave in ways that, you know,
link |
02:09:31.480
occasionally traditional academic types
link |
02:09:33.400
criticize as being reckless.
link |
02:09:35.220
But I mean, on the other hand, you know,
link |
02:09:37.820
there's definitely real benefits that come from
link |
02:09:41.680
like just taking a rigorous approach,
link |
02:09:46.400
especially when, you know, you know what the thing,
link |
02:09:49.600
like, you know what the specification is
link |
02:09:51.760
of what you're trying to get.
link |
02:09:53.160
And like, you're trying to kind of improve your ways
link |
02:09:56.520
or provide protocols that actually provide that.
link |
02:09:58.760
And like, you know exactly what you're looking for.
link |
02:10:00.840
I feel like realistically, you probably wants to do
link |
02:10:04.320
both kinds of analysis.
link |
02:10:06.040
And like, sometimes you even want to do
link |
02:10:07.280
both kinds of analysis in stages, right?
link |
02:10:09.060
Like you have, you want to do more quick and dirty things
link |
02:10:11.760
and even wants public feedback on the quick and dirty stuff.
link |
02:10:14.200
And then later on you formalize it more
link |
02:10:16.200
and then you get more feedback.
link |
02:10:18.660
Like in general, I guess I feel like the norms of research
link |
02:10:23.580
in the future, like the internet has just changed so much.
link |
02:10:27.680
There's no way that it's not going.
link |
02:10:29.000
And you know, it's even changed like collaboration structures
link |
02:10:32.720
and like the patterns in which we work with each other.
link |
02:10:35.520
There's no way that the correct structure
link |
02:10:38.260
for collaborative research is the same
link |
02:10:40.760
as what it was 15 years ago.
link |
02:10:42.120
But like, what combination of these existing components
link |
02:10:46.500
and of new ideas it is, like that's something
link |
02:10:48.680
that's, you know, totally legitimate
link |
02:10:50.960
to kind of fight it out.
link |
02:10:52.320
And I think it's great that there's different ecosystems
link |
02:10:54.800
that have different attitudes to things.
link |
02:10:56.060
Like, you know, I think, you know,
link |
02:10:57.260
there's a big possibility that, you know,
link |
02:10:59.840
things that the Ethereum,
link |
02:11:01.160
ways that the Ethereum ecosystem approaches some problems
link |
02:11:03.280
is totally wrong.
link |
02:11:04.100
And if there's other ecosystems with different principles
link |
02:11:06.360
and they do well, that's something that we can learn from.
link |
02:11:09.360
In the spirit of the depth for a search,
link |
02:11:11.560
can you comment on AI safety?
link |
02:11:13.320
And some people are really worried
link |
02:11:15.300
about the existential risks of artificial intelligence.
link |
02:11:18.440
Is there something you could say that's hopeful
link |
02:11:22.360
about how we avoid in the same kind of line of reasoning
link |
02:11:26.720
about creating formal models versus kind of looking
link |
02:11:30.140
outside the model into what the real world actually is like?
link |
02:11:33.360
Is there some lessons from that we can take
link |
02:11:36.580
and map onto the AI safety world
link |
02:11:39.000
where the potentials of the technology,
link |
02:11:41.540
whether it's in autonomous weapon systems
link |
02:11:45.240
or just the paperclip problem
link |
02:11:47.960
that we can avoid AI destroying the world?
link |
02:11:51.840
So my impression is actually that, like,
link |
02:11:54.360
this is more of a kind of far away impression
link |
02:11:56.880
and it could be wrong, that it might even be
link |
02:11:58.540
that one of the challenges is that AI is not formal enough.
link |
02:12:01.480
Like, because AI is very practitioner oriented, right?
link |
02:12:05.860
Like, it's all about like, hey, I found a couple of hacks
link |
02:12:08.600
and look, I ran them and look,
link |
02:12:09.900
they seem to improve classification accuracy
link |
02:12:12.160
from 0.684 to 0.773.
link |
02:12:15.960
So a lot of the time there just isn't actual science behind
link |
02:12:20.240
why this hack works and why this other hack doesn't work.
link |
02:12:23.720
You just sort of like trial and error your way into it.
link |
02:12:27.000
And I could see how that approach works,
link |
02:12:30.160
but at the same time, like,
link |
02:12:31.280
that approach is not good for eligibility, for example.
link |
02:12:34.440
Like, it's not good for like understanding
link |
02:12:36.240
what the heck is actually going on,
link |
02:12:37.840
like how these kinds of systems conceivably might fail.
link |
02:12:42.000
Like, there's even, you know, a debate on like,
link |
02:12:45.940
can you take GPT3 like things and just scale them up
link |
02:12:49.200
and their intelligence will continue to improve
link |
02:12:51.360
or is there just like some types of reasoning
link |
02:12:53.680
that they're fundamentally bad at
link |
02:12:54.960
and like they're not gonna get good at it
link |
02:12:57.400
no matter how much you like scale this exact same approach
link |
02:12:59.760
and add more hardware to it.
link |
02:13:01.200
So having like thinking about what's going on
link |
02:13:06.560
more explicitly, I mean, my understanding
link |
02:13:08.160
is that a big part of AI safety research
link |
02:13:10.520
is trying to do that sort of stuff, right?
link |
02:13:13.840
Formalize.
link |
02:13:14.840
Yeah, formalize, try to improve just AI eligibility,
link |
02:13:19.200
like trying to understand, you know,
link |
02:13:21.140
if the AI makes some classification
link |
02:13:23.040
so we can actually see like what happens
link |
02:13:25.520
and like what's going on in the middle, right?
link |
02:13:27.840
Whereas with crypto or with traditional cryptography,
link |
02:13:30.880
you know, it's like very much not,
link |
02:13:33.140
well, okay, I mean, I shouldn't quite say that.
link |
02:13:35.240
It's, traditional cryptography is this interesting mix
link |
02:13:37.900
of being very formal and being very informal
link |
02:13:40.200
because it's very formal with,
link |
02:13:43.100
given these security assumptions,
link |
02:13:44.760
prove that the protocol works
link |
02:13:46.000
under these security assumptions.
link |
02:13:47.480
The places where it's very informal is like,
link |
02:13:49.400
well, how do we even know that there isn't
link |
02:13:51.280
an efficient algorithm for factoring numbers?
link |
02:13:53.480
Yeah, we kind of tried it for 40 years.
link |
02:13:56.000
And then, you know, so far,
link |
02:13:57.360
no one's found anything better
link |
02:13:58.600
than the general number field sieve.
link |
02:14:00.840
And like, okay, fine, we'll just assume it's fine.
link |
02:14:03.280
You know, how do we know you can't find the discrete log
link |
02:14:07.120
between two elliptic curve points?
link |
02:14:08.520
Like, nope, did it a couple of decades,
link |
02:14:11.040
no one's found anything faster
link |
02:14:13.360
than like baby step, giant step stuff.
link |
02:14:15.760
So that's,
link |
02:14:18.120
and like, there's definitely ways
link |
02:14:24.080
in which that approach really makes sense, right?
link |
02:14:25.960
Because at least you can concentrate your analysis
link |
02:14:28.800
on a small number of building blocks.
link |
02:14:30.820
And like, you know, you do have some intuitive reasoning
link |
02:14:33.000
about those building blocks,
link |
02:14:33.940
but like at least there is a small number
link |
02:14:35.680
of building blocks and lots of people are looking at them.
link |
02:14:38.000
And then everything else just sort of gets formally built
link |
02:14:40.400
on top and you actually can like mathematically reduce
link |
02:14:43.040
the security of big things to building blocks, right?
link |
02:14:45.640
Like you can have mathematical proofs
link |
02:14:47.800
that say, you know, if you make a ZK Synarch
link |
02:14:51.120
of a yes statement when in reality that statement is false,
link |
02:14:54.460
then you can use that to like extract information
link |
02:14:59.320
out of elliptic curves that, you know,
link |
02:15:00.760
it completely breaks the problem or something like that.
link |
02:15:03.760
So.
link |
02:15:04.600
So ZK Synarch is an example where formalism is beneficial.
link |
02:15:08.520
Absolutely, yeah.
link |
02:15:09.360
And so maybe you can have the same kind of stuff
link |
02:15:11.320
in the AI safety within AI systems
link |
02:15:14.520
that you can get a hold of some kind of aspect
link |
02:15:18.740
of the systems that you can control provably.
link |
02:15:21.320
And then in blockchains and cryptocurrency,
link |
02:15:24.080
I think the one area where consensus mechanisms
link |
02:15:27.360
is still more an art than a science
link |
02:15:29.000
is that these aren't just like technological systems,
link |
02:15:32.060
they're crypto economic systems, right?
link |
02:15:33.560
And they make assumptions about people.
link |
02:15:35.400
And which assumptions you can make about people
link |
02:15:37.760
is not something that you can prove with math.
link |
02:15:39.540
Right, even just the basic 51%.
link |
02:15:43.400
Exactly.
link |
02:15:44.240
Honest.
link |
02:15:45.160
Can you trust the 51%?
link |
02:15:47.360
If you can't trust the 51%,
link |
02:15:49.200
can you trust the other 49% to be able to coordinate
link |
02:15:53.400
on like making their own fork?
link |
02:15:55.080
What will happen to coin prices?
link |
02:15:56.560
Like how do people as human beings react to these events?
link |
02:16:00.000
Like there's all of these assumptions.
link |
02:16:02.320
But no, at the same time,
link |
02:16:03.720
look, if you can write down the assumptions,
link |
02:16:05.640
then you can like do formal things with them.
link |
02:16:08.480
I almost forgot to ask you
link |
02:16:10.400
about one of the most exciting aspects of Ethereum.
link |
02:16:13.280
I mean, it's non technical.
link |
02:16:14.520
I think it's a societal, it's social, which is NFTs.
link |
02:16:19.960
So what do you think about the explosion of NFTs
link |
02:16:24.600
in the recent months, especially in the art world
link |
02:16:28.840
and beyond, and what does the future look like?
link |
02:16:31.600
So this is maybe the social impact on the world,
link |
02:16:35.800
on the individual creators of all kinds.
link |
02:16:38.760
Like is that something you've actually expected to see,
link |
02:16:42.440
NFTs having this kind of impact?
link |
02:16:44.680
And beyond, what do you think will happen
link |
02:16:48.120
in the digital space with NFTs,
link |
02:16:51.720
in virtual reality, in gaming, all those kinds of things?
link |
02:16:55.520
I was definitely surprised by like NFTs in particular.
link |
02:16:58.920
Like I even actually think might be on record somewhere
link |
02:17:02.240
on some tech conference panel.
link |
02:17:03.680
Like they were asking, you know,
link |
02:17:05.200
it was one of those overrated or underrated sections
link |
02:17:07.480
and ask about NFTs and I thought,
link |
02:17:09.240
and I said like, hey, I think NFTs are overrated.
link |
02:17:11.800
And, you know, in retrospect,
link |
02:17:12.880
that turned out to be quite wrong.
link |
02:17:14.600
I think, like, I guess I just personally
link |
02:17:17.560
can't really relate to this concept
link |
02:17:19.960
of like spending a lot of money on a thing.
link |
02:17:22.240
Like there's nothing, you know,
link |
02:17:24.680
there's no clear kind of understanding
link |
02:17:27.360
of why that thing would maintain its value.
link |
02:17:32.000
Uniqueness of a thing having value.
link |
02:17:34.640
Right, exactly.
link |
02:17:36.200
That's like, I definitely like cannot really understand,
link |
02:17:39.960
you know, the psychology behind like buying,
link |
02:17:42.000
you know, paying $200,000 for original art painting.
link |
02:17:44.480
I'd be like, you know, if I had a mansion,
link |
02:17:46.400
just like give me photocopies of everything.
link |
02:17:48.520
You can hang three photocopies of the Mona Lisa section.
link |
02:17:52.200
Why would I even have the Mona Lisa?
link |
02:17:53.360
I think I'd probably just like have some Nyan Cats
link |
02:17:55.320
or something.
link |
02:17:56.160
That's one thing where mathematics
link |
02:17:57.680
or theoretical computer science cannot formalize
link |
02:18:00.000
why the heck NFTs are valuable.
link |
02:18:01.680
Exactly.
link |
02:18:02.520
But the thing that makes me very happy about the space
link |
02:18:07.200
now that it has happened is that,
link |
02:18:09.600
and this gets back to the conversation
link |
02:18:11.680
that we had at the beginning, right?
link |
02:18:12.760
Like I'm interested in this concept
link |
02:18:14.440
of decentralized public goods funding, right?
link |
02:18:17.360
Like I want things that are good and valuable
link |
02:18:20.800
to as much as possible also be things
link |
02:18:23.720
that can economically sustain the people
link |
02:18:25.920
who produce them, right?
link |
02:18:26.960
Because if you don't have that,
link |
02:18:29.000
then either the public goods just don't get produced at all
link |
02:18:32.000
or people make like centralized versions
link |
02:18:34.560
that have some of the properties and try to be substitutes,
link |
02:18:37.040
but actually just like concentrate control
link |
02:18:39.280
in a very small group, right?
link |
02:18:41.040
And both of those things are not very nice.
link |
02:18:43.480
So the nice thing about NFTs would be,
link |
02:18:46.240
well, if you're an artist and you can just mint NFTs
link |
02:18:49.560
and this is a source of revenue,
link |
02:18:50.640
then like great, that's another stream of revenue
link |
02:18:52.720
for creative work that often does still get underfunded
link |
02:18:57.000
and that's amazing.
link |
02:18:58.160
Okay, let me ask you a weird question.
link |
02:18:59.480
We talked about Craig Wright a little bit,
link |
02:19:01.320
but a lot of people write to me, one of two emails.
link |
02:19:06.320
One email is calling any coin outside of Bitcoin a scam
link |
02:19:15.120
and then the other email is saying,
link |
02:19:17.760
my favorite coin is the best coin,
link |
02:19:21.160
it's going to save the world, whatever that coin is.
link |
02:19:25.560
And so I sit back and I look, I have no idea.
link |
02:19:28.720
I try to figure out like the humans that I trust
link |
02:19:33.240
in this space, just the basic human qualities,
link |
02:19:38.120
but do you think some coins are scams?
link |
02:19:43.160
Do you think some coins, maybe another way to ask it,
link |
02:19:46.040
are scamier than other coins?
link |
02:19:48.680
How are people that are looking outside of this space
link |
02:19:51.320
where there's all of these cryptocurrencies
link |
02:19:53.640
supposed to figure out what is a scam and not,
link |
02:19:57.520
or how to use the right kind of language
link |
02:19:59.440
when talking about them?
link |
02:20:01.200
Because there's the harshness of the language
link |
02:20:03.200
from the Bitcoin maximalists that doesn't just say
link |
02:20:06.160
everything's a scam, including Ethereum,
link |
02:20:09.500
but they use terms like shit coin
link |
02:20:11.560
that says it's not only a scam, it's like a waste of time.
link |
02:20:14.160
I mean, every word you can use, they say that.
link |
02:20:17.080
That's very harsh.
link |
02:20:18.400
And then some people just apply the word scam
link |
02:20:22.040
much, much more conservatively and just refer to coins
link |
02:20:26.740
that legitimately are trying to scam people
link |
02:20:29.200
out of their money as scams.
link |
02:20:31.440
So what do we do with this word scam?
link |
02:20:33.120
Should it ever be applied to coins?
link |
02:20:35.440
And is it a binary thing or is it a gray area?
link |
02:20:41.040
I think it's definitely a gray area.
link |
02:20:42.840
There's definitely things that are really and actually scams.
link |
02:20:46.280
I mean, Bitconnect would be one example
link |
02:20:48.240
of something that's way on the scam spectrum.
link |
02:20:51.640
Did you see their 2017 promotional video, by the way?
link |
02:20:54.880
Of Bitconnect?
link |
02:20:55.720
Yeah, hey, hey, hey, what's up, what's up, what's up?
link |
02:20:59.040
Bitconnect!
link |
02:21:01.520
It was this three minute, 48 second video
link |
02:21:03.760
that was just of this guy making this totally crazy rant.
link |
02:21:07.800
And it was at some conference in Vietnam
link |
02:21:10.720
where they were, of course, trying to convince
link |
02:21:12.920
a whole bunch of people to buy this coin
link |
02:21:14.560
and they had these claims about how it would go up in value.
link |
02:21:17.680
That was definitely the peak of these pure,
link |
02:21:23.080
completely scammy coins.
link |
02:21:24.520
And that was definitely really terrible.
link |
02:21:27.640
And I feel like we have less,
link |
02:21:29.640
despite cryptocurrency as a whole being bigger,
link |
02:21:31.640
we actually have quite a bit less of that now.
link |
02:21:34.880
But then, of course, there's this spectrum
link |
02:21:37.820
of things that are not completely scams
link |
02:21:40.200
and then things that are not scams
link |
02:21:42.520
and that are technically totally fine projects
link |
02:21:44.440
but where their community is just incredibly sketchy
link |
02:21:48.520
and then all the way to things
link |
02:21:50.560
that are where the community is nice
link |
02:21:52.440
but maybe the project is just fundamentally incapable
link |
02:21:55.360
of achieving what it's trying to do
link |
02:21:56.640
or in the community doesn't realize
link |
02:21:57.960
and then really good projects, right?
link |
02:22:00.160
So if you wanna go a step,
link |
02:22:04.200
like if that's 100% scam,
link |
02:22:06.800
then what would I call say 80% scam?
link |
02:22:09.600
Well, like Bitcoin SV is one example.
link |
02:22:11.240
This is a Craig Wright's fork of Bitcoin.
link |
02:22:13.640
Theoretically, it's a blockchain, right?
link |
02:22:15.600
It's a fork of Bitcoin.
link |
02:22:17.000
It has some 512 megabyte blocks.
link |
02:22:20.200
If you really wanted to, you could use the blockchain.
link |
02:22:23.360
It satisfies the property
link |
02:22:24.600
so that you can send transactions onto it.
link |
02:22:27.280
You can probably use it as a backup
link |
02:22:30.760
to store your files if you really wanted to
link |
02:22:32.840
just because it has so much space.
link |
02:22:35.840
It might fail, but at the same time,
link |
02:22:42.680
as we basically said, Craig Wright is a scammer
link |
02:22:46.480
and half the community is just totally batshit insane.
link |
02:22:49.640
So the humans of a particular cryptocurrency
link |
02:22:53.280
is what makes for a scam and not like the humans at the top
link |
02:22:56.360
that have a voice guiding the community.
link |
02:22:58.960
Yeah, I think in the case of BSV,
link |
02:23:01.720
the humans, they make just completely wrong
link |
02:23:04.840
and just obviously wrong claims
link |
02:23:07.680
about what BSV is capable of accomplishing
link |
02:23:10.200
and what it can say we could accomplish.
link |
02:23:12.640
And there's just a lot of aspects of it
link |
02:23:15.320
that make it feel like a money grab.
link |
02:23:17.160
So that's one example.
link |
02:23:18.400
And then you gotta go a bit further
link |
02:23:20.840
and then you have the trons of the world.
link |
02:23:23.440
And that's a platform, you can use it,
link |
02:23:26.160
you can do stuff on it.
link |
02:23:27.960
But at the same time, they did plagiarize the IPFS white paper
link |
02:23:32.480
and then they...
link |
02:23:34.560
So there's scammy qualities.
link |
02:23:36.600
See, the thing that throws me off a lot,
link |
02:23:38.560
it's very difficult for me, is that most coins,
link |
02:23:43.920
but the ones that make me feel like are scammy
link |
02:23:47.600
have a large community of people
link |
02:23:49.520
that are super positive about it.
link |
02:23:53.160
Like, and they'll write to me.
link |
02:23:56.320
Now that said, sort of on the flip side of that,
link |
02:24:00.480
Bitcoin people are also very positive.
link |
02:24:04.160
There's some sense in...
link |
02:24:05.360
The reason I was having like squinty eyes
link |
02:24:09.480
looking at Bitcoin for quite a while
link |
02:24:12.600
is like, why is everyone so positive?
link |
02:24:14.760
I was getting total cult vibes.
link |
02:24:18.000
Like the ideas are not grounded in truth,
link |
02:24:22.400
but are grounded in an obsession
link |
02:24:25.640
of like when you can artificially conjure up a truth,
link |
02:24:29.000
which is why I was a little bit like worried about Bitcoin.
link |
02:24:31.680
I think I've learned a lot since then
link |
02:24:33.280
to where like, I learned to separate the community
link |
02:24:38.560
from the ideas.
link |
02:24:39.880
And I think Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea on many fronts,
link |
02:24:43.920
but still a community that's like dogmatically excited
link |
02:24:48.080
about something, whatever that is, makes me skeptical.
link |
02:24:51.240
Maybe it's just like my upbringing,
link |
02:24:53.680
but when everybody's really excited about something,
link |
02:24:56.960
it makes me skeptical.
link |
02:25:02.120
But it also makes me difficult to decide
link |
02:25:03.800
what is this scam or not,
link |
02:25:04.760
because some of the most exciting ideas in this world
link |
02:25:07.320
have a community of people who are excited about it, right?
link |
02:25:09.680
Because it's, I don't know.
link |
02:25:12.360
I think space exploration is super exciting.
link |
02:25:14.840
And there's people, I know a lot of them
link |
02:25:17.960
that are exceptionally excited about space exploration.
link |
02:25:21.400
Does that mean it's a scam?
link |
02:25:23.360
No.
link |
02:25:24.840
So I don't know what to do with that.
link |
02:25:26.200
And so most I just try to stay away, I suppose,
link |
02:25:28.680
but it's unfortunate because I'm sure there's a lot
link |
02:25:31.320
of exciting technologies in that space.
link |
02:25:33.720
Like in the case of Bitcoin,
link |
02:25:34.760
like I would definitely not call Bitcoin a scam.
link |
02:25:36.800
Right.
link |
02:25:37.640
But I would also not call Litecoin a scam.
link |
02:25:43.360
There's people who call Litecoin a scam
link |
02:25:45.200
because they just like say, oh, look,
link |
02:25:47.520
it has no fundamental use case.
link |
02:25:49.360
And the concept of being silver to Bitcoin's gold
link |
02:25:52.840
is just like stupid.
link |
02:25:53.960
And like milli Bitcoin is the silver to Bitcoin's gold.
link |
02:25:58.240
But at the same time, like if you have these people
link |
02:26:03.120
who just, they do seem to earnestly believe this.
link |
02:26:06.640
And like they're trying to just like make Litecoin
link |
02:26:09.680
be a Litecoin as best as they can.
link |
02:26:11.480
Then like, to me that's enough for it to not be a scam.
link |
02:26:17.920
And then, so yeah, I think the biggest gray area
link |
02:26:21.440
is definitely between like projects that are earnest
link |
02:26:27.920
but they have just all sorts of these
link |
02:26:30.520
like different combinations of flawed qualities to them.
link |
02:26:34.400
I mean, the ones that legitimately is a scam
link |
02:26:36.760
is when the key people that are at the head of the project
link |
02:26:40.000
are intentionally lying.
link |
02:26:42.440
And I think as long as the intent
link |
02:26:45.920
is to try to do good in the world,
link |
02:26:48.160
even if your actual implementation of that is flawed,
link |
02:26:51.800
I think that's not a scam.
link |
02:26:53.520
It could be flawed ideas, it could be wrong ideas,
link |
02:26:55.680
but it's not a scam.
link |
02:26:58.000
I'm learning to navigate this space.
link |
02:27:00.560
Yeah, it's definitely a very challenging space
link |
02:27:03.960
to navigate, I mean, it's in some ways
link |
02:27:07.840
the reflection of the world at large.
link |
02:27:10.240
Yeah, and as we've said, maybe offline
link |
02:27:13.040
that the fact that money is involved
link |
02:27:15.200
makes it a little bit more complicated
link |
02:27:17.480
that lives can be ruined by the choice of technologies
link |
02:27:24.840
that are taken on.
link |
02:27:25.680
So it makes it more real, more painful,
link |
02:27:28.920
more like elevated the impact of this.
link |
02:27:31.720
Like imagine like Mac versus PC wars
link |
02:27:35.160
if everyone who bought a MacBook had 10 Apple shares
link |
02:27:38.520
inside of it, and everyone who had a PC
link |
02:27:40.200
had 10 Microsoft shares inside of it.
link |
02:27:42.360
And then you had the elites who bought their Macs
link |
02:27:45.960
back in 1983, and then they spent $500 debt,
link |
02:27:48.960
and now they have $40 million,
link |
02:27:50.400
and they just think that they're these gurus
link |
02:27:52.720
who understands the future of finance and geopolitics,
link |
02:27:55.360
and they make theories about why Apple is the one
link |
02:27:59.080
that's gonna bring freedom to the world,
link |
02:28:00.720
and Windows is secretly allied with the axis of evil.
link |
02:28:05.120
Oh, that's brilliant.
link |
02:28:06.120
So yeah, this is so brilliant.
link |
02:28:07.720
So I think the right way to think about this
link |
02:28:09.560
is we map some of the cryptocurrency battles
link |
02:28:12.660
into the space of like EMAX versus VIM,
link |
02:28:14.800
or Apple versus PC, if there were some stock
link |
02:28:19.340
that came along with each implementation of each PC,
link |
02:28:23.960
each Mac, that's fascinating.
link |
02:28:25.640
This is 100% correct, 100% correct.
link |
02:28:28.880
Because then that really energizes the armies
link |
02:28:31.160
of people debating over this in a way
link |
02:28:32.640
that something without money does not.
link |
02:28:35.580
Okay, let me ask you about something really fascinating
link |
02:28:38.540
that you are also excited about, which is longevity,
link |
02:28:42.520
antiaging.
link |
02:28:44.240
You have donated money to the SENS Foundation,
link |
02:28:48.280
so you have an interest in this whole space
link |
02:28:50.800
of lifespan research.
link |
02:28:53.240
What's your vision here?
link |
02:28:54.560
Or what do you hope to see in antiaging
link |
02:28:58.000
and longevity research?
link |
02:28:59.880
I think I hope to see the concept
link |
02:29:03.120
of seeing your parents and grandparents die
link |
02:29:06.440
just slowly disappear from the public consciousness
link |
02:29:08.940
as an experience that happens
link |
02:29:10.680
over the course of half a century,
link |
02:29:12.600
the same way that getting lost in a city
link |
02:29:15.080
slowly disappeared over the public consciousness
link |
02:29:16.960
over the last 50 now that we have smartphones.
link |
02:29:19.760
The thing you have from Nick Bostrom,
link |
02:29:21.960
the essay pinned in your Twitter argues
link |
02:29:26.840
that essentially death is almost unethical.
link |
02:29:33.160
The fact that we don't do something about this thing that,
link |
02:29:36.360
this, in the essay, is a dragon
link |
02:29:38.680
that keeps murdering everybody around us,
link |
02:29:43.560
including our parents and grandparents,
link |
02:29:46.000
is, the fact that we don't try to do something aggressively
link |
02:29:49.380
about that dragon doesn't make any sense.
link |
02:29:53.360
So you think this is a battle worth fighting,
link |
02:29:58.560
a battle for immortality, or at least longevity?
link |
02:30:01.760
I'd say absolutely.
link |
02:30:02.700
And I'd say a battle where we really have started
link |
02:30:07.760
over the last five years in particular
link |
02:30:09.560
to see the first cracks of humanity
link |
02:30:13.000
starting to make things that look like
link |
02:30:16.080
they'll turn into victories.
link |
02:30:18.600
Do you think humans can eventually live forever?
link |
02:30:22.680
And maybe as a side comment to that,
link |
02:30:26.120
what technology do you think will enable that
link |
02:30:28.000
as a genetic modification?
link |
02:30:29.960
Is it cloning, is it uploading your mind?
link |
02:30:32.440
Define forever, like are we talking 1,000 years,
link |
02:30:34.680
a million, 10 to the 14, 10 to the 45?
link |
02:30:38.480
Well, let's start, as I tweeted today,
link |
02:30:40.520
eventually everything, the universe will be filled
link |
02:30:43.040
with supermassive black holes.
link |
02:30:44.740
So that forever, maybe like backtracking to where.
link |
02:30:49.120
We'll have 10 to the 16 years to figure it out.
link |
02:30:52.420
Yes, exactly.
link |
02:30:55.360
Yeah, maybe travel between the multiverse,
link |
02:30:59.920
between the different universes of the multiverse.
link |
02:31:02.920
I mean, but forever meaning like, you know, millennia.
link |
02:31:11.640
I definitely think that we can get there.
link |
02:31:13.920
I definitely think that it's the sort of thing
link |
02:31:15.900
that's going to take an insanely huge amount of work.
link |
02:31:19.280
And I definitely think it's the sort of thing
link |
02:31:21.240
where once we figure out the first crop of problems
link |
02:31:24.760
and like people start living to 150,
link |
02:31:27.640
we'll just realize that there's like 10 other problems
link |
02:31:29.680
that kill you half as slowly and we'll have to do more work.
link |
02:31:32.120
But the good news is that this is Aubrey's longevity
link |
02:31:36.120
escape velocity argument that if you get everyone
link |
02:31:38.480
to live to 150 now, then you have half a century
link |
02:31:41.400
to fix all those other problems as well.
link |
02:31:44.320
So I'm optimistic for that reason.
link |
02:31:47.380
I think you definitely do not want to underestimate
link |
02:31:52.080
human ingenuity, especially over the longterm.
link |
02:31:54.480
Like just to look at what happens to computers
link |
02:31:56.400
between the ENIAC in 1950 and we're around 2020, right?
link |
02:32:00.000
Like that's a span of 70 years.
link |
02:32:02.720
So like, you know, both of us, I think,
link |
02:32:04.640
with just present day technology,
link |
02:32:08.000
I have like at least 70 more years to live.
link |
02:32:11.040
So just like imagine what kind of sea change
link |
02:32:12.960
will happen in biomedicine during that time.
link |
02:32:16.080
And the other thing that made me optimistic
link |
02:32:17.800
is that I actually think COVID has been this kind of event
link |
02:32:22.480
that's really kind of pushed biomedicine
link |
02:32:26.520
and especially like activist approaches to biomedicine
link |
02:32:29.800
really into the public consciousness, right?
link |
02:32:32.420
Like it basically, it's put people into this mindset
link |
02:32:36.200
that, you know, wait, but like, you know,
link |
02:32:37.840
it's not just like, you know, the bits and tweets
link |
02:32:39.840
that are gonna save the world, you know,
link |
02:32:41.880
the bio is actually like super important and huge.
link |
02:32:46.040
And, you know, ultimately what's ending COVID basically,
link |
02:32:51.960
you know, is the vaccines
link |
02:32:53.360
and the vaccines have just been, you know, amazing.
link |
02:32:56.160
And if you can take that energy and also like this,
link |
02:33:03.360
I think philosophical attitude that I've noticed,
link |
02:33:05.840
like the way that I would describe
link |
02:33:07.580
the philosophical attitude here,
link |
02:33:09.960
this is going more depth first,
link |
02:33:12.000
is that I think the way that I kind of interpret
link |
02:33:15.840
part of what I would call late 20th century ideology
link |
02:33:19.560
is that there is this mentality that, you know,
link |
02:33:21.760
nature is good and disruptions from nature are bad
link |
02:33:25.600
and generally you wanna minimize disruptions from nature.
link |
02:33:28.520
And like this exists everywhere in the political spectrum.
link |
02:33:31.160
So there's nature as in literal nature.
link |
02:33:33.280
And my view is that like the right wing version of that
link |
02:33:35.760
is markets as nature, right?
link |
02:33:37.380
Like, you know, the way that like that kind of philosophy
link |
02:33:44.020
talks about, you know, markets
link |
02:33:45.940
and like the goal of not interfering with them,
link |
02:33:48.260
like, you know, it is very kind of like nature styled.
link |
02:33:51.380
And then of course, you know, the conservative one,
link |
02:33:53.860
which is like traditional culture that existed
link |
02:33:56.940
before the activists started controlling everything
link |
02:33:59.460
as also being a kind of nature.
link |
02:34:01.940
But the 21st century attitude and like really COVID,
link |
02:34:05.260
you know, has flipped a lot of minds
link |
02:34:08.620
because with COVID what's happened is that,
link |
02:34:10.820
well, no, like it's not, nature is not safe, right?
link |
02:34:13.740
The default is that is like, you know, untold misery
link |
02:34:17.340
and suffering in tens of millions of people dying.
link |
02:34:19.620
The only way out for us is through
link |
02:34:22.300
like basically human ingenuity.
link |
02:34:25.820
And that frame of mind is one that's like much more friendly
link |
02:34:30.260
to one, this other change of minds that I want to see,
link |
02:34:36.260
which is like basically treating aging
link |
02:34:37.740
as an engineering problem, right?
link |
02:34:39.540
Like the default is all 7.8 billion human beings
link |
02:34:43.300
that are currently on this earth are gonna die
link |
02:34:44.860
and they're gonna live their last decade of life
link |
02:34:47.260
in debilitating pain.
link |
02:34:48.820
And the only way to stop that is human ingenuity.
link |
02:34:51.900
And, you know, we don't have that solution yet,
link |
02:34:54.520
but, you know, if we work hard, we will.
link |
02:34:56.620
And more and more people on the biology side,
link |
02:34:58.680
computational biology are basically converting
link |
02:35:00.780
the mess of the human biology into an engineering problem.
link |
02:35:05.340
And once that conversion is happening,
link |
02:35:07.380
looking at the genetic code, the proteins,
link |
02:35:09.860
all those kinds of things, once that conversion happens,
link |
02:35:12.380
you can now apply the tools that we know
link |
02:35:15.340
how to solve engineering problems to solving it that way.
link |
02:35:18.140
And then there's also the other version, which is, you know,
link |
02:35:21.160
why do we romanticize this meat vehicle
link |
02:35:24.580
that ultimately is just the thing that carries the brain,
link |
02:35:28.500
maybe we can more and more convert ourselves
link |
02:35:30.460
into the digital realm.
link |
02:35:32.540
This is where like Neuralink have the computer interfaces
link |
02:35:35.660
and then achieve immortality in the space of information
link |
02:35:38.660
and the digital space versus the biology space.
link |
02:35:40.940
That stuff's interesting too, I agree.
link |
02:35:42.660
Again, I think, you know, we have enough resources
link |
02:35:45.980
and we should just try all the parallel tracks.
link |
02:35:48.060
You know, it's great that we have people
link |
02:35:50.260
just trying to make our bodies work.
link |
02:35:51.520
It's great that we have people trying to upload
link |
02:35:54.540
or improve brain scanning.
link |
02:35:56.560
It's also great that we have just like people
link |
02:35:58.500
improving cryonics.
link |
02:35:59.500
So like we could just like, you know,
link |
02:36:01.300
go to sleep in the freezer and eventually,
link |
02:36:04.140
hopefully sometime in the future, you know,
link |
02:36:06.620
Hal Finney is gonna be able to wake up,
link |
02:36:08.740
all of this, you know, anyone who gets cryo chronically
link |
02:36:13.740
frozen today will be able to wake up,
link |
02:36:15.260
but you know, that's a bet, right?
link |
02:36:17.300
That's the last resort.
link |
02:36:18.700
And then the other interesting thing
link |
02:36:20.340
about the like extreme uploading approach, right,
link |
02:36:23.980
is we're excited about space.
link |
02:36:27.300
And one of the points that a lot of science
link |
02:36:32.620
or like hard science fiction types make
link |
02:36:34.460
is that, you know, if you want to explore space,
link |
02:36:36.000
that's a lot easier if you're not a human, right?
link |
02:36:38.400
Like one example of this is that, you know,
link |
02:36:40.820
in the context of humans, we're talking about like,
link |
02:36:42.920
oh, we're gonna be able to go to the moon,
link |
02:36:44.340
oh, we're gonna be able to go to Mars,
link |
02:36:46.180
but there's this project called Starshot, I believe, right?
link |
02:36:49.580
That's basically trying to send spacecraft
link |
02:36:52.900
to mini spacecrafts to Alpha Centauri,
link |
02:36:55.220
and they literally believe that they're going to be able
link |
02:36:58.180
to get spacecraft over to Alpha Centauri
link |
02:37:00.020
like four light years away by like the 2060s.
link |
02:37:03.440
Now, I mean.
link |
02:37:04.280
By traveling close to the speed of light, yeah.
link |
02:37:05.540
Exactly, like, so the way it works is, you know,
link |
02:37:08.260
you have these light sails,
link |
02:37:09.300
like you basically take these a spacecraft
link |
02:37:10.980
and you shine a laser at it,
link |
02:37:12.380
and the laser is insanely strong,
link |
02:37:13.940
quickly accelerated at a hundred Gs or,
link |
02:37:17.060
no, I think it was 10,000 Gs
link |
02:37:18.780
until it gets to 20% of the speed of light,
link |
02:37:20.900
and then, you know, it goes on your merry way, right?
link |
02:37:22.940
So if you wants to be in,
link |
02:37:27.340
like personally explore the Alpha Centauri system
link |
02:37:30.100
within like two centuries or one century,
link |
02:37:33.600
then, you know, being a robot is like,
link |
02:37:37.520
by far the most practical way to do it,
link |
02:37:39.380
because there's no way that a human being
link |
02:37:40.820
can survive 10,000 Gs.
link |
02:37:42.480
So it's definitely interesting longterm,
link |
02:37:45.220
but at the same time,
link |
02:37:47.260
there's definitely a lot of like psychological hangups
link |
02:37:50.060
and a lot of like deep philosophy
link |
02:37:52.100
that we'll just have to grapple with to get there.
link |
02:37:55.660
I think what it hangs on the topic
link |
02:37:57.940
of whether we can convert consciousness
link |
02:37:59.900
into an engineering problem.
link |
02:38:01.420
So like, is consciousness tied to our biology?
link |
02:38:05.180
Because the moment we can convert consciousness
link |
02:38:07.740
into a digital form,
link |
02:38:09.100
then we can send it with that light sail
link |
02:38:11.860
to Alpha Centauri.
link |
02:38:12.820
Until then, a robot is not carrying anything
link |
02:38:16.380
except maybe some basic knowledge like Wikipedia.
link |
02:38:18.580
It's not carrying the flame of human consciousness.
link |
02:38:21.620
I have high hopes for converting consciousness
link |
02:38:25.580
into an engineering problem.
link |
02:38:27.460
In fact, I think it's not as difficult as people think.
link |
02:38:30.180
I'm like, yeah, I agree with that.
link |
02:38:31.540
I'm definitely in the camp that consciousness
link |
02:38:33.900
is a property of the algorithm
link |
02:38:35.900
and not a property of a brain structure.
link |
02:38:38.660
The other fun, like the kinds of philosophical things
link |
02:38:41.500
we'd have to grapple with is like,
link |
02:38:43.700
once you upload yourself, like you can hit Control C,
link |
02:38:46.140
you know, like it wouldn't be lovely
link |
02:38:48.500
to have like 10 copies of Alex Friedman
link |
02:38:50.740
and then like we could just interview everyone.
link |
02:38:53.380
So this is, I mean, this is, I have to ask this question.
link |
02:38:56.180
It's a difficult one,
link |
02:38:57.380
which I don't think it'd be wonderful, first of all.
link |
02:39:01.660
Sure.
link |
02:39:02.500
So in the following way,
link |
02:39:04.300
and this has to do with immortality as well,
link |
02:39:06.340
there's something about scarcity that creates value.
link |
02:39:11.460
Or there's a bunch of philosophers,
link |
02:39:13.340
Viktor Frankl, Bernard Williams, Ernest Becker,
link |
02:39:16.260
they argue that death or the scarcity of life
link |
02:39:20.140
creates meaning.
link |
02:39:21.380
The reason we, life is beautiful,
link |
02:39:24.420
the reason so many moments of experience
link |
02:39:27.660
of love or delicious food,
link |
02:39:31.620
all those things are made delicious
link |
02:39:34.460
because they're finite, because they end,
link |
02:39:36.900
and because we don't have that many of them.
link |
02:39:39.620
And there's a kind of worry
link |
02:39:40.940
that if we extend the human lifespan,
link |
02:39:43.780
if we achieve immortality, or if we, God forbid,
link |
02:39:46.900
clone me multiple times,
link |
02:39:51.380
then you lose the richness of what it means
link |
02:39:53.940
to have this life, to have this experience.
link |
02:39:56.980
Is that worry you at all?
link |
02:39:58.420
Do you think there's some aspect
link |
02:39:59.780
to which death does in fact give meaning to life?
link |
02:40:02.780
I guess like the one historical parallel,
link |
02:40:05.460
and this might be a bit unfair,
link |
02:40:06.900
is that there have been philosophers
link |
02:40:09.060
that have said things like,
link |
02:40:11.340
war gives meaning to human collectives,
link |
02:40:14.500
and the struggle for supremacy between nations and races
link |
02:40:18.860
is this big driver of progress
link |
02:40:21.060
that ensures that everyone strives to be their best.
link |
02:40:25.220
And of course, this viewpoint got into the head
link |
02:40:28.900
of a crazy Austrian guy, and 20 years later,
link |
02:40:30.940
his soldiers were shooting at my grandparents.
link |
02:40:33.260
So these days we don't really have that,
link |
02:40:36.900
but yet life still feels meaningful.
link |
02:40:39.500
We've still found other ways to,
link |
02:40:43.900
there's still a striving for technological progress.
link |
02:40:47.220
There's still a striving for self improvements in general.
link |
02:40:52.740
And it turns out that you don't actually need
link |
02:40:55.380
to have existential conflicts in order to have that.
link |
02:40:58.780
Now, maybe you need conflict,
link |
02:40:59.940
but we have other kinds of conflict, right?
link |
02:41:01.300
Like we have competition between businesses,
link |
02:41:03.700
competition between political ideologies,
link |
02:41:05.460
competition between projects.
link |
02:41:07.580
And so these are, like whatever the psychological needs are,
link |
02:41:12.620
like they're just our substitutes for it.
link |
02:41:14.500
So I guess like, yeah, so if we trying to say,
link |
02:41:19.380
I feel like once we start living to the age of 200,
link |
02:41:24.660
then like, I'm just intuitively expecting
link |
02:41:27.220
that we'll see substitutes emerge in the same way.
link |
02:41:31.700
Yeah, we'll create conflicts of other sorts
link |
02:41:35.740
that lead to less human suffering than wars do.
link |
02:41:38.900
Like we'll just start playing Diablo four, five, six,
link |
02:41:42.420
cause you die in video games.
link |
02:41:44.180
So maybe we'll get some of the inkling of scarcity
link |
02:41:48.460
through the activities we partake in
link |
02:41:50.420
as opposed to our own body dying.
link |
02:41:52.380
I mean, I feel shitty when I, like you can,
link |
02:41:55.500
I remember in Diablo three, you can play in hardcore mode
link |
02:42:00.340
where if you die in the game, your character's dead.
link |
02:42:03.140
Maybe we'll get the richness that we currently get from life
link |
02:42:09.500
by having like little artificial versions
link |
02:42:11.940
of ourselves that die.
link |
02:42:12.940
Interesting enough, as I've just like personally
link |
02:42:15.780
spent more time in this world, I've started realizing
link |
02:42:18.180
that there is a concept of like real finiteness
link |
02:42:22.020
that still exists and it might even still be a thing
link |
02:42:25.060
that provides meaning that doesn't require anyone
link |
02:42:27.020
to actually die.
link |
02:42:28.180
Like for example, like how many people from middle school
link |
02:42:32.180
or even high school are yours?
link |
02:42:34.820
Like do you still talk to regularly?
link |
02:42:36.660
I happen to be close friends with like four or five of them.
link |
02:42:39.620
Okay, well, like in my case, the answer is zero
link |
02:42:41.500
for middle school and two for high school.
link |
02:42:43.060
But you're right.
link |
02:42:43.900
Right.
link |
02:42:44.740
It dropped close to zero.
link |
02:42:45.580
Exactly, it dropped a lot, right?
link |
02:42:47.100
And so like there's a lot of these just like relationships
link |
02:42:50.540
that end up being very finite.
link |
02:42:52.620
A person changes their, I feel like a person changes enough
link |
02:42:56.420
of their worldview after 25 years.
link |
02:42:58.260
Was there even a study about this?
link |
02:42:59.620
Something like a person and themselves 25 years later
link |
02:43:03.140
are about as different as like two different people
link |
02:43:06.700
or something like this.
link |
02:43:08.020
So, I mean, just like you can have conflict
link |
02:43:10.940
without bloodshed, I think you can have finiteness
link |
02:43:14.780
and even the necessary sorrows of finiteness
link |
02:43:18.580
that give meaning without like literally anyone
link |
02:43:21.420
having to end their life.
link |
02:43:22.780
And hopefully if we do extend our life,
link |
02:43:24.660
we'll figure out ways to extend the period of time
link |
02:43:27.980
where there's neuroplasticity
link |
02:43:30.340
to where we could change our worldviews continually
link |
02:43:33.980
throughout that time.
link |
02:43:34.820
So you can have these different phases of life.
link |
02:43:38.860
I thought it would be fun to hear you speak a little Russian.
link |
02:43:41.540
Do you speak Russian?
link |
02:43:42.460
Yes, of course.
link |
02:43:44.260
How did your Russian roots help you?
link |
02:43:48.420
That's an interesting question.
link |
02:43:50.660
What can you say in Russian about that?
link |
02:43:52.740
What can I say about my Russian roots?
link |
02:43:55.860
When I just look at other projects,
link |
02:44:03.700
other people in the blockchain industry,
link |
02:44:07.820
sometimes when I look at what Russian people are doing,
link |
02:44:12.620
what other people are doing,
link |
02:44:14.300
I can sometimes feel that these people who are Russian
link |
02:44:21.180
have something that feels similar to me,
link |
02:44:27.860
but I don't know how to explain it.
link |
02:44:32.220
Do you think there's, so for people who don't speak Russian,
link |
02:44:35.620
that Vitalik said that there is something to the spirit
link |
02:44:40.860
of the people that are Russian
link |
02:44:42.220
that are working in the cryptocurrency world
link |
02:44:44.940
that is a little bit different
link |
02:44:46.820
and it's something that connects to some kind of aspect
link |
02:44:51.300
of your own self, some kind of roots there.
link |
02:44:54.500
And it's kind of interesting.
link |
02:44:56.580
Do you think that there's, does it make you sad
link |
02:44:59.260
that there's these two different worlds
link |
02:45:01.660
that are sort of in part disconnected by language?
link |
02:45:07.420
And I'm sure the same could be the case with China
link |
02:45:09.820
and other parts of the world,
link |
02:45:11.660
where the language slows the transmission of the beauty
link |
02:45:17.140
of the culture in a certain kind of way
link |
02:45:19.340
where you can't truly collaborate.
link |
02:45:21.380
Like you can all speak English,
link |
02:45:23.180
so you're collaborating on maybe a technical level,
link |
02:45:25.820
but you're not collaborating on the level
link |
02:45:28.380
of some deep human connection.
link |
02:45:30.660
Do you see that being able to speak both languages?
link |
02:45:34.140
There's definitely benefits, I think,
link |
02:45:35.860
to be able to speak multiple languages.
link |
02:45:38.980
And once you can, you discover that even your mindset changes
link |
02:45:44.980
while you're speaking in one language versus the other.
link |
02:45:47.660
People have told me this, like, when I speak Russian,
link |
02:45:50.460
I sound more, I guess, to the point and pragmatic.
link |
02:45:54.380
When I speak Chinese, I sound more cute.
link |
02:45:56.420
When I speak English, I'm something else.
link |
02:46:00.940
I guess there's definitely a richness that you're missing
link |
02:46:06.980
if you're only in one of these language bubbles.
link |
02:46:10.580
But I guess the arguments on the other side would be that
link |
02:46:14.940
if everyone spoke the same language,
link |
02:46:16.540
then there would just be one bubble.
link |
02:46:19.300
This is the challenge, I think.
link |
02:46:22.500
There are actually benefits to having cultural diversity,
link |
02:46:25.660
and you definitely don't want the entire world
link |
02:46:27.540
to be too conformist.
link |
02:46:30.180
Well, one of the interesting things about crypto
link |
02:46:31.780
is that it's just a culture that actually manages
link |
02:46:34.780
to somehow have its uniqueness and even preserve its independence
link |
02:46:40.180
from all of these surrounding countries
link |
02:46:42.940
despite being embedded in all of them.
link |
02:46:44.980
So it spans outside of the geographic boundaries,
link |
02:46:48.780
and language in some ways does as well.
link |
02:46:51.020
And the way these cultures, these bubbles are created,
link |
02:46:54.500
I mean, they overlap in interesting ways.
link |
02:46:56.300
It's almost like a hierarchy,
link |
02:46:57.420
and the same is the case of the crypto world.
link |
02:47:00.020
There's communities associated with these cryptocurrencies.
link |
02:47:03.460
There's communities within those communities, and it's...
link |
02:47:06.900
Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely sad
link |
02:47:09.460
whenever these groups are fighting each other,
link |
02:47:13.420
and it's definitely good for them if people can cooperate more.
link |
02:47:19.780
But at the same time, just having groups of people
link |
02:47:24.460
that have different kinds of life experiences,
link |
02:47:27.740
there's definitely something to benefit from that.
link |
02:47:30.260
So let me ask one last question.
link |
02:47:31.940
I don't think I asked you last time
link |
02:47:33.780
the ridiculous question about the meaning of life.
link |
02:47:37.140
You know, Dostoevsky said,
link |
02:47:38.380
beauty will save the world.
link |
02:47:40.100
Krasata spacet mir.
link |
02:47:43.820
Some people believe money is a big part of happiness,
link |
02:47:46.740
and you've turned...
link |
02:47:48.860
First of all, you've made a lot of money.
link |
02:47:50.340
You turned away a lot of money.
link |
02:47:51.820
You turned away a lot of power.
link |
02:47:53.860
So you're a fascinating person to ask,
link |
02:47:56.220
what do you think is meaning to life?
link |
02:47:59.580
The thing that I've realized with money
link |
02:48:01.300
as I have experienced both having little of it
link |
02:48:05.460
and having a lot of it is that the benefit of...
link |
02:48:12.300
You can get the most out of money if you think of it
link |
02:48:15.580
not as something that lets you do and have more things,
link |
02:48:18.740
but as something that lets you worry about fewer things, right?
link |
02:48:22.780
Like, if your savings are just nonzero at all,
link |
02:48:28.300
then you don't have to worry as much about losing your job.
link |
02:48:31.220
And if you feel like you have a job
link |
02:48:35.020
that just really conflicts with your values,
link |
02:48:36.900
then if you have even six months saved up,
link |
02:48:39.020
that just makes it easier for you to say,
link |
02:48:40.420
bye bye, I'm going to do something else.
link |
02:48:42.620
If you have more money, then you can not worry about
link |
02:48:49.620
even what you're doing needing to be profitable at all.
link |
02:48:53.620
Once you get more money, then you can choose transportation options
link |
02:48:59.180
and food options that just have less hassle in your life
link |
02:49:02.420
and allow you to be lazier.
link |
02:49:04.300
So, this aspect of just reducing troubles
link |
02:49:11.340
and opening up room for other things, I think, is a big part of it.
link |
02:49:16.180
If you instead think of money as being this positive
link |
02:49:20.140
or this thing that gives you stuff
link |
02:49:22.380
and you try to derive meaning from the stuff,
link |
02:49:25.740
I think that's much more likely to be a road to basically squandering that opportunity.
link |
02:49:32.260
So, yeah, and I guess my philosophy on that is definitely more subtractive than additive there.
link |
02:49:38.380
But once you have enough money that you don't have to worry about the money,
link |
02:49:41.660
you're burdened with another question, which is of meaning.
link |
02:49:45.980
Do you think there's meaning to it all?
link |
02:49:47.900
Or it seems like your own life,
link |
02:49:51.660
you're trying to build cool stuff that alleviates some level of suffering in the world.
link |
02:49:59.220
Well, I mean, one way to think about it is like,
link |
02:50:02.380
think back to how you thought about life when you were in school, right?
link |
02:50:06.540
In school, this act is interesting to think about, right?
link |
02:50:09.020
Because in a lot of ways, it's just totally outside of bounds of the kinds of systems,
link |
02:50:16.300
like social systems that we live in as adults,
link |
02:50:19.460
or maybe not, like maybe things like academia are intended to replicate parts of school.
link |
02:50:23.540
Like, first of all, school is very totalitarian, right?
link |
02:50:26.180
Like, you have to follow the teacher's instructions,
link |
02:50:30.500
the bulk of your schedule is like forced to be in particular areas,
link |
02:50:33.780
and you can control the real purview from leaving the grounds during this period of time,
link |
02:50:43.420
assign a lot of homework.
link |
02:50:45.180
But at the same time, also, school is a bit of a post scarcity utopia
link |
02:50:50.220
in that you just don't have to worry about getting resources for yourself.
link |
02:50:53.500
And we've both lived through 12 years of that, right?
link |
02:50:57.660
So, what does that say about us?
link |
02:50:59.580
And I think one thing of aspects, obviously, is that there's definitely an easiness to living life
link |
02:51:10.700
if all of your decisions are made for you.
link |
02:51:12.940
And one of the challenges of adulthood, I guess, is moving to this world
link |
02:51:20.140
where all your choices are much more self directed,
link |
02:51:22.860
and you just have to learn to live and deal with that.
link |
02:51:26.540
Yeah, dealing with the burden of freedom, in some sense.
link |
02:51:30.380
It's actually interesting, because in some ways, I feel like even my first five years
link |
02:51:38.780
of doing Ethereum things, my life was not even all that self directed,
link |
02:51:43.420
because a lot of it was just responding to obligations.
link |
02:51:47.420
Like someone said, oh, come to speak at this event in Korea.
link |
02:51:51.020
Okay, come to speak at this thing in Taiwan.
link |
02:51:52.940
Okay.
link |
02:51:55.660
For Ethereum to launch, we need this particular piece to be done and tested.
link |
02:52:00.780
Okay, work on that.
link |
02:52:01.820
We need some proof of stake algorithm, work on that.
link |
02:52:05.820
And the last year of COVID life, basically, I was holed up in Singapore for much of it.
link |
02:52:14.300
And it gave me a lot more alone time.
link |
02:52:16.620
I had much less travel.
link |
02:52:18.060
And that was definitely a very new and interesting experience for me.
link |
02:52:21.500
Would you characterize it by sadness, melancholy, hope, dreaming, innovative period?
link |
02:52:31.180
How would you characterize that alone time?
link |
02:52:33.260
Some of all five, definitely some self discovery.
link |
02:52:37.260
I definitely did make this very deliberate decision that, okay, I have this time,
link |
02:52:43.420
and I'm going to actually make something meaningful out of it.
link |
02:52:48.780
So one example of the things I did is I just actually started
link |
02:52:53.980
listening to your audio books and podcasts much more.
link |
02:52:57.580
Just this year, I basically discovered that the podcast space is real for the first time,
link |
02:53:02.700
I guess.
link |
02:53:03.500
Like before that, there would be things that I would get interviewed for,
link |
02:53:06.300
but I was not mentally incorporate this idea that podcasts are a thing that you can go listen to.
link |
02:53:16.220
And this year I did.
link |
02:53:17.660
My friend, Carl Lafleur, one of the optimism people, recommended hardcore history to me.
link |
02:53:24.380
And so I went ahead and just listened to all the hardcore histories.
link |
02:53:27.260
And then after that, I listened to like 10 Luxfried mids and then a bunch of others.
link |
02:53:32.940
And after that, I also got into audio books.
link |
02:53:37.740
Oh, I listened to the entire The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the whole thing, 45 hours.
link |
02:53:44.460
That was fascinating.
link |
02:53:45.580
So let me ask about Dan, because Dan is going to love hearing this.
link |
02:53:48.540
I'm going to send it to him.
link |
02:53:50.460
Do you have a period of history, whether it's Dan or in general,
link |
02:53:54.220
that you draw for your own life, like kind of thinking about the world,
link |
02:53:58.060
about human nature that you go to?
link |
02:53:59.900
Is it World War II?
link |
02:54:01.100
Is it Wrath of the Khans, the Genghis Khan?
link |
02:54:05.420
Is it some other more ancient history?
link |
02:54:08.380
Is it World War I?
link |
02:54:09.660
Is there something that kind of echoes with you in the voice of Dan or anyone else that you connect to?
link |
02:54:16.460
I feel like the 1930s and 40s are fascinating because they force you to really grapple with
link |
02:54:21.660
the question of where does evil come from, right?
link |
02:54:25.100
The sort of mental puzzle that I've always had in my head is, on the one hand,
link |
02:54:31.740
things like the Holocaust happened.
link |
02:54:33.660
But on the other hand, if you just go and have a coffee with people,
link |
02:54:38.140
then a hundred times out of a hundred, everyone just seems so nice.
link |
02:54:41.180
Yeah, exactly.
link |
02:54:43.900
How do you kind of reconcile the macro and the micro there, right?
link |
02:54:47.580
And that's the sort of thing that's very difficult if you don't have a lot of,
link |
02:54:56.540
I guess, the right kind of personal experience,
link |
02:54:58.940
especially if your personal experience starts off being sheltered, like it was for me, right?
link |
02:55:03.340
I know the stereotype is that the nerds get bullied in school, but actually for me,
link |
02:55:07.980
in my school experience was just being treated with kindness by everyone.
link |
02:55:11.020
Yeah.
link |
02:55:12.220
So that definitely made it harder to understand things.
link |
02:55:15.820
I remember actually being pretty blindsided when I started Ethereum.
link |
02:55:19.580
And then within six months, there started being fights over who would get more shares
link |
02:55:24.460
if Ethereum turned out to be a company.
link |
02:55:26.460
And then I suggested we should just make it to be a non profit,
link |
02:55:29.100
and somehow that ended up upsetting people.
link |
02:55:34.860
So the fascinating thing for me is that I've been obviously reading and listening to the history,
link |
02:55:40.620
and then at the same time, just observing things happening in the crypto world.
link |
02:55:45.020
And so one of my interesting mental intuitions that I've gotten is that I think most evil
link |
02:55:55.580
doesn't come out of greed, it comes out of fear.
link |
02:55:58.700
And one example of this in Ethereum lands, right, is I think the part of Ethereum history
link |
02:56:08.220
where I thought that the Ethereum community was at its lowest,
link |
02:56:10.460
and even when I personally was at my lowest.
link |
02:56:12.540
Now, if you go back to the Dow fork in 2016, right, so the Dow hack happened,
link |
02:56:17.820
and then we made this controversial decision to change the Ethereum protocol.
link |
02:56:21.980
And then there was that Ethereum Classic split.
link |
02:56:28.300
And as soon as that Ethereum Classic split happened, there was a lot of anger everywhere.
link |
02:56:34.860
And there started especially being anger when the price of ETC started taking up.
link |
02:56:41.420
So this was the time when Ether started off being $13 and Ethereum Classic started at zero,
link |
02:56:46.860
but then suddenly there was this one day when like ETH dropped to 12.5,
link |
02:56:50.780
ETC went up to 0.5, and then they dropped more.
link |
02:56:55.100
And people were saying things like,
link |
02:56:57.980
oh, this whole Ethereum Classic is just a psyop by the Bitcoin community
link |
02:57:03.900
and just the wealthy Bitcoiners trying to destroy Ethereum.
link |
02:57:06.860
And in the back of my mind, I knew that that wasn't entirely true.
link |
02:57:11.020
There definitely were Bitcoiners.
link |
02:57:12.460
But at the same time, I think blaming disagreements on foreign interference,
link |
02:57:20.860
like this is the sort of thing that countries, governments do all the time,
link |
02:57:25.820
it's a very convenient excuse because it allows you to just blame these things
link |
02:57:31.260
that are happening on the foreigners and avoid actually grappling with the facts that like,
link |
02:57:36.380
well, no, actually you have people in your very own community
link |
02:57:38.860
who just disagree with you and have a different belief.
link |
02:57:41.660
And I feel like the Ethereum community during that time
link |
02:57:46.540
did not do a very good job of grappling with that.
link |
02:57:48.780
And I feel like I during that time did not do a very good job of grappling with that.
link |
02:57:52.940
And so there was a lot of blaming the Bitcoiners.
link |
02:57:56.060
There were also even a lot of people calling for us to use trademark law
link |
02:58:00.460
and basically sue exchanges and try to prevent them from listing Ethereum Classic.
link |
02:58:05.660
And to me, that was very unethical, right?
link |
02:58:07.500
Like basically using the government as a weapon to try to attack the other cryptocurrency
link |
02:58:17.180
and destroy it goes completely against the ideals of freedom
link |
02:58:21.420
and things that at least in theory were supposed to stand for.
link |
02:58:25.580
But in that particular time, basically what was happening was that the ETC price was rising.
link |
02:58:32.700
And at the same time, the ETH price was dropping in lockstep.
link |
02:58:36.060
And there were a lot of Bitcoin people basically saying this is the end of Ethereum.
link |
02:58:40.140
And I think a lot of people really were afraid that
link |
02:58:42.780
Ethereum would be just like completely destroyed as a result of this.
link |
02:58:45.900
And so that's where the anger came from.
link |
02:58:48.700
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
link |
02:58:50.300
It came from the fear.
link |
02:58:51.260
And that's what allowed people to rationalize in abandonment of principles
link |
02:58:56.940
that I think they would not have accepted in other circumstances.
link |
02:59:01.740
And I definitely, to some extent, played along with this myself.
link |
02:59:06.700
And I do definitely regret that to some extent.
link |
02:59:10.060
Well, I definitely regret the excesses completely.
link |
02:59:17.020
And then obviously, Bitcoin block size war, similar sort of stuff happened.
link |
02:59:21.580
So that insight was interesting because it does mentally make a lot of sense
link |
02:59:30.700
when you're actually afraid that unless you act in some way
link |
02:59:34.220
that your entire world is going to collapse.
link |
02:59:36.300
It's much easier to just rationalize forgetting your principles
link |
02:59:39.820
and doing whatever you have to just save the specific thing that you care about.
link |
02:59:44.140
It feels like the right thing to do, the brave thing to do is in the face of fear
link |
02:59:51.660
to still have compassion, to still have love as opposed to hate.
link |
02:59:56.780
So the darkest moments, the toughest moments of human history
link |
03:00:01.500
are those where fear is everywhere.
link |
03:00:04.700
And despite that, the way to get out of that is through love, not giving into the fear.
link |
03:00:14.860
And again, that's the lesson that you draw from all those moments of history.
link |
03:00:20.540
Yeah.
link |
03:00:21.660
Well, I like you have in terms of those coffee and the kindness that people have,
link |
03:00:26.060
it does seem that everybody has the capacity for evil
link |
03:00:29.340
and everybody has the capacity for love.
link |
03:00:31.500
And you just have to create mechanisms and incentives
link |
03:00:35.100
that prioritize the latter over the former.
link |
03:00:38.380
Vitalik, you're one of the most interesting people I've gotten a chance to talk to.
link |
03:00:44.060
Thank you so much for talking to me.
link |
03:00:45.580
I hope we get a chance to talk again.
link |
03:00:47.500
I hope I can at least be some small part.
link |
03:00:50.220
This would be awesome in a podcast with you and Dan Carlin.
link |
03:00:53.340
That would be an awesome conversation.
link |
03:00:56.380
Thank you so much for doing so much incredible technical innovation
link |
03:01:01.820
that inspires the computer scientists, the economists,
link |
03:01:05.900
inspires the world and what technology can do.
link |
03:01:08.860
And now with longevity, I do hope we live a very long time
link |
03:01:14.620
and play Diablo to make that long time fun.
link |
03:01:19.580
Thank you so much for talking today.
link |
03:01:20.860
Thank you too, Alex.
link |
03:01:21.580
This was great.
link |
03:01:23.260
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vitalik Buterin
link |
03:01:26.060
and thank you to Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon,
link |
03:01:29.420
Indeed, Four Sigmatic and BetterHelp.
link |
03:01:32.860
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
03:01:36.620
And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela.
link |
03:01:40.780
When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in,
link |
03:01:44.540
he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
link |
03:01:47.820
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.