COSMOS VS. THE FIAT SYSTEM

Transcript

you see me rolling we hating controlling and trying to catch me riding dirty and riding dirty I'm gonna catch me riding dirty and catch me riding [Music] thank you [Music] I'm here at Cosmo verse and in the lovely

medin in the back of the hotel uh uh probably you do some news out here today and I'm here with Ethan Buckman Bucky pleasure to be here thanks for having me it's been a long time yeah since we've had one of these conversations oh yeah I think the last one was probably in 2016 or something I think I was a little baby yeah just a little baby Ethan yeah didn't even have a beard wrapping with the yeah with the toy mic um yeah so yeah how you been I've been amazing I mean you know we built this whole Cosmos thing and it's it's happening it's it's happening yeah yeah it really feels like it's happening it feels like it's happening even more now after what was announced here this

morning yeah yeah so you you gave this talk this morning and I bet it was really interesting because it sort of reinvigorated the the cosmos Vision oh yeah right and maybe set some new goals and some new directions yeah but um yeah tell us a bit about like your these three phases that yeah yeah so you know I was thinking about the larger Arc of the story that's happening here and and you know what it means to have shipped the white paper and that was complete sometime in in 2021 but uh completing the white paper didn't quite didn't quite make The Interchange pop yet it took a little bit for for change to start coming online and start using IBC and obviously most osmosis played a big role in that and all the other

chains that have been launching and so you know reflecting on sort of where we are and what's been happening and what we've been doing institutionally and cosmiverse and some of the announcements and and you know the new Cosmos have white paper it sort of made me realize that the end of a phase you know we had kind of completed the end of the first phase and we were on the precipice of a new phase and I wanted to try to understand you know the broader picture of what that looked like and what you know a potential third phase was going to be and and so the you know the reflections I offered were that you know there's three phases of of Cosmos so we just completed the initiation phase yeah we're entering into what we might call the integration phase which will be followed ultimately at some point in the

future we don't know when uh by the illumination phase right and and different thing you know we completed a lot of things in the initiation phase that sort of transformed the way people think about blockchains proved the cosmos thesis you know application specific blockchains IVC all this good stuff and now we're moving into the initiation or integration phase where we need to sort of cope with and wrestle with the complexity of this thing we've given birth to right so now we have this inner chain we have this community Computing technology now what are we going to do with it right do we just like keep cruising along or are there more challenges ahead and so I outlined some of the challenges I think I think we need to address moving into the integration phase and at a high level the way I positioned that in the talk

they were one you know improving our social coordination improving our ability as a highly decentralized Community to work together to coordinate to continue to evolve our public goods to develop a strong cause most Hub to be a leader in The Interchange to help take the Interchange to the next level that's what the new white paper is about as well and then and then three to start preparing for the illumination phase which is you know in some sense where we prove that we're mature enough to actually be taken seriously in the halls of the institutions that that dominate our societies and which we you know ultimately need to upgrade if we're going to get towards a more sustainable uh civilization yeah I think this this was the thing that really inspired me the most about the talk is when you're talking about like you said we're not

competing against other blockchains we're competing against traditional institutions and that's right you know political institutions and what's what yeah what types of Institutions are you thinking about specifically here like what are the things that you think Cosmos can bring uh or The Interchange can bring uh to these institutions and service up yeah governance uh public goods uh infrastructure funding and backing and yeah what's your vision for like the illumination that you're talking about yeah I mean one way one way I think about it is we're on the you know we're on the the verge of a kind of constitutional transformation right you know the last one maybe happened a couple hundred years ago when nation states were born and started to be

formalized and all kinds of new legal structures and our institutions came together to create you know this new concept of the nation state right and and the internet kind of kicked off really in Earnest the end of the nation state right it sort of eroded its boundaries and fundamental ways that that they're still grappling with and someone in in denial of and I think I think the vision of of Cosmos and the idea is I've kind of always espoused about stakeholders and state machines and representing you know citizen citizenry within the state Machines of Society is to push towards more localized more decentralized State structures and that you know that might emerge or I think that might emerge in the form of Municipal sovereignty and seeing you know this movement from the nation-state towards the city-state as sort of a renewed locus of political

autonomy and political economic you know constitutional structure and and you know I'm hoping that Cosmos is actually going to enable uh enable that to happen and that the result of that will be you know greater representation of a greater group of people that people feel more trust and legitimacy in their institutions that thereby you know will be able to build more sustainable systems around that yeah and I mean this this makes a ton of sense I think for like a lot of us who are in the space here and who've been like thinking about these things for a while but you know this is this is a drastic transformation and you know it I think as drastic as this transformation that we would that was you know existed existed 300 400 years ago or whatever like when democracies started to form

and nation states started to form around constitutions yeah um is there gonna be a lot of hurt before you know like for change to happen often you know there has to be chaos and yeah um what kind of time frames are you thinking about here and like what uh what what you know what's the what's the amount of pain that Society might suffer in order to like emerge uh on the other side with like a a you know more uh yeah better perhaps a better system yeah yeah I mean it's a good deep difficult question my agent might be a little frustrated that you're giving it to me but she's not here so um I mean you know worst case scenario is we go through nuclear war I mean

that's a very real possibility it's on the horizon I mean you know you're threatening it right now I mean there's a lot of potential hurt that hurt is not coming because you know a bunch of renegade technologists are saying let's transform the state and let's build city-states you know that is not where the hurt is coming from the hurt is coming from you know years and years decades if not if not centuries of institutional neglect of underrepresentation of citizenry of you know a sort of amalgamation of interests that power of power right that have misrepresented the actual substructure of the natural and social world that you know that we're embedded in or that we are essentially and that that has consequences and that and that's bubbling up and and you know how that bubbles over and the pain we go through

I mean you know hopefully it's as little pain as possible all change is painful in in some way but you know the short-term future is a little bit scary like institutions are breaking down I don't think we've ever quite grappled with the the failure that was the you know financial crisis 2007-8 in some sense we're still reeling from that and you know the issues that that came up there were never really addressed and huge swaths of the population have already gone through significant hurt just from that thing alone and and you know that's probably gonna gonna get worse you know Lord knows we're on the on the precipice of some other um you know financial crisis or something right so yeah um it it could be pretty scary but um you know I'm hoping for the best at least one thing that I often think about

when you know contemplating about what we're building here and is there is a real risk I think that what we're building actually just exacerbates or recreates existing structures but worse right so in terms of like governance where I'm in I'm in Cosmos governance you know but like I barely have time to look at like all the governance proposals going through and governance proposals are fairly you know simple now right like but there is a point I think when the governance that's happening at the protocol level will be so far removed from anybody using the system and you know lots of people are thinking about building sub-dos and

maybe some sort of like political structures But ultimately you know validators have a touch you know also have a ton of power and um and the disconnect between those who are nearest to the chain and producing blocks and and participating in governance and those who are using the systems is quite quite far removed and so I worry that these systems of inequality but not just like wealth inequality but information inequality that exists in the in the real world maybe exacerbated yeah replicated exacerbated so yeah like where do we go from here in order to not do that no no I I deeply share this concern we've already seen like the worst of Finance I think like kind of play itself out yeah you know in

crypto yeah um yeah you know I mean I write about this a little bit that like the the biggest threat to what we're doing is that we just get co-opted by Wall Street and and in some sense all of Defy is angling for that it's like hey Wall Street we can just do you but better like come play with less rules right and that's not the message I'm trying to advocate for the kinds of system I'm I'm trying to build I'm I'm very afraid that you know if we don't actually take Finance seriously take the you know uh Power seriously capital is power seriously then we're just going to rebuild these existing systems and exacerbate and you know proof of stake is interesting in that regard because it was it was an important step to be able to experiment with these kinds of Technologies more sustainably and and

more securely than we could if every new chain had to secure itself using proof of work um but I don't think you know proof mistake is by any means the final State uh or or or even potentially um you know a permanent State it's a transitional state right and so I think we need to move Beyond these pure kind of proof of stake mechanisms to other other kinds of accountability systems that are more grounded in the real world and how we do do that remains somewhat of an open question and people are you know are are afraid of you know censorship and all these kinds of things but but what you're talking about the the native you know information asymmetries and even fees in some sense are a form of censorship right but we don't we don't you know we talk about censorship in a

kind of very refined narrow specific way but really what we care about is access yeah right and censorship is a proxy for for well do do people have access if they want it right and not the whole world can't have access to a single Computing system I mean that's just not feasible um and that was kind of the you know core Insight of causing so we can't build a world computer right and so what do we do about that well we have to build many computers Community computers and give communities the the ability to express themselves and express their values and and we will still have to do a lot of work to to figure out you know where proof of stake kind of goes from here and how it continues to evolve you know I've offered in the past this idea that you know that there's a there's a

trajectory of going from the sort of global Anonymous somewhat objective proof of work down towards more subject div and local forms of verification and end of work you know starting with the mistake but maybe on to proof of bandwidth and ultimately things like proof of care or proof of plant if you will right I think that's kind of the direction we have to go to really ground these systems in the real world yeah that's that's really interesting um let's maybe just bring it back to um let's ground ourselves into things that are concrete here for a second that's grass yeah you you talked about um the ICF sort of Reinventing itself and one of the things that you mentioned here is that you had to upgrade the ICF

that it needed better forms of coordination more transparency there's this technical Advisory Board yeah yeah what's what's the reasoning behind this and what do you see here is like what should we expect the ICF to look like in a year or two or uh what was the role in the ecosystem for sure so I mean the ICF is committed to being a long-term institution to being you know being here to Steward this this ecosystem and this new technology for the long term and so to do that it sort of needs to needs to change the way it operates a little bit and you know professionalize and there's you know Cosmos has a kind of complex history and we're we're in the process of telling the story of that history we recently published um you know part one of a blog post we could say but it gets

a little bit more complicated in part two yeah I didn't see this if you didn't see the history okay yeah I'll have to go read this it feels good yeah I'm very interested in this in this conflict yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so everyone you know it's a little there's a little bit of lore it's a little bit mythological and that's fine that's good so we don't wanna we don't want to you know spoil the rainbow or something but um but you know the ICF found itself in in a position where you know a level of complexity complexity was kind of thrust on it um and and it's been sort of trying to deal with that right and um it's been a slow process but but it feels like we've we've turned a corner and you know September 2022 this whole transition phase I'm talking about from initiation

to integration you know there's um the ICF is part of that as well and changes at the ICF are are part of that and you know Staffing the ICF in a new way kind of properly and you know building up a proper management team and so on in a way we haven't been able to do in the past and um you know renewing the delegation program and all these sorts of things and then taking a more um you know integrated and and longer term approach to funding the public goods and bringing in you know leaders from across the community for this new technical Advisory Board to be part of that and just to be you know more engaged with the community get the transparency program going again like it's really be a beacon of you know non-profit stewardship of an ecosystem and and to you know encourage and

coordinate others to kind of Step Up and participate in this I mean we've such a massive ecosystem at this point there's so many communities involved and um you know so the ICF is sort of recognizing that and sort of welcoming everyone in to say okay how do we all how do we all work together to take everything to the next phase to get us through you know the the the difficult processes of integration this you know complex highly decentralized decentralized community of development in teams of individuals of blockchains of organizations and and so on to take us through you know to what we need to do throughout integration but concretely what's that going to look like I mean like what I think I think like one of the things that I've certainly experienced and heard a lot of other people also like talk about is

the complexity of the organization and navigating the different parts of the organization as someone who is looking for either support or exactly you know these sorts of things and like also transparency about what the ICF is working on or doing exactly you know I think that's been sort of the gripe that a lot of the community has had are you addressing those things directly or yeah yeah well I mean the plan is by by bringing in more project leaders to be part of Technical and Market strategy for the ICF to be part of you know guiding the icf's treasury and bringing in you know funding from additional sources to complement the funds that the ICF is deploying and and so that can all be done in a more in a more transparent way in a way that's more engaged with the wider community so there's more

voices that are sort of part of that that are part of that process um yeah all that is sort of is sort of happening and then to also just like you're saying you know set up a better uh we could call it like an indexing system to find things in Cosmos and Orient and sort of clear through make it easy for people to sort of get situated and discover different different parts of the system and you know where they need to go and find support and things like that these are exactly the things that that we're working on now okay yeah cool yeah and um yeah let's I already did like a full 45 minutes with Zachy about Adam 2.0 some you know we're not going to get deep into that but what's the significance of this for you in in realizing you know this

illumination goal I mean I think this is a big step where you know we're attempting to reinvent a system at a level that you know I'm not sure has really been done before um and and to transition the the the cosmos hub from a prototype of a new kind of approach to building and deploying blockchains to an actual you know meaningful application specific blockchain in this new landscape it helped create it yeah as a vehicle to also transform it again towards you know the next stage and we don't know exactly what needs to happen in the next stage and and and the the hub's role is going to have to continue to change you know I have this long-term vision of the Hub becoming effectively a Cooperative of other chains right and yeah and sunny sort of hinted at aspects of that in in

the mesh security and you know that's those sorts of ideas you know I I sympathize um sympathize with with a lot and especially you know cooperatives multi-stakeholder cooperatives and and you know having the Hub be able to work towards that sort of thing in the long term and you know this idea of being able to run tender mint over IBC I mean I see that as kind of the Holy Grail of the project right once we got tender man over IBC you know we could pack it in I'm kidding but but you know that's that's how we know we've really built you know proper internet we can run a consensus protocol over it um you know at sort of a meta level and and have a you know have a new blockchain that sort of represents that you know higher order thing um so I think that's that's the

kind of thing we're working towards um over the long term in in the midterm I think you know there's an opportunity for the Hub to really come out as a leader as preserving these sort of wider values of sovereignty and interoperability of finding the right mix between you know taking care of itself and its Community but also supporting a much broader community of of sovereign interoperable chains and so that's going to be a really interesting space to navigate um and so I think it's got a really exciting future ahead as we build and develop new new tools and you know what I'm really interested in are you know how do we better specify and understand these systems how do we understand the invariants that are supposed to uphold how to you know how do chains offer guarantees over you know block space and over other kinds of you know execution

and security properties and everyone throws around the word security like it all me you know like there's only one thing oh security yeah I know what you're talking about like no everyone you know you mean like eight different things if if not more and so you know starting to try to get a little clearer about what security means in different contacts and what kinds of security The Hub might be might be providing or not um I think it's going to be is going to be very interesting so yeah well for more on that check out my other podcast with with Zaki yeah where we dive deeper into the different parts of atom 2.0 um yeah thanks so much for doing this you got it man yeah it's been great thanks thanks for chatting yeah thanks [Music]