Connect, Part 1: Mihai Alisie at the Dublin Tech Summit 2019

Transcript

[Music] never sleeps pal hey there welcome to money never sleeps a podcast that looks inside the head of entrepreneurs and what makes them do what they do I'm Pete townzen and this is episode 44 which is the second of two special episodes recorded live at the recent douin Tech Summit 2019 this episode of money never sleeps is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialist top tier recruitment if you or a colleague need help attracting and retaining great talent for your fintech or financial services company we highly recommend you have a chat with the team at top tier recruitment as they really know their stuff you can find them at toptier recruitment.com and tell them we

sent you for this episode we recorded a fireside chat with Mii alisi and me on day one of the Dublin Tech Summit last month Mii alisi is the founder of the aasha foundation a nonprofit born at the intersection of blockchain and collective intelligence before founding aasha mihi was one of the co-founders of both ethereum and Bitcoin magazine given what I put up to the last few years getting to know Mi high was just awesome so away we go with episode 44 of money never [Music] sleeps good afternoon Dublin dear great Dublin how we doing I see we got a nice change over the crowd going here which is fantastic

and our minutes are ticking away Mii you're down to 1848 W so um let's get started so I'm Pete Townson founder of noro Ventures principal at the startup.com author of chaos co-host of money never sleeps podcast available for download on iTunes and Spotify now Mii alisi has joined us um he is visiting us from the wonderful Canton of zoo in Switzerland uh where his headquarters is of the acasha project which he founded a few years ago um and also uh well known as a co-founder of ethereum and founder of Bitcoin magazine so so welcome to deblin it's a pleasure to be here hello everyone um Mii so let's let's get started right so um what what we've kind

of talked about is with what you're doing right now there's some important formative moments of your life that took place um less than 10 years ago more or less uh that have kind of LED you down this path you maybe want to just give us some insight into that sure so if I would pick uh the start of the formative uh moments I would go to when I was around 10 years and you know as a little kid when you hear like thunder storms and you have Lightnings in the sky and so it's like so magic and being afraid but then I stumbled upon one of these little books in like physics in everyday life and then I found out that if you count the seconds between you see the light and then hear the sound you can actually have an idea on how far that

lightning is so that kind of make me believe that the world around us can be understood if you try to and then in the next years I uh started learning English by watching movies with subtitles and playing games so that was also like a really interesting U kind of way of tapping into a whole different areas of knowledge that was kind of encrypted before uh and I had a strong interest in computers which led me to informatics in high school and later on and cybernetic statistics and information economy in uh University okay so this is around 2010 and this is also when uh due to a family health problem uh when my father had a

stroke uh we went to this physio therapy hospital this is by the way in C Romania uh from there originally and uh that that's when I heard from one of the nurses that I was lucky and we were lucky to benefit from the treatment uh in in this hospital and from the Personnel because the hospital was about to be shut down soon and then I was like why because I saw like miraculous recovering from from my father and there's also a younger person that was in a car accident recovering so regaining the ability to enjoy life um and that's when I found out that actually there were some uh deep interests involved and the owner of the building was actually the local church I was like what how can that be uh and

then I said no I I I'm going to do something about it and then for the next couple of days I really tried to figure out what I could do to stop this from happening and in the end I figured out you know that I cannot really do anything on my own and that's when I started Gathering like emails from all like the local newspapers the local blogs the local TV stations and National and I I asked them to look into this problem is like hey this is a good uh thing we have my name is Mii and this is what's what's going on and actually then the the reporter started to go ask questions like what's going on the largest newspaper in the the local area published actually my my email which was a bit of a surprise uh and the effect

was that two two weeks later a local politician capitalized on the public oror because people started to like what the church shutting this place down and so on like how can that be and then these local politicians hey this hospital is actually a really good thing we have here we shouldn't shut it down so then the people were like wow that guy is a really cool politician we should vote for him and then the hospital was not shut down that was yeah that was for me a moment when I kind of you know the real change and uh making things happen is not just in the movie movies and uh you can do something and things happen or don't happen because people know about them or don't know about them yeah so like like you kind of said to me earlier Mii that once you get

enough people caring about something that's when Real Change starts to happen yeah right now moving on from there and and thinking about yes that important formative moment and knowing that you have a voice and that you can influence others right that um Bitcoin magazine the opportunity to launch that came along um tell us how that started and how did that lead to the next thing so basically around 2011 uh in a random conversation with someone from Argentina thank you internets uh he mentioned a decentralized digital currency thing named Bitcoin but I forgot that the name Bitcoin but I recall the decentralized digital currency and then a couple of weeks later I kind of remembered and then I

searched and then I stumbled into Bitcoin and I was coming already with this uh idea that some things happen or don't happen when people know about them and when I was trying to learn is this actually a real thing or you know another Nigerian kind of Prince thing uh it was hard especially in 2011 like the main source of information was a forum bitcointalk.org a small village of sorts and uh it was challenging and that's when uh across some of the articles I stumbled upon was were written by vck and we got in touch and you know we kind of agree that uh it would be a really good addition to the landscape to have a coherent source of information education Outreach and so on so people more people get to know about this so maybe it

happens you know yeah but and just again getting that Community thing going and building that virtual um Global Community right to an extent um then after Bitcoin magazine or or that kept going but ethereum um you were co-founder of ethereum yeah so so uh you know uh after launching Bitcoin magazine and so on it was like a really interesting opportunity to get to know this space from within rather than you know trying to look from from outside and also it gave us uh you know in the beginning it was like oh Bitcoin is the one it's the silver bullet and so on but it also was uh a learning experience for us to understand the limits of what this thing can be it's not a one siiz fit s

and like every all our problems are solved and so on it was clear as uh you know until 2013 that uh it was mainly designed as kind of a digital cache single use case or like uh application in this case a decentralized ler for track digital cash and then uh around the end of 2013 uh it was also during some of the conversations with v that we were talking about daos as the distributed autonomous organizations and how how would that fit into the the bigger picture it was also a moment where we kind of realized that you have an also like you know the question what is blockchain that also the explanation shifts as your own understanding of what this thing is evolves and uh it was this

understanding that evolved from like okay blockchain equals money of source to blockchain equals a world computer as a sort of general purpose programmable kind of thing through to Smart contracts so that was a really big shift and if you think about it we're here in the first decade after the invention of this technology still scratching the surface of what can can be done um and uh this is uh in early in January 2014 together with Roxana and a few others we traveled to Switzerland as as a co-founder of ethereum one of my kind of what I spearheaded was a search for a jurisdiction what what would be the the home for this project and that's when we went to Switzerland and uh the true

Canton also might be known as crypto Valley for some so if you heard that that's Su in be high came up with crypto Valley right down with con up with crypto so it was during one of the discussions with the local authorities when I was trying to also present like the opportunities like this thing is not just about silk C and you know the there was all all about the the classic kind of cycle of mainstream is like what about the children was like there there's more than just you know the the bad stuff and uh following this uh there was the Genesis of the ethereum blockchain so after the you know we we had like a very successful I think for a brief moment it was the biggest crowdfunding uh campaign successfully as a one-time event so we raised the equivalent of

$8.5 million in Bitcoin it was kind of an a cipher Punk Inception way of like using a digital uh cryptocurrency on blockchain to build the next blockchain yeah and when the blockchain was launched in ethereum you know you had the first block it's like everyone is like it's still working the second block the third block and one first 100 dayoo this thing is is live so from like a dream of s became like a platform for other people to build their their dreams and also uh I felt that as a co-founder my duty has was kind of fulfilled and I steep down as from the ethereum foundation as a vice president and focus my energy on trying to figure out what we can now build with these things is it

real so tell tell us about the inspiration for the acasha project so um I think in a way if you if I look at this these moments that we briefly touched upon I think it's a continuation of that lesson and uh like the pieces that we tried to mix first was like can we build a decentralized social network that does not have a central point of failure or us being in the middle of this information flow between people and after a few weeks of testing uh together with Marius and a few others we actually uh got to the point yes this can work but it's not just the blockchain thing so we have ethereum and beside etherum you have a bunch of other complimentary Technologies so like one of them being the interplanetary file system or

shortened as ipfs um and basically we use the ipfs to store the information the content so you know we have like videos pictures text and so on and use the ethereum blockchain as an index so people could see what has been published and then people would connect to another person and peer-to-peer actually yeah that's a big thing it is all peer-to-peer right yeah yeah yeah yeah so I think we were if I'm not mistaken the first ones that we actually tried to mix this technology in this way that's successfully yeah but now it's kind of normal it's like this was like early or actually late 2015 after the the LA yeah I mean if you think about some of the social networks that are out there today there is this Central Priestess of trust um you know component to all of

that and that um opening that up and saying that well it doesn't need to be about one single group that has control of all that data and that it can just be it's distributed it's decentralized it operates on a peer-to-peer basis that's a pretty strong proposition yep and and there's also like this uh we're like in such a bad uh position like this is such a big problem um when you think about like imagine this for a second so we have like this 7 billion plus Planet filled with beautiful human beings uh each unique in their own way and then you have like this giant hyper centralizing the relationship established between these uh human beings and like you have this entity running this service you know you have

the Facebook and others uh but in particular you have Facebook being the biggest one and you have this entity with the with a single command line to silence half a planet it's like where's the intelligence in like that intelligence species and you also have this other problem so I'm going to use this as a huge prop here you know you have the data information knowledge wisdom kind of triangle and you have like the lower layer being data and then you have like information and then you have the knowledge and then hopefully at the top there you have like some wisdom but in the current kind of situation we have like a vast amounts of data you know the Big Data and you have like some information and when I say some information is like when it comes to

Facebook and other social network operators you have like the information that is derived from your personal data that helps them serve you like better ads and then you know the knowledge and wisdom is almost like very thin so you don't have actually a a pyramid there so on the other side you also have this understanding and this talk about the global village but uh when whenever you will hear this again like about the global village also ask who sees the themselves as the mayor of This Global Village and in these cases like you have usually an entity or Corporation or some sorts of person kind of already projecting themselves in that power position and on the other side like with Akasha what we want to do is like we have like a layer of open data and like

the information and all this stuff that can be derived with an approach that is interoperable by default and then you know in the hopes that we can uh redistribute uh knowledge and hopefully from that to derive some wisdom in the society as a whole because we need it uh if we are to stand a chance to solve some of these big challenges that we face as a civilization some of these peer-to-peer um opportunities that we talked about before Mii were along the lines of um improving humanity and improving the ability for individuals to uh use the creative side of their brain right rather than the analytical side of the brain um and by having this information in a uh you know presented in a

decentralized Iz way having these communities connected you know what what are some of the perhaps use cases that uh that you think could be interesting along the lines of you know helping Humanity get back to that notion uh that is brought about in the book sapiens of 100 to 150 people being kind of the you know the real climax point of what a group can get done right so there's like a lot of interesting research on this topic and uh maybe this is a rabbit hole that I explored a bit deeper because we were operating this like The Social Network space and uh starting from the brain right we we are wired with this social brain and in nature you kind of have this natural incentives so you know you have like sex feels good you do you

ensure the reproduction of the species we have kind of a similar uh let's say desire or we long to belong to a community or some group of people and I to my you know an assumption here might be that this is Nature's Way Of incentivizing Us in connecting into these kind of networks so like one of the key uh elements of like Humanity success to this point was the ability to come together in groups and Achieve what we cannot achieve as individuals so in a similar kind of uh fashion when we also look at uh the collective intelligence versus collected intelligence like again if we use this pyramid like today and the way is like this Information Society is like a collected Information Society right so when I say collective

intelligence like this also complements the side and you you have many people and projects talking about AI but when I say CI it's like I and I know this metaphor is not really applicable because we usually use both hemispheres but I would say that the AI might be more like The Logical analytical side of the brain and then on the other side we have this creative side that is uh kind of natural to us as humans which kind of the creative side more the the right Hemisphere and many of the talks and you know either about the future of our society or the implication of technology and so on seem to kind of discard that human that side of us and like what is humanity without that thing like a big question there so um that I think also points and the City of NASA in his very

cool presentation was talking about you know you have this group of people on Mars for example or so it's like what if they cannot communicate with the home planet it's like what happens to them so I would argue that we as individuals being Network and part of these groups we exhibit this uh naturally this collective intelligence but simply until now we either discarded this side of our humanness like uh and in general like masses have been seen as this dumb thing you know from the Freudian and and so on like in general and looking at the psychology but I would argue that we're actually very smart and if you would look into the future it's like what does it mean also when looking at it the bigger picture applying this on planet Earth let's say for now and you have like you know the Internet of Things

smart cities and all this discussion but like what is a smart city if not it would be composed by smarter citizens so I I I come from this perspective where we could use this ability natural ability of us to connect with each other yeah uh and these mini supercomputers in our pockets to build something that facilitate this collaboration between us as individuals and as part of collectives without losing our individuals our individuality and something to keep in mind here is that you know some people see this collectiveness as using the uniqueness of the individual being absorbed like in a Bor kind of fashion but that would be a dumb Collective it's like you need diversity so the all the talk on like you know the differences among us being

standing in the way of progress this is actually a feature not a bug that makes the collective smarter it brings up and opens it to many perspectives and I'm talking about you know like race knowledge uh technology Advan of other things that come together in not something limited to to something specific diversity is good in all all all areas here okay so the the I I really like the smart cities concept of um you know the that well rather than smart cities we're talking about smart citizens and that each of us are organic sensors in our own right um picking up human feeling and emotion and perception and sensation um and that that then becomes part of a collective right and that you are you are bringing these

communities together virtually I think it's a pretty pretty strong proposition a couple the other things you talked about as well Mii were um imagine being able to let a community know quicker that a storm is coming or a tsunami is coming right um perhaps crowdsourcing um the conversion of an exoskeleton that is used for military purpose exactly um using that as to solve paralysis right or even the um getting a big you know uh a big Pharma company to open source um the development of a new drug or not even relying on a big Pharma company to steer the direction of our research but rather tap into the collective intelligence we have and uh analyze from a you know purely humanitarian or also from a humanitarian just a profit driven

kind of what makes sense oh we won't invest in this even if it will Cur this disease for billions of people because it's not pable or is it to make a profit from and I think this also points down to the way we are kind of in a hangover from the industrial kind of society and like the military uh top down control view where even if you look at the companies and in general when you have a description of someone is like chief executive officer uh Chief Operating Officer why is it called an officer there like I think that points back to the military kind of way in mil military in general when you look you have strategy and planning around the enemy but the more you kind of Base your whole strategy and your your plans around the enemy the more you become like the enemy

so hopefully in the next and what we will understand and what we can uh bring in the the future would be this uh not just coming together against the common enemy but also realizing that it makes sense and everyone benefits if we come together for the common good looking at the those win-win-win situations and it is possible also uh multi- testing of like various governance systems and that today we operate in a world that was built under the limitations and some of the restrictions around 200 years ago so absolutely it's outdated it's become outdated looking at the future with what aasha will be enabling um what are you most excited about that's a that's a big one so I think uh this event is a perfect example

of some of the things to be excited upon and it's not just one particular piece of the puzzle I think the exciting thing is the convergence of all these things coming together so you have the communication technology you have the manufacturing technology like 3D printing uh blockchain and introducing also these governance systems that you can experiment with you have also the cryptocurrencies like information as as value so I think what these uh things and what got gets me most excited about is that without even realizing we're kind of building the pillars or the puzzle pieces that would enable us to build new o socially or like operating systems for our society so it doesn't have to be you know one thing to rule them all it can be many coexisting and

co-evolving monocultures in general are not ideal right gotta so we're talking about benefits when it comes to resilience faster response times the ability of people to organize without having to go through that command and control and like you have the increased efficiency and sometimes if you think about it why do we have these institutions why do we have this kind of uh government idea it was designed to serve the citizens and to make their lives better so if we have now the pieces to kind of upgrade or like build the next model why not I gotcha makes sense Mii thank you really appreciate you coming to Dublin to do this um thank you to everybody out in the crowd um and we'll see you again soon thank

[Applause] you that wraps it up folks thanks to the team of the Dublin Texas Sumit for letting us piggyback off the sound desk and record the chat with Mii elisi from the aasha foundation to learn more about the work of the aasha foundation you can find more information as well as the networks that they're on at Akasha thatorganicmom if you like what you heard today please subscribe to money never sleeps on it tun and leave us a festar review you can also subscribe via our website to channels like Spotify and Stitcher so

just go to the subscribe page on money sleeps. and follow the links if you're searching directly on iTunes or Spotify money never sleeps is spelled as all one word for more info on links check out the show notes on money never sleeps. you can drop us a line on info@ Mighty never sleeps. or MNS show on Twitter as for me I increase the odds to Startup success DM me on Twitter at Ptown znv if you want to know more and you can follow Owen on Twitter at Owen fitzal 9 finally thanks to Conan broy from create sound for editing this podcast till next time thanks for listening see you hone never sleeps pal