#251 Glen Weyl: Radical Markets – Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by top down top towel is addressing the talent shortage in the blockchain space connecting companies of all sizes with the world's best blockchain engineers if you're looking to scale your team check out top Cal calm slash epicenter hello and welcome to episode 2 show which talks about the projects technologies in startups driving Accenture ization and the global blushing revolution my name is Fran

Fabien clain and I'm here today with Glen whale he is a political economist and he's the principal researcher at Microsoft Research and also visiting research scholar at Princeton so he's been it is PhD in economics at Princeton Lewis at the University of Chicago as a professor and now is assistant professor now is it at Winston he's also written a book called radical markets together with Eric Posner and so we're gonna speak quite a bit about radical markets there's some interesting ideas overlap with the blockchain space and he's recently also started dabbling in the blockchain space and there's some of these ideas are being applied here so yeah thanks so much for joining us at

Eglin my pleasure so just before you get started you know asking you okay so you're an economist and he said no political economist you would call yourself and I think that's also a theme that comes up a little bit in the book this contrast between maybe some of the traditional way that economics was applied before about in today's can you explain like what's a political economist and how is it different from an economist well before there was economics which didn't really exist as a field until the late 19th century there was a field called political economy but political economy gave birth not just to economics but to sociology political science

many contemporary fields it's that tradition of broad and bold social thinking Karl Marx was a political economist someone named Henry George who I really admire was a political economist at John Stuart Mill was political economist and he was as much a philosopher as he was a modern economist so it's that tradition of not focusing on just the narrow purview of what's considered to be one contemporary field but trying to take seriously the broad problems of society in all their dimensions that has increasingly become important to my work and I want to reclaim that tradition fantastic that's great yeah I mean I say economics as

well as an undergrad and in grad school a bit and this is one of the things I miss anyway right that you would beat things about like let's say Mises or Adam Smith and all those things and then they're not taught at all but in economic context yeah absolutely now how has your academic work evolved and how did that lead to the work on radical markets so I was a pretty standard economist early in my career very early in my career before I I really before even got my PhD I was working on some quite ambitious projects one about applying machine learning to economics

one about the way in which financial speculation could be harmful to the economy and I got discouraged by colleagues from pursuing these I ended up pursuing much more standard things some especially things related to price theory which is something which you as a University of Chicago graduate probably got familiar with and it turned out that those things that were made more ambitious that I was pursuing have ended up becoming huge movements within the discipline of economics and this other stuff you know was fine and nice and solid and I'm proud of it but it really didn't add up to that much and around that same time I started coming up with

these ideas of quadratic voting and other things and together they really offered a pretty comprehensive vision of how to design a better society and that was very exciting for me but I realized that while that was a very exciting vision the economics profession wasn't really a perfect vehicle for getting those ideas out there the you know maybe eventually people would come around to being interested in accepting them but the format of the standard journals and so forth wasn't really into that sort of

practical path-breaking type ideas and so I ended up realizing at the same time that the world was going into a real crisis you know with 2016 with all the rise of populism brexit what was going on in the United States I started to feel that on the one hand things didn't fit so well with the economics profession and on the other hand the world desperately needed some vision to respond to all these events some positive progressive pro-market Pro technology solution to the problems of inequality and populism and so forth and so that's the reason I ended up writing

the book was this combination of sort of frustration with the standard channels and on the other hand what seems so clear in terms of the world's need for a for a more path breaking vision great now use the term radical markets and and sometimes in the book or I think in bukas uses it you know in capitals as as this term but one of the things that I struggled a little bit is that it felt to me that there were sort of you know very creative market-based original approaches to solving a range of different problems in the book so there's things about property immigration like and we're going to speak about some of

those but I struggled a little bit to see how you know what is the the overall coherent thing that's that unites them so can he define what are radical markets sort of in a general way so radical markets are markets that on the one hand are much more complete free and open than existing markets but at the same time we associate typically markets with inequality and often with political conflict and these are markets that at the same time as being much more complete free markets are radically egalitarian and radically inclusive and I we would argue can address a lot of

the political conflicts that we've been having so we mean radical in a variety of different senses it's both the tie to a historical tradition called the radicals that United egalitarianism with something more like what modern libertarianism is but we also mean the fact that it would fundamentally change society and that it would change it in sort of the way that many people on the Left and vision but that it would do it through market mechanisms so it's a combination of these different meanings and of these different political forces okay now let's try to make a little bit

of a link to blockchain so what has your exposure to this been how long have you been interested in that or following that well not very long it really came out of italic deuteron about eight months ago tweeting about one of the ideas that went into the book and then after that I offered to send him a copy of the book and he read it and he sent me about 20 pages of comments on it and then he ended up writing about it and that that's created a link between these communities but you know the way I've come to see things is frankly I'm not a huge blockchain enthusiast I don't necessarily think that as a technology per se it's going to succeed I mean

there's a lot of questions there but I think that there is a social movement around it which is in some sense more important and more fundamental and more exciting than the technology or the speculation around the technology itself and that movement to me is one that is based on an idea that we need to make power as diffuse and equally held within society as possible and that technology and market mechanisms can play a critical role in achieving that goal that's something I firmly believe in and I

think if anything the problem is that the blockchain world has not clearly articulated what that society needs to look like it's more like a technology that points of it in that direction but precisely what it means or what it would look like is very vague and radical markets even though it wasn't conceived of as for the blockchain world I think can be thought of as an attempt to describe in some detail precisely what the world of sort of decentralized market driven equality could could look like okay great maybe you can expand a little bit on it

so you think that a blockchain like you skeptical blockchain succeeding like how do you look at blockchain succeeding what would that mean and how do you think it will fail so I think the things that I worry about most in the blockchain space is that the goal of blockchain is decentralisation now decentralization requires not just that you have a bunch of nodes running but that they actually be independent of each other and that in turn requires a certain amount of equality there have been many many societies that have started with

some principle of decentralization that have ended up incredibly dominated by an oligarchic elite the Internet in its original design was that way the Russian economy when they privatized after communism gave everyone an equal number of shares to all the companies and very quickly things got under the control of a very few so in order to understand whether a system is not just decentralized but sustainably decentralized you have to look at and analyze the effects of the rules of that system using economic theory and political science and so forth and the problem is there are so many leading indicators within the blockchain

space that the system is headed towards oligarchy rather than towards true to centralization so I think that while the goal of a decentralized system is extremely admirable the actual designs that exist at present aren't pointing in that way another example I would give is if you think of something like the central land which is a you know virtual world where people own territory and you know they wanted to decentralize control of it well that that's a good aim but what's in fact ended up happening is a lot of speculators have bought up a lot of the land and now it's going to be

under the control really of a few people who are dominating the whole system so unless you actually design new rules just the desire to make something decentralize is not sufficient you actually need a design of a social system which inherently promotes the centralization within the public chains the problem is that the existing system formalizes property that's the whole idea of it it formalizes ownership right that's that's what a blockchain does but it does not formalize people it's based on anonymity it's based on pseudonymity so there is no notion of an individual person and any system that formalizes ownership and property but

does not formalize people will inherently tend to serve capital and ownership rather than people and so and in fact that's precisely what we've seen happening if you looked at the inequality within aetherium if you that as a microcosm of the world I could guarantee you that it's more unequal than any society in the world so it's supposed to be serving to centralization in fact it's serving a huge amount of centralization of power now that doesn't mean it has to but at present that's what's happening okay that no that is a extremely eloquent I think criticism off blockchain and and I must say I think it is very accurate to in my own estimation actually there is a fundamental

prerequisite to building block chain systems that are more egalitarian and to have you know less inequality and that is having you know this is concept new blocks amount of self solving identity I thought you people have individual identities and they are like unfortunate clear identities but that they're they're controlled by the people themselves as opposed to like issued by the state and that seems to be a fundamental prerequisite to creating something like that and I think that would also be a fundamental prerequisite for having quadratic voting I completely agree with what you're saying and I I think that that is one of the most fundamental issues though it's not the only fundamental issue that is a problem for existing blockchain environments I

mean another fundamental issue is that there exists no current system of voting or of property redistribution or I mean there's a variety of problems but I do think the identity problem is one of the most fundamental ones yeah yeah ok well let's let's speak a bit about this idea a new book off property being monopoly can you explain what you mean with that so if you own a large plot of land in the centre of a very important city no one else can get access to that land unless you consent you could sit on that

land and hoard it and let it increase in value and never do anything with it and still make a huge return on it this is true not just of land this is true of spectrum right now we're probably reaching our audience over Wi-Fi but at least in the United States must much of the spectrum that Wi-Fi could run on is controlled by a bunch of the television and radio stations that used to come over the air that almost no one listens to anymore those get in the way of new technologies and new development everyone recognizes that in some sense intellectual property is a form of monopoly but why just intellectual

property any scarce out asset that isn't perfectly replicable is a form of monopoly and in fact all that intellectual property is is sort of owning a part of the idea space whereas real property is owning a part of the real world and the individual ownership over these things the failure of them to be allocated by competitive bidding the fact that you have to go in to negotiate with someone who's going to seek profit or even just be lazy and refused to engage in a transaction with someone who can use it better those all are impediments not just economic development but also to equal access to opportunities and resources for various members of society so one of these

issues that you see is let's say I have a plot of land I am rich right I don't need to use it in particular way and I can just sit on that and maybe somebody else could use it much more productively and there is this the situation where that very often doesn't happen yeah it gets stuck yeah now maybe one point here so you've mentioned generally this is true for property but it seems like maybe it's not true for all property I mean what about let's say something like gold or fungible commodities like wheat or what about shares of a publicly traded company like Apple buy this so many shares so I me having some shares

that's no monopoly is it well I think that's correct there's no monopoly over an individual share but there can be monopolies over large numbers of shares and in fact there can easily be a monopoly over wheat there have been monopolies over wheat in many countries and many times so there the issue is not the monopoly over the individual shares the problem is for example if you want to buy the whole company which requires buying up lots of shares typically when a company gets bought off the markets it you know the purchaser pays a 30 40 50 percent premium and the stock price that's

effectively the monopoly price that's being charged by the current owners in total for the purchase of that company it's what about what are the negative effects of this monopoly characteristics of property it leads to tremendous under use of land you know I'm I'm actually talking tomorrow to a startup called City Builder which tries to use machine learning to estimate what would the value of various collections of land in a city be if you could get them all together and redevelop them even holding fixed zoning rules and a typical value of that for a reasonably large chunk of land in the city is about three times so what that indicates is that much of the land in the world is dramatically

underutilized the spectrum is another great example there's huge amounts of spectrum that are being used for over-the-air television and radio that could be used for Wi-Fi 5g etc and in many countries like Singapore and Israel where they have had a more flexible system they've been able to adopt those new technologies in the u.s. we have very low quality of those services because we're stuck in this rigid old-fashioned system because of these monopoly power so they're a solution that you guys propose to this is called costs of common ownership self-assess tax can you explain what what's the core idea of cost so they do have cost is

that everyone would have to self assess the value of any significant private property that they have most private properties actually held by businesses or this mostly applies to businesses but you would sell these businesses would self assess the value of their assets they would have to pay a tax on that self assessed value but they'd also have to stand ready to sell that asset to anyone willing to pay that price to give an example right so let's say I own a house let's assume I own a house and now I think ok this house is probably worth five hundred thousand so then the idea would be okay there's some percentage of and I do this for all of the property you have and then including

you let's say my computer my computers were four thousand five hundred dollars or something like that and then on all of that they take you take some percentage I don't know I think you mentioned seven percent maybe in the book and then I have to pay that as a tax right so I have to pay like let's say on that house five hundred times seven right thirty five thousand a year on that computer have to pay something and all of the after betas tax but anyone could come and say okay actually I'm gonna pay you 500 so if I had know five hundred one thousand or five hundred thousand and at that price I have to sell it and and then the proceeds of that sale would go to you yeah the proceeds of that sale would go to me yeah yeah so of course there I

think a lot of people would be if you look at the example of real estate a lot of people maybe they've lived in the house for a certain number of years they're used to living there the idea that now anyone could come in and say okay you've assessed their values is probably at that I'm gonna take it that's probably a horrifying idea do you not see the massive downside to this idea I know I think that that's mostly a misunderstanding I think that for anyone but rich people what you described is precisely the opposite of what would occur under this system at present most people except for the very wealthy have a mortgage on their house or their renters very very few people own their house outright so they face

very significant risks of their house being taken away from them if they are unable to if they have any risks or anything like that that they taste in their life in the world that I'm describing this tax about seven percent or so on assets would raise enough income not just to eliminate all other taxes and corporations all taxes on property all that sort of stuff but also to pay every family of four in the United States a $24,000 a year social dividend at those rates the amount that it would cost a citizen to maintain her assets for a typical citizen would be about a thousand and a half dollars if she priced them at market rates if she priced them at ten times market rates

she'd still receive a net ten thousand dollar social dividend so for almost everyone in in the world except for the very wealthy this would dramatically increase the stability they have in their lives not reduce it what it does is tax the stability of the wealthy and the property owners so that other people are able to afford that yeah okay okay but so let's use some examples so we've talked about the house I mean I can see that you know on for many people sure it could provide financial stability and I mean in a way what you're also describing is it's almost like a basic income social dividend right but so

batalik example he wrote a post about radical markets and he made the example of like my ether wallet right so you have like a domain name which is associated with a cryptocurrency world that many people use I said there's a lot of money being flowing through that my ether world isn't like a huge business and they don't make a gigantic amount of revenues so they may only be able to pay a fairly low number of facts but somebody could come maliciously and say okay I'm gonna pay that amount take over the domain and then example put up my malware or something like that do you think this is like how would you address this under a cost well I think the first thing to recognize is that there are a

huge number of cases in which what you're describing is already happening in Reverse people are buying up and trolling domains and no one ever has a chance to get access to them in the first place so there's like we always it's always true for market economies that you whenever you move towards more of a market system you have protectionist instincts you say oh there's this good thing that's already here to make sure we protect that thing but you don't think that the present system the rigid system is blocking all sorts of innovation right now so that's really the the situation and yes there could be

cases where there's someone who's very very illiquid for some reason and they can't afford things but on average people who own property are not poor downtrodden etc the average owners of property especially on theory 'im are the extremely wealthy and powerful and any system that redistributes that more evenly so that more people are able to access the system and have more opportunities is overwhelmingly on average going to benefit ordinary people and not the concentrated owners of property it's always been the strategy of the capitalist class to make everyone think about the tiny things that they possess and cling very hard to those

things in order to stop them from realizing how much more is held by the very wealthy this is great do you seem to be a true revolutionary there's a line in the internet but now there's a line in the Internationale a which is the International Socialists anthem in the modern US lyrics are English lyrics where it says don't cling so hard to your possessions for you of nothing if you have no rights yeah okay okay fantastic one of the faults that also came to my mind so in in this cost system right we have to now I have to self-assess this tax and all the property and pay this tax so of course that does create a certain incentive to

just hold cash right like if I have lots of cash and I don't get taxed on that cash and so I can kind of you know avoid the tax do you think that's a desirable outcome because it means that people wouldn't sort of monetize capacity you do tax cash you tax cash as well yeah well another way of putting that is you can just have an inflation of 7% a year yeah which is much less than today of course much more than today well you speak about price inflation or a monetary price in supply inflation rice inflation if you have price inflation of 7% a year that's like equivalent to putting a cost on money you couldn't die man and by the way by

the way that doesn't happen anyways the reason why what you're describing doesn't happen is that people can't on net move into cash there's only so much cash out there right so what actually happens is the price of all assets Falls to the level where you're just as happy to hold cash and the other asset so while I would apply it to cash as well it's not important because you don't actually lead people to unmet move into cash there's only so much cash to be had so really what happens is the prices of assets fall until it accounts for all the tax payments you'll have to make yeah so how well do you think this is suited the cost is suited to digital property I think it's best suited to digital property at present because most

digital property is not an absolute private property it's a administrative property so it's much easier to experiment with things and people are much less sort of tied to it in a strong sense and so it provides an excellent area for experimentation the same way the blockchain world more broadly provides an excellent area for experimentation on many different things so I think that that's where it's likely to be applied most at present you gave the example of my ether wallet and these domain addresses I think that's a great application another really interesting one proposed by Simon de la rivière was a million dollar home page which is like a website where everyone owns one pixel and can choose what it looks like and

it's sort of a collaborative design environment a cost would be very useful there as if there was someone who is recalcitrant ly doing something stupid with one pixel you could buy out that area to redevelop de central land is another really interesting area for applying this spectrum as I mentioned is a leading application so I think that it is precisely the descriptions you're giving in terms of digital assets where I expect this to be used first and most heavily yeah it's important to distinguish here that let's say if you talk of something like Bitcoin right probably you know if you look at the traditional sort of philosophy of many big corners and the

idea of that you have this asset which cannot be confiscated by anyone cannot be touched by anyone it's sort of beyond the reach of government that's like a core thing that people like about Bitcoin right so there you wouldn't really be able actually implementing a cost would be extremely difficult I don't think you can build it into the algorithm itself so you don't want governments or central authorities involved in this process that I completely agree with but there's no reason why you can't build it into the code sure yeah yeah I mean I that's so on Bitcoin they will never build AI into the code so I think that's why like let's say having it there would be very difficult because also a government

implementing it would have a challenge enforcing it but let's say if you started a new chain let's say something at the central and then you may well have that the developers do you see the benefit of this and and do one implement it so I agree that in in those kind of your network level rules actually enforcing a cost would be very very simple yeah so are there any interesting plot projects working on this right now yeah so there's a number of interesting projects um there's some people thinking about applying it in commercial real estate there's some people thinking about applying it in sort of co-working or accelerator spaces where you know there's a very dynamic need for space

over time because start some startup succeed and some fail and so forth those are some of the larger scale physical world applications but within blockchain there are a huge number of really interesting applications there's a lot of thought about it into central and I don't know exactly where they are but they're very seriously thinking about applying it to the 15% of property that they've reserved with into Central and there are tokens that Andrew Miller has been building that incorporated into the code there are projects trying to do this yeah for a home page for sponsorship is another seaman to lariviere idea sponsorship of musicians

like patreon type thing where there would be an exclusive patron and they would harberger price that right and so forth so there are a number of super interesting projects in the space right now just add one one here so actually the first time might have been the first time I heard about your book is from a friend who founded company called parsec Labs and they're building this plasma a theorem sidechain and they were at the time I don't know if that's still the plan thinking of using basically cost like system to auction off the Divis slots to validate right they'd have a particular number of kind of like mining notes in a way of validating notes and

they would use this system for allocating them yeah I've heard many schemes that are like that yeah yeah I think that's a very good Vega fit I think there's some other ones I think especially if you talk about like existing property rights where I think the political opposition would be it would be very hard to implement some well look it's very hard to implement stuff right now when it's very unfamiliar but if first we start in blockchain world and people learn about and they see how useful it is and how much it improves things it could just gradually grow and those societies might be the most successful societies if it becomes a key part of blockchain and blockchain does become really important to the world others people might adopt it because it's their only way for them

to survive and compete and thrive and and because they also see that it's much fairer and more productive system have you ever considered that one of the biggest factors holding back growth in the blockchain industry is the lack of talented available developers by some estimates there are up to fourteen job openings for every single blockchain developer in the world that's where top dog comes in top Cal is a global network of talent in business technology and design and they pick their members by selecting only the top 3% of applicants when you work with top tile you're getting the tend election we've got a blockchain specialization that's an on-demand service that connects your business to an elite network of developers and engineers specializing in areas like solidity smart contracts hyper ledger fabric our

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dollar for the support so do you see any major open questions regarding cost oh there are tons how to deal with bundling so we at leaves a proposed allowing people to put together a take apart property as they want that's there's so many complicated issues around that there's many issues around what tax rates you charge for different types of assets and how finally did it define that that's super interesting there are really interesting questions about how long you have to surrender an asset and how you define that by asset type they're really almost everything around the cost is kind of open right now it's

really a very new idea okay great now let's speak about your or the other idea that I think probably has most application in the boxing space which is a quadratic voting but maybe before we go into quadratic voting you can outline what what are the big issues with voting systems today and especially those traditional voting systems where you know there's let's say all the US citizens and each person has one vote no yeah yeah so the standard one person one vote system is fun not something that any of us really believe in if you reflect on it even though we're taught it in school

we know that majorities will tend to oppress minorities under the one-person one-vote system and so we have constitutional rights to defend minorities but then what that ends up meaning in practice is that judges decide tons of things these central unelected authorities who have whatever you know personal views they have and if just deciding on so many things in our society because we don't trust democracy because one-person one-vote oppresses minorities so what I want is a system we are rather than relying on these central discretionary authorities we can allow minorities to have the right to protect themselves to say no this issue is

really important to me don't prevent me from marrying don't take away my guns don't prevent me from going to schools with people of another race etc and so can you outline how quadratic voting works so the idea is that every citizen receives an equal budget of voice credits and they can spend these credits on influencing issues according to the principle that the cost of a certain number of votes on an issue is the square of the number of votes you get on it so it becomes increasingly expensive to express very strong opinions this discourages people from just being extremists for no reason even if they don't really care about the

issue but at the same time it allows people to express a very strong opinion if they if they feel that way yes let me use an example to illustrate this so let's say I have two credits right you have two credits and there is election like referendum a which is maybe it should gay marriage be loud or not and then this should guns be loud or not and I can spend you know one on each right and then I have basically one vote on each but I could also spend two on one and then I I basically get the square root of two right so one point four votes on that one so if I feel like very strongly about one I can say okay I don't care so much about like gun rights

but the gay marriage is very important so I'm going to spend my entire credits on that and so I get more votes but actually there is sort of you know it flattens out right so you would the marshal number of votes I get additionally are decreasing very rapidly right exactly so you mention minority rights the way I guess we protect minority rights would be like okay so they they feel very strongly about a particular issue and they can use a lot of their credits there and then basically say not vote on other stuff right so don't you see that as an issue that let's say minorities would have to use up much of their credits to you know protect protecting them on some issues

and then wouldn't have a say in other stuff well look the truth is that for the most part everyone is a minority on some issue so the the real question is are we making the right trade-offs and compromises in society where each of us gives up things that are less important to us for things that are more important to us if we're gonna live together as a society we need some way of resolving issues where we don't each get our way on everything so yes if you're a minority on say racial issues you'll end

up paying maybe more on those issues but you may be in the majority on issues related to gun ownership and you may be in the majority in your religion and you may be in the majority on your preferences on economic policy but then other people will be in the minority on those issues you see what I'm saying and so that is the trades that we make we don't all get to just because we are in a minority on something control everything in a society that wouldn't be at all democratic instead we you know get a chance on things that are critically important to us to weigh in in exchange for allowing other people to do that on things that are most important to them

so I think on this high level I actually think it's quadratic voting seems pretty like unobjectionable to me and like strictly better than current voting system where it gets interesting and much more controversial is when you bring in the idea of like the ability to buy votes all right so let's say I can go and I think you can go to you and say I want to wanna get a vote so instead of having two votes now I have three words right I did not pay you so what do you think are the pros and cons of allowing the trading of votes in chaotic voting well the con is really that it would give far disproportionate power to the

wealthy and that is not something that we support so that's why we don't propose using that for quadratic voting any time in the near term however in the long term it has the benefit of allowing people to express the things that are most important to them not just in comparison to other social issues but in absolute terms in saying no I care in general about things in the public sphere more than you - maybe you're more involved in your community and so forth so by allowing people to express it in some external money that's not just

related to other collective decisions you allow people maybe who are persistently in the minority or people who just are very interested in politics to weigh in more the broader you allow for the trade the more you get an accurate reading of how important things are to people but that is only acceptable once we have a far more equal society which is something that for example the cost could help bring about yeah okay okay I mean I do think one argument in favor of having you know this explicit vote buying potentially is that if you can actually enforce that let's say I want is I want to cast a

thousand votes and I have to pay it in that quadratic cost of a thousand votes then that would be very very expensive so even though every wealthy people could disproportionately influence elections they would have to do so I had an extraordinary cost well and beyond that you know there's even ways of dealing with it if you actually know what people's incomes are it's not a problem to use money because you can make the cost of them buying votes actually proportional to their income so you would pay for one vote 1% of your income for two votes four percent of your income something like that then it wouldn't be disproportionately weighted towards the wealthy but that requires some verification of people's income level that's external to the system right right okay fascinating now of

course when we think of this applying so now this translates a little bit to the blockchain space right and then building and on chain governance has been a topic we've done I don't know dozens of podcasts about but it's a very often discussed topic and I think there's a lot of expectations around it many new projects are implementing different voting systems and I think on the one hand we have this extreme hope and expectation and all of the other hand there are also concerns so vitally or you know there are some people in the etherium space with how they can last time for being two of them who are you know skeptical around this and of course oligarchy is is one issue right because in January blockchain we have you know

one call the paradigms often one coin one vote and then even if you did have quadratic like so how do you see this translating into a blockchain contest well look I understand Vlad and metallics skepticism about voting because of potential gain ability of a whole bunch of concerns but I think there's one incredibly important thing to keep in mind if we are going to say no we can't trust voting we should also say no we can't trust absolute private property ownership there's an idea in the blockchain world that private property claims are totally immutable whereas votes are not don't exist at all and

that I think is fundamentally imbalanced and is the reason why wealth is coming to dominate this world you cannot have a reasonably balanced economy where there is private property ownership that's absolute and there's no democratic check on that process so I'm happy to say look private property shouldn't be so absolute and neither should voting that can make sense but until we loosen the hold of private property we absolutely need to have some sort of democratic mechanism to govern it because otherwise everything will end up being dominated by those who control the most wealth yeah I mean I guess that that is really sort of the argument against voting on

the blockchain is that we don't actually have technically better systems than having basically one coin one vote and all of our other ones seem circumvent able so that then it may go even more in the direction that you fear right that you have is oligarchic so that's why we desperately need the identity solution we were talking about upfront yeah yeah now do you see any adoption of quadratic voting or experimentation with this in the blushing space at this point yes we see much more of that than we do even for the cost that's probably the largest area of ex experimentation at the present moment there is a huge number of people using it for things like you were

saying actually voting on validators for various things not necessarily side-chains but but related things may be private chains permission chains things like that there's a bunch of use of quadratic voting even for doing validation itself there's coins that are thinking about that if they can have an identity solution or if it is a more permission structure to it their quadratic voting is being used to manage content curation within a variety of blockchain communities so quadratic voting is has really been the most influential of the ideas within the blockchain community for sure

in general those experiments do they tie quadratic voting with some identity system or they already have some kind of at any system and layer on top or yeah they and they have to they have to there's not there's no there's no system that has made the mistake of trying as far as I know that has made the mistake of trying to use quadratic voting in a permissionless way that wouldn't work or you know it sorry permissionless is fine but it there needs to be some identity solution it could be an external Authority it could be some self sovereign identity it could be I mean there's a variety of potential solutions but it has to be with some real identity solution that's verifiable

so if you look at the cost as an example cost is as a let's say if you're a capitalist then you probably wouldn't like cost if you have a lot of assets hmm so you would probably be against it but if you let's say you're an American citizen you can't really opt out because you know the cost of moving somewhere else I mean you could but it's very high right so you may as well many would put up with it and say ok I accept it because this is just a part now of being a US citizen but in the blockchain space there tends to be much more to think you know okay we can just fourth the chain or there's many different chains and I can kind of go to whatever chain I want to so there's much more flexibility in

avoiding particular kind of regulatory regimes regulatory regimes being like network level rules that you want so that that seems to me like an attention or a very different approach oh look look I I don't know I don't think so another I don't because the reason is that the only possibility of using blockchain or any of these technologies in order to avoid regulation is if there are other people who believe in it and support it everything in these systems all the money that's been made in speculation is parasitic on people who genuinely believe that the system is a

better way to do things and so I don't think it's true that people can use these systems if people genuinely become convinced that they're not serving the public interest as a way to undermine that because other people need to be using it and willing to accept it and trust it and if they think it's dominated by people who are powerful and corrupt they're not going to use it and though instead use and believe in and and raise the value of systems that serve the broad public I think you know blockchain would not have succeeded had not people not believed in the idealistic vision of a decentralized

world it's not only reliant on wealth it is reliant on people it's just that that's not built into the system directly in a formal way so you mentioned the beginning we talked a little bit but your skepticism of blockchain at the same time just a lot of experimentation now going on with your ideas so like you're still overall the skepticism about the oligarchic tendencies over way or like how looks kind of like you I mean though I would look but my feeling is that the system needs at a technical level to overcome a number of fundamental flaws very rapidly in order to avoid imploding in some way or another and I think that's very

unlikely to happen that being said so I expect that you know the value will go down at a 95 99 % sometime in the coming years that being said I think that out of it will come a lot of really powerful ideas and experiments and things we learned from that's what happens with many bubbles so I both am optimistic on the long term contribution that blockchain thinking will make to change in the world and pessimistic on the specific platforms and technologies unless they manage to adapt very quickly yeah can you speak about those fundamental flaws technical flaws you see

so the fundamental flaws I see are the lack of identity the lack of scalability the lack of governance the lack of real applications that have value that's external to some sort of bubble mentality and the fact that the technology is not really like especially the extreme redundancy that's built into it is not really necessary or sufficient for most of the goals of decentralization that it purports to be associated with it's not sufficient because of all the reasons we just

talked about and it's not necessary because large you know chains that aren't completely global or redundant are going to be the best most secure solution for most you know applications so for all those reasons I I think that there's just like a huge number of weaknesses in the current framework relative to its goals and so forth but I love the spirit okay great yeah I mean of course I think many in the blockchain space would agree with you that you know those issues those issues exist but still I speak for almost everyone that the optimism would

far outweigh and the expectation that those would be resolved and then there's enormous opportunity in but that's in that team I mean look that that just seems extremely implausible to me in the near term the the amount of progress that's actually been made on resolving those issues relative to the fact that there are so many risk factors that could be a huge shock to the system like some government really trying to go after it like the world having a global recession that causes panic in some form that could go in any direction relative to the blockchain world well I mean there's just so many things that could potentially disrupt the system there's so much value that's been vested in it there's so little applicability I mean you think about the internet ten years

after the internet was created and you know what what applications it had versus the applications in quote web 3.0 so I'm not saying that something good won't come out of this I I said it would but the notion that there's gonna be enough that's gonna come out of it soon enough to justify the huge bubble around it seems extremely unlikely to me and what do you think the reason is for that do you think it's just that not a great technology or is there some other reasons for it well I think there's huge weaknesses in the technology that need to be resolved and you that's not say it's not an interesting potential technology but you know from the first work on the personal

computer in the 1960s it took 15 years before you actually had something that anyone wanted to use and you know Knology just needs a lot more work and I don't think that the bubble even though it's stimulated a lot of enthusiasm has been that productive and actually resolving the underlying technological issues so are there some other areas of technology that you think are more promising and potentially have you know bigger positive impact on the world in the next decade no I I actually am very optimistic about the stuff around the blockchain world in terms of the potential impact it can have I just don't think that it's going to be fast enough or sufficient to sustain the

sorts evaluations that are on existing chains yeah yeah so you're you're you are I think it's important right - that's a one is a great great optimist greatly optimistic about blockchain like maybe one worth greatly optimistic our personal computer at one point but it just takes a really long time to get to a point where it's really useful and it's gonna have this positive impact but I guess another position could be our blockchain is like fundamentally driving to some sort of oligarchy system it's not the right approach we need a very different approach but you're falling in the first camp not the second well I mean I guess it depends on what features you think are fundamental to blockchain

if you think that pseudonymity and anonymity are fundamental to blockchain which I think some people do then I would say no that's going to lead to oligarchy that's a disaster if you think that absolute immutability of most things is fundamental to blockchain you know that is completely inconsistent with having both privacy and identity so clearly that's that's not gonna be sustainable in the long term for most things that go on so those are fundamental features that I think many people would identify with the system that I don't think are sustainable he's decentralisation and you know the notion of

some protocol of rules that we all agree to rather than some discretionary authority being in charge is that here to stay absolutely I think that's here to stay so it depends what you mean by blockchain okay great now what's your own focus on in the next year's around radical markets and implementing that like how are you approaching this so basically I'm spending about 50% of my time writing coming up with new ideas vitalik and I are working on a white paper right now that I I think is the most ambitious thing that I've done in this area it really is a coherent vision that ties

together the cost and the harberger tax into a system of funding decentralized self-organizing communities so I think that's going to be really cool and very important for the blockchain space so I'm doing things related to that I'm working on different auctions and so forth then with about and on the book and so forth so on the on the side of the actual organizing in the movement there are what we're creating a conference and we have four different tracks in that conference and I'm working on supporting all of those tracks there's arts and communications there is ideas and research there's entrepreneurship and technology and

there's activism and government and what I'm doing in each of those areas to support in addition to working with the people who are running those tracks and so forth is different I'm helping to create unions for the state of labor union idea that's in the book I'm helping to talk to governments and so forth I'm consulting for startups that are or blockchain projects that are trying to do stuff and working with large companies that want to do stuff around walk around radical markets I'm I'm helping talk to artists and and and to journalists and to other people who want to write about this and I'm of course we're doing all this writing and research so I'm really trying to help support this huge movement that's really

started around these ideas oh that's fantastic I wasn't aware that there was kind of movement already going on so you mentioned a conference when is that conference taking place probably early March but it's possible off to push back to early April okay okay gray it's gonna be called radical exchange lower radical lowercase X capital change so it's like radical change but also radical exchange like you know radical markets and that there will be a radical exchange of ideas so okay very good title so if people want to learn more about it get involved is there besides reading a book is there something else where people can or how can they get involved in this community I think that the best way is to assume there will be a website up around this

but the best way is if you go in the radical markets website there's a contact list avital Bal wit and Charlie Thompson are on there and they're helping me organize things in the interim until we get something more permanent going so it would be best to get in touch with them okay great well thanks so much Glen for joining us I'm super excited to see how radical markets today are gonna be implemented in blockchain and in the wider world so yeah thanks so much for your work and for joining us today thanks and of course thanks so much for a listeners once again joining so we put out episodes of episode of every week you can subscribe to it on iTunes SoundCloud or any other podcast application and of course you can watch the videos on youtube.com slash episode of Bitcoin so yeah thanks so much Eric forward to

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