Fireside chat: The prehistory of Ethereum and proto-network states / Amir Taaki, Vitalik Buterin

Transcript

yeah hi hi yes I please if you want to say anything or I can say feel free yeah um I guess um so just uh get right into it I guess uh one I mean one of the reasons why we've been I guess we're talking here right is that Amir and I have actually known each other for about 10 years now and you know we've both been following the yeah complicated and uh curvy path that uh first the Bitcoin space then the blockchain space then the crypto space and then now you know what whatever it's

called today have taken over over these years um the uh the first time that I met Amir was um actually at this um interesting place in Catalonia called a colofo it's this abandoned Factory about 50 kilometers Northwest of Barcelona that it was basically taken over by a group of people that was about this like 50 50 mix of a kind of maybe traditional kind of like Agriculture and industries yeah people like I remember they were manufacturing chairs kind of autonomously on a pretty large scale they were interested in kind of like

vaguely left-leaning anarchists kind of self-organization ideas um and the other uh the other half of the 50 50 is kind of old crypto open source hacker community community types right so not just people working on um what was done at the time just at Bitcoin but even people who are working on like open source messaging technology is and like internet routing and you know all kinds of really fast editing things right and I mean a mere members writing lib Bitcoin which was an alternate Bitcoin no implementation I think he was actually the one who kind of um in inspired me to build a python Bitcoin Library this is a pi Bitcoin

tools uh Heroes use five Bitcoin tools yeah trying to think of how many people have used it indirectly like I think some of the code that is in the pi eat sale tool that people use to participate in the original ether sale might have also been taken from there so it's uh actually yeah it's it's a it's a library so we here bought participated in The Ether sale using the python command line okay so also apply a Bitcoin Source user but the point is that like there's this uh you know deep technical history across um you know both Bitcoin and ethereum but I think in addition to caring about you know both of those

things I think um you know both of us care about this and of ideas of uh decentralized Community isn't just um you know creating stronger communities in general kind of person trying to really preserve and make sure that we're always you know looking back to the original Spirit of crypto and not just crypto itself but some of the older movements like open source and all of these things um so yeah happy to you know dig much deeper into all of those topics over the next uh I guess 43 minutes yeah I mean there is a lot of um very technical history about the Bitcoin scripting and how if was born

out of that and that would be like another hour or two hours and all the different things that were going on that led to Eve um and yeah and and about colorful because there's you know it's it's 10 years since we were in in California and now there is um there's a lot of kind of discussion about Network States and Montenegro and zuzalu so it's very interesting to kind of connect with that and also you know uh also tie into you know what was the vision of Ethan there and in in that time and you know how do we unlock the true destiny of crypto like did we that

Vision at the start has it changed how did it change Etc um I'll say and and you describe colorful very eloquently like how your experience was how I was there um California was also a subsidiary of the cic which is Catalan integral Cooperative which is a network of 10 000 cooperatives in Catalonia where uh they realized because Catalina has a long Anarchist history and they uh wanted to use the structure of a Cooperative to create their own internal economy which means they don't have to pay taxes to the state uh they have all the basis of

of Life of agriculture industry Health Etc within this big Network and colorful was an experiment from the cic to construct a kind of community you can go on YouTube and you can search colorful you can search images of color photos get a sense of how big it was it was a huge industrial complex where groups of anarchists they said okay you know we want to take over this place but you know it's we want to make a break with the past with how things are done and we might actually want to conceptualize Society we want to conceptualize how does economy work like

how can we have an economic model to sustain this and you know there are some successes there are some failures but it was a a good departure from the tradition and in California there was also a system of computers where we had system of credit and people could trade those and also inside the cic they had their own monetary system and that was where the interests with cryptocurrency came in because they also wanted to use cryptocurrency as a way to connect their economy to also the international Network um so yeah I'm interested to hear more also about the network State's vision and zuzalu

Etc yeah also I mean there's always basically this kind of crazy social experiments that I had the idea of doing at the end of last year which was uh basically like trying to take something in the direction of um you know both Network States but also kind of things that are vaguely like Network States but but in some way different in a somewhat different direction and figure out like what is a thing that goes in that direction but is also and is ambitious enough that by running it we actually yeah like learn a lot of things and we build towards something valuable but at the same time it's like actually yeah like manageable and you know not some

kind of crazy over commitment and so the idea is basically to take 200 people from a combination of the ethereum community but also some other community is particularly longevity and just the community of people interested in governance experiments more generally and uh bring everyone together into a location in Montenegro and like live there for two months and like basically be a pop-up city right so from like in surface of what daily life there was like it was basically um you know people I mean some people described it described it as being somewhat like a University campus like basically people people live people talk to each other there are a lot of uh

things that were kind of designed to encourage people to talk to each other like providing a free um a breakfast that was uh explicitly designed to be as as healthy as possible and as close as possible to the fancy longevity recipes of Brian Johnson um but uh also there was this structure called The Dome where people could organize events and like educational events about various topics various kind of mini events mini conferences also fun stuff like karaoke happened uh there at least a couple of times um and basically it was trying to both be an opportunity for people in these communities to like discover each other

and just like be an in-person environment in the same way that you know cities are Universal environments together and but both within each of the spaces but also create some a different set of cross connections between the spaces like the the D side decentralized science movements would be an example of uh a cross connection between um you know the ethereum movement and uh people working in mental health longevity biology in general and uh and some of those other fields but also do a couple of experiments and like trying to really Implement some tech some of the technological ideas that we care about in real life so like one of the things that God built and used was something

called the zoo pass which is uh basically in a zero knowledge proof based identity system right so like if I take a cell right now I here I can basically um hold on let me go to switch over profiles on graphene OS because we have to be a Cypher Punk cool kids now um by the way you should use graphene OS it's like actually good um but like there's uh this is it right it's a QR code and ins this QR code literally is a QR encoding of a ZK snark right like this like it's not a pointer to a snark it's not a QR dot code blah blah this literally is a snark and it's a snark that proves that I am in the set

of zerzola residents and it proves this without revealing any other information right so you prove that you remember without revealing anything else about yourself and then there is like a physical component of this which is I can show you this so you can scan it and there's also like this online component where you can pull basically yeah there's an API you could verify these proofs online and there was a system called Zoo poll which is basically an anonymous voting system and people could make polls and people could vote on these polls anonymous this way right and so like all of these technologies that we love you know talking about in theory we got to like actually test them out and like actually use them inside of a community that was like actually yeah I'm you know excited and interested about like you know bringing these kinds

of uh of crypto ideas into real life right um so I think like the reason why I I mean I care about this and it just uh it is I mean I think a lot of reasons but one of those reasons is just that like actually like implementing a lot of Technology as well and implementing Technologies in a way that doesn't uh involve a lot of sacrifices to the to the core principles it often really requires a yeah a community to be effective right like if if you just you know say here I published some code and I probably you know you can do a zero knowledge proofs and you just put it out there like often

it doesn't like get very far by itself because people are like okay I downloaded it I ran through the examples like what's the next step right and like that's very far from like actually you know saying here's the technology and like let's try to do the technology and have a culture and community that use the technology and where people can support each other in you know helping each other use the technology and like really yeah benefit from it in ways that just depends on everyone I'm you know using it using it at the same time and like really do those things in parallel uh kind of in parallel and uh you know like where basically you don't have to make the sacrifices of like making everything super friendly to

people trying to figure that alone because people don't actually have to be alone right and it's like a group of two of uh you know 200 people that's all we're working through everything and like working through the challenges of these of these kinds of things at the same time right so I think uh yeah the challenge is like how do we create these um you know it's really yeah stronger crypto Community is where we people can support each other in uh bringing these Technologies to real life and people also have um you know more choice in like what what locations um you know these kind of [Music] you know environments that end up building these these kinds of Technologies actually happening

yeah you know like people today they feel very alienated and it's kind of telling that you know people seek uh to be part of a intentional Community where they sense as a meaning and they can work together that's kind of uh very radical speak what you said about the values in in software and it's similar I mean there's like many historical examples where if you look at any major uh paradigm shift that happen in history any technological or scientific paradigm shift for example when uh the heliocentric model was first proposed it didn't actually offer a

better explanatory power than than a ptolemaic model because usually in science how the scientific consensus shifts is um there's always contradictions in some scientific theory and it's not necessarily that the community will shift to a new Theory uh because that theory offer uh is is better like the actual Criterion for why people select a new paradigm can change like sometimes it can be the a new paradigm or theory is it has better aesthetic qualities or it has more explanatory power and always you know how does that happen is in in society there's a you know widespread philosophical or moral change and in

science there's always these contradictions and and for whatever reason some person or or small group of people initially go and stop pulling at those threats and then the more they pull at those threats the more they unwind those contradictions at which point they can form a new paradigm and at some point you know there is something that will cause the community to shift onto this new your consensus and start putting their energy into it and to start develop that Paradigm to be to be better and right now with cryptocurrency uh you know uh there is there is a feeling of bewilderment I mean I don't know if you I would be curious to see like for when

when you're envisioning if I mean I have my own ideas but I'd be curious to hear in your own words like when you envisioned if like you know what were you envisioning but I kind of can cite that in 2012 a lot of us they kind of we kind of thought we were like the agarist parallel economic system it's inevitable you know we just need to relax and it's coming but it hasn't hasn't happened like that and now there is this feeling of um of you know uh how do we how do we get in touch with that thing that gave us vitality and energy the free software movement when it first came out in the 90s which there's a history behind that um there was a lot of creativity and

they're creating software that people were like I couldn't imagine that this software could exist it was really at the Forefront of Technology then as the movement started to scale other people said hey guys let's take this to the next level you know let's and then then they they they start to bring the the businesses on board and they said okay let's Rebrand open source and they stopped talking about freedom and in the free software content started to just talk about uh utilitarian arguments like uh that it's cheaper that it's more secure and suddenly a lot of business flowed into the open source movement and it started

to grow very big and people started to talk about Mass adoption but then something happened along the way where people started to look and go okay we need to reach Mass adoption which when people say Mass adoption they don't actually mean the world they mean you know Western People Western markets and and then um and then we kind of looked okay who is who is the biggest by Marcia okay Microsoft Windows okay that's the gold standard we're going to follow behind that and instead of being its own thing Linux became the alternative and he started

playing catch-up and and and because and we lost that uh in that process we lost that uh Vitality that source of innovation and creativity so that that's that's a question now a big cloud not just over ethereum but cryptocurrency in general it's it's like where where are we heading towards yeah I think uh one of the big philosophical shifts that happened to me over the last 10 years is the shift from what Peter Tio calls um indefinite optimism to a definite optimism right so the way they can define those terms roughly is that indefinite optimism basically it says that like you're

optimistic you expect that the future is going to be better and good things will happen but you don't really have an idea of what those good things are and the best that you can do is kind of set up abstract mechanisms that ensure that those good things are more likely to happen you know more quickly regardless of what they are right um and that's I think at the beginning of ethereum like a lot of my thinking was definitely indefinite Optimist right like I I had some specific ideas of things that I thought would be really cool to build and like you know many things I'm like making this kind of more full stack finding uh Financial system having stable coins having uh you know things like prediction markets but the larger part of my thinking was basically like I

did not know what specific things people would want to like build on top of blockchains and like what specific things people would want to make you know more more open and more and more censorship resistant and decentralized and so I wanted to create the tools to empower developers to kind of build those uh things and they will know more you know more than us what what those things are going to be right and I think over the next uh over the 10 years that followed like the thinking as uh really kind of ended become sort of more aware of like what the actual areas are where these kinds of things can provide a lot of value and what the areas are where these kinds of

Technologies can provide can provide less value right and I they're I think like in my thinking there's a bigger kind of appreciation of the fact that like if you want a thing to happen you have sometimes you just have to go do the thing right like um you know if we want uh people to have um you know finances that are actually like actually secure um and you know people to actually be able to hold their savings without having to depend on a single um you know centralized company Institute for them then like you have to like actually go and specifically build build those those tools to make it possible right if we

want a stable coin to exist you have to like actually go and make the stable coin um if um you know we yeah wants to create a culture where people actually yeah you know where like value um you know privacy and uh privacy yeah actually becomes a reality then like you have to actually go and build the culture but you have to build the tools as well but like if no one actually does the last step of uh building the culture well the culture actually won't get built there's like so many instances where things just can't keep on not happening for many years just because everyone is kind of you know staring at each other in an imaginary room pointing to each other and it's like hey hey the thing is going to get built right like look we

have a proof the free market incentives say that the thing it will be built the yeah the holy book of Austrian economics says so Human Action wait wait why aren't the humans acting and you know no you're the human you have to act right and like that realization has been a big change in my thinking and I think also just a yeah um a deeper understanding of like the deal like the the need to focus not on like places where you're one point where you're kind of 1.1 exiting what people can do but places where you're 10xing what people can do right so like to to kind of get into this example of like free software and um Ubuntu like I think one of the kind of mistakes there was

like like I was uh in early uh well early by my standards Ubuntu user uh yeah you know I was there since like to 2007 or eight or so um but the um I think I remember was that the main pitch for Ubuntu at the time was like oh you don't have to pay too like 200 for a Windows license right and like the challenge is that like first of all that pitch depends a lot on network effects right because for an average user if you want to use it but like you you know this that stuff today like you have to buy a computer chances are the computer comes with Windows pre-installed and then you go and install the Ubuntu on

top of the windows and you're not actually benefiting from those savings right so that's number one and then number two is like well Ubuntu at that time when the network effect is still small the yeah like you have to incur a lot of personal cost and like figuring out how to actually use stuff you have to figure out like okay can't use Photoshop gotta use like okay Ubuntu is developer friendly gotta understand how to like do things in this developer friendly way two or three pieces of Hardware are not gonna work you have to figure out how to do like static look through stack exchange and get answers right and like if your page to people is a 1.1 x and when people see the first obstacle they're gonna give up right and like the same thing is true

for cryptocurrency like at that time the pitch for cryptocurrency is like oh you don't have to pay 2.9 to PayPal and it's like well okay yeah PayPal is awful and like the 2.9 percent is awful and three point nine percent for international payments is even more awful right but like the 1.1 x is uh look okay fine 2.9 percent plus three um you know 3.9 percent that's like a bit more than 1.068 right it's like 1.068 plus 2.9 of uh of 3.9 so somewhere around 1.069 like that's literally less than one point one one point One X right but yeah if I but then if you start talking about like hey

privacy the privacy of cash this is a human right that we did not even have to think about because it's been a basic default fabric of society for 3000 years and now suddenly over the course of 10 years we're basically sleepwalking into an equilibrium where that is just being taken away and the privacy of cash is being denormalized and people are trying to like meme into existence the idea that if you are trying to conduct intermediated Finance you are some kind of sketchy sketchy person who's not trustworthy and possibly a criminal like that's scary like that's not a 1.1 x like that's that's a big deal and that's a big deal that not not everyone but some people are going to be willing to

like actually you know take a go through a big deal of effort in order to get around if you talk about like hey I'm in Africa and in my local market I can make you know 400 a month but there's U.S markets where I can be a remote worker and I can earn four thousand dollars a month well that's a literal 10x right and like if for problems like that right like that's something that you can really uh like really make it make a big deal out of uh like you're going to be willing to spend effort and pay costs for that right and the thing is that the 10 a lot of the time the 1.1 x's in our society they happen just because of technical inefficiency the 10 access in our society they happen because of political inefficiencies that exist

because people want them to be that way right like you're if you're circumventing a 10x barrier in income you're circumventing a barrier that was put in place by people that where those people want that barrier to exist right and you know you are to some extent engaging in what's ultimately a confrontation with those people if you want to preserve your privacy at a time when uh you know of many kinds of bureaucrats are trying to create a zero privacy cash with Society you are going against their objectives right and like that's uh it's like a different kind of game and if you get people if you try to sort of push people into crypto in a yeah like in a context where they're kind of you know not appreciating that game then like short term it's a good

adoption strategy but like when serious difficulty starts to come in like you're not really creating a community that's like really going to like actually stick like stick together for that right and I think that's one of the things that like the crypto space as a whole and like the lunar Community Punk Community absolutely is uh you know like it's like starting to recognize and I think like recognizing that in a healthy way that at the same time doesn't turn you into a crazy guy that like keeps on predicting you know like successfully predicting 18 of the last zero US dollar hyper inflations like that's you know an important balance that we need to that we need to get right and I think you

know the some of the recent movements are doing a better and better job of actually doing that yeah did you read the sovereign individual I did yeah yeah interesting [Laughter] yeah I mean I don't want to scare people too much but I be in uh to be fair I also read your Amazon is the virtue of nationalism which I did not super agree with but I mean yeah obviously he says some strange things in the book like he's at the beginning he says that um human history is purely shaped through technological factors yeah and and therefore that influences economics and and economic shape history and the

philosophy and ideologies don't play any part which is not really true because human will and Human Action you know shapes uh history and historical events but that human Beyond Human Action always exists in the framework of narratives and stories and ideologies religions Etc um but um yeah I say I didn't want to scare you too much but to give you I mean like hmm I mean okay in in Turkey there's the bayrakhtar which now is being used in Ukraine they even on YouTube you can see they they make songs about it but the origin of that was the the uh the son of

the father baraktar who's an industrial guy sent his son to MIT in America and he started hanging around with the hackers and hacker spaces and he was like whoa drones and then he came back to Turkey he's like Dad we need to make a drone industry to kill terrorists and his dad is like wow cool idea and turkey actually has the biggest uh uh hackathons in Europe like where but it's government-run hackathons anyway they started mass manufacturing these drones for example in North Iraq where they have in Insurgency from the cuts fighting for their autonomy for many

years they were far better Fighters than Turks but now with the drawings have completely changed our reality we're now an entire country or entire region they can put a drone in the sky and it flies for hours and hours in a circle and they're cheap so you can replace them with another one when one runs out of battery so it's just like aerial surveillance of of the grounds when it rotates around the ground it just rotates the image so it's a still image and it has it's automated it uses AI has thermos Etc so now nobody can move on the ground everything is is completely monitored and surveilled and America now has developed what's called a ninja

missile and as a missile that when it hits the ground it doesn't explode on impact it shoots ninja swords and individual targets and eliminate a single human being without any collateral damage so now you can have an uh you're like your maps on a tablet like an iPad and you're like beep and you can eliminate that person and when we brought China into the wef in the 90s we said oh yeah you know China they become more democratic human rights didn't really happen and now China has this social credit scoring system where um you know people if if you're for example late to a meeting with someone

or you hang out with bad people you do or your neighbors report you you get a lower social credit scoring and then that means you can't get a train ride or you can't rent an apartment Etc so your life becomes harder there's a way of incentivizing or disincentivizing citizens behavior um was now in Europe they want to do cbdc's this is a long process where they've gradually more and more centralized the financial infrastructure and now the last part of that is where there's no other Banks that's just a central bank and they give people they say oh you know we're going to give you uh an incentive which is the Ubi to move over to this scheme and essentially they're

deeply inspired by the social credit scoring system so there's a there's a philosopher and historian of Science and Technology called Lewis Mumford and he says that there are two legacies within technology one Legacy he called the state civilization Legacy and this is like Technics to do with uh control of society of management of human beings and then there's like a democratic techniques and this is techniques which Empower certain groups in the society organized to mobilize uh with certain groups of philosophies he was talking about making communities that I swung them out in California we had this resource management system those are

examples of democratic techniques stuff that enables the society to create value so as a cryptocurrency now um you know the the sovereign individual you know we mentioned I I when I saw him speaking I was like there's a lot of I don't know if it's if it's explicit references but it's it touches on on things in that book which was written in 1997 which uh talks a lot about cryptocurrency um and one of the things it's saying in the book is that um cryptocurrency renders the business model of nation states Obsolete and you know we we

now uh We've we're seeing the um you know like a lot of people they're feeling despondent they're like oh it's just used for scams Etc we haven't we're trying to conceptualize uh to deliver this technology that can liberate people that can make people Freer we we but it feels like we're perpetually like close to this threshold and there's something that you know we're trying and we're like something that's lacking that we can't cross that barrier so that's that's when we're talking about um the the values and so on and um I went to Athens and uh and and in Athens there is a museum of ancient

Greeks Science and Technology and ancient Greeks they had steam power they had Advanced astronomical instruments they were able to calculate the circumference to the Earth accurate to a few meters they had cryptography they had steam power they had Hydraulics they had electricity they uh and I was very confused because I was like oh why didn't ancient Greece have a scientific and Industrial Revolution they could have had it they had they had the prerequisites there I was talking with my my friends and somebody said that it was because of the slavery the slavery

in ancient Greece Whenever there was a problem uh you could just get more slaves to solve the problem for you and indeed when you look at the inventions that they made they're all toys they're toys to amuse the Kings and this is kind of similar situation now in crypto where it's like I was I was alluding to free software and open source transition I mean the free I think the free software people also made a mistake they weren't pragmatic you know like it was tough being a free software developer that's that's what I appreciate about crypto is we have a way to financialize to to build economy around and to capture value because that's a problem with creative people creative people they

deliver tremendous value to the world but they don't often don't have a way of capturing that value back so it's important to have pragmatism at the same time we have to also realize what is the source of that value come from and it's like it's like uh developers you know there's like developers are merely good but there's great developers so there's great you know mathematicians and you know like for example when you read Isaac Newton you like look at his books and there's a lot of crazy speculation now in the universe and in fact that's a lot of why people get into science you know you want to understand what is the cosmos what is the cosmos about the same thing with technology I was watching a anime called Finland Saga and there's a

section where it has um a plow and the guy's using a plow and he goes what a marvelous invention this is this is this is an invention that could only have been made by a farmer and um it's like okay so what is it that's preventing us as a cryptocurrency community from manifesting crypto's Destiny what is crypto's destiny hmm sorry I've done that [Applause] you know I think these uh the analogy

that you started with is uh interesting right because it really shows the importance of like thinking things through especially when you're building building a technology with uh some social goals in mind right because like if you're going to be building like uh drones for example right or and even military drones like it might even be that uh the first war that your dro the drones get used in are going to be yeah you know produced by your company and sold to the side of the the side of the war that you like actually yeah really genuinely and you know but maybe you know correctly believe is the side that's actually just protecting their free their freedom in their homes from

people that are trying to colonize them right but then I think 10 or 20 years ahead into the future and then there is this question of like well who is the next uh next guy that's going to take advantage of the technology and who is the guy after that right and it's possible that like three iterations further into the into what you've built what you basically end up creating something that like actually ends up in any context that you totally did not predict enabling the exact sort of you know oppression that you were originally trying to fight against right and there's uh I mean even in the in the case of uh cryptography there is a tradition of uh kind of worrying about

this somewhere right there was this uh famous article called the moral character of cryptographic work by Philip Rockaway I think and uh it was talking about how you know cryptography yeah like began with a yeah kind of pretty heavy Spirit of um individual rights but then as that kind of professionalized and academicized and you started getting things like uh you know identity based encryption and like various you know things that go up the ladder of uh like different kinds of applications and like you know a couple of decades out like later people started implementing like Dr Ram right which is like one of the most uh you know anti-freed I mean anti-personal sovereignty Technologies out there and the so the question is like if you're

building something then like how can you ensure that the thing that you're building you know really does and going go toward the the value that you wanted to go toward and you know it doesn't end up getting co-opted into like being something that's uh you know totally different and separate right and like I think there definitely are um way ways and that you can be somewhat sure right like you can just look at a technology and see like like what are the infrastructure dependencies of the thing right like is the is the uh the thing and even the format in which you're releasing the thing something that's uh like designed to um you know Empower people and

communities at the edges or is it designed to create a world where everything goes through kind of one Central source that then becomes a yeah point for you know corporations and governance and governments to kind of start fighting over as a political football right but like it's still a uh it's a very non-trivial problem and even like building the technology at the same time as uh building the community is perhaps even one of the strategies by which you know you can be more more likely to be successful at that sort of thing right and that's like this is the sort of thing that I think like we've seen kind of mixed mixed Us in the uh in the crypto space right like like look

what if these I think actually yeah the thing that's been more successful about the crypto space I think than we uh um and its ability to kind of stick to values than we realized is that the technology like the meme has in some cases in some cases found dystopian applications right like the meme of crypto definitely contributed to the meme of cbdcs but the technology itself if you look at like actually existing cbdcs the closer they get to implementation right like if you look at if you look at the trajectory in the history of actual we see actual cbdc projects it's like I don't know if you people have seen the internet meme where like there's uh you have this picture of

like a horse and the left side of the horse is like this really beautiful and like real photorealistic drawing and then as you get closer to the right edge of the horse you get something that looks like it was drawn by a five-year-old and like the left side is like Theory and the right side is and like the middle is like plan and the right side is like consumer facing implementation right and like cbdc's are basically like that right like I remember back in 2015 there were people from The People's Bank of China that were like coming into you know conferences and talking to a blockchain and crypto people and at least some of them were you know seems genuinely interested in like building a cbdc on top of a block on top of a blockchain

that like might actually be cryptoly in like one in one or two ways right but then as the thing got closer to fruition all the blockchain bits fell away and like you know there aren't like the current dcep like I don't I like I I don't know of any block explorers I don't know of any Markle proofs I don't know of any ways to run a node I don't know of any ways to run a light node and like it basically just becomes a glorified like centralized thing that's not very different from other existing centralized Payment Systems right and like that's not just the China story that's like a story of basically every attempt of out of cbdc that I've seen in like anywhere either returns into something incredibly boring that does doesn't actually like have any kind of like blockchain cryptographic

verification or the project disappears right and so there is something about the crypto technology that has kind of resisted to getting um you know co-opted to some extent right but then at the at the same time like there's definitely um you know ways in which like the meme ended up connecting to other memes and like there were people who got interested in this like very inoffensive vision of like blockchains are great because blockchains are about digitizing and then people realize that you can digitize without a blockchain without giving people any kind of decentralization or privacy and uh yeah look I don't think I have any like

one strong conclusion I think it's like more you know 10 000 small accumulated pieces of wisdom that have to do with just the fact that like there exists this challenge of making sure the thing on the right side of the horse actually Bears any resemblance to the thing on the left side of the horse and like yeah uh like you can't get around having to like actually explicitly think about that problem interesting so you'll you know you said in the beginning you made uh if because you wanted to deliver something with utility right for people but now seems like it's increasingly going into a bigger vision of parallel societies I'd say I'd say I'd say things or didn't

the most valuable stuff in the ecosystem like I think there is basically two parts of the ecosystem right like there is uh just making basic payments for and uh savings work for people and I think that's valuable and like as I mentioned like there's I think in like Western countries that sort of stuff is a 1.1 x but like in Latin America Africa southeast Asia like that's a 10x right and then at the same time like there is this deeper vision of um like let's uh actually we try to you know be the like like basically be a part of this kind of deeper um you know open source Centric decentralization Centric I mean user sovereignty Centric privacy Centric

vision of like actually building out a full stack right like that includes payments it includes things like identity and reputation it includes voting and includes like and ZK voting and includes tools for people to uh for people communities to organize themselves and like let's actually try to like really make that work together as a coherent whole right and like one of the key components there is like this idea of making the pieces fit together right like the difference is like the difference between a product and a society is that in India or an ecosystem is that any true ecosystem you do have or even more so in a true Society like

by another 5x right like you have like pieces actually fit to fit together and fit into each other right like one of the things that I sometimes think about is how like if you look at like Estonia for example right like I remember in the marketing right like many years ago there was this Vision that like hey Estonia is going to become a digital nation and anyone around the world is going to be an Estonian and like we can have a community of estonians and all of these things right and like I remember even visiting and being really impressed by it and like I visited the government so the government felt like it was actually being run by a startup right and like it was really freaking cool and I was super impressed and there is aspects of that Vision that succeeded and that I am still super impressed by

and there's aspects of that Vision that failed right the aspects of that Vision that succeeded are like you could actually go vote using era like fully you know e-residency technology you could actually do like full e-banking e-companying corporation like actually you know don't bother with the paper you can like there are people from um you know places like China and other countries that like you use it as a gateway to basically create eight like businesses in the that are registered inside of the EU right and like get plugged into that whole ecosystem and like it it does give people a lot of empowerment by kind of connecting them to these uh you know kind of global um you know tools of like of like

Commerce and just like basic interaction you know economic interaction in society right but at the same time the part that failed is like e-residents are not a uh real really much of a community right like you don't there isn't that much of like feeling kinship with each other because like oh I mean I'm any Resident and you're also an e-resident right like there's a little of that but like far less than the crypto Community for example and the thing that I realized out of that lesson is that a corporate ecosystem is one a group provides services to many people one to n a community is people providing services to each other end to end and like e-residency never really succeeded at being a community in that sense to

enough of an extent right and crypto has succeeded more the ethereum ecosystem is an ecosystem of people providing services to each other right and people building applications that are interconnected interlocking one thing depends on another thing like you know David Hoffman who loves the money Lego is metaphor like you have Legos and Legos like stick into each other right and like uh the Unix philosophy programs communicate with each other through the universal interface which is text right and uh we actually have like more and more of that happening right and like one of the things that I care about seeing more of is like he but people like actually making sure that like that kind of plugging actually exists right don't build Empires build tools build tools to

plug into other tools the VC funds they're going to tell you to build Empires because if you build an Empire you can value capture and you can give them profits if you build a tool well you know you're you're going to get a lot of success and your and the community is you know you're going to be part of a community a community that loves you and that builds on top of things that you're building and there's a lot of payoffs that you get but their payoffs that the VC is not going to get 23 of because they're part of your series a round right so don't build an Empire or build a tool and uh man okay that's uh a good moment to stop for now but okay okay the stuff about VCS is

really really important because um I don't know if people many people know how the game works because we were talking about slavery and slave mindset and where does that come from because no there are some very very good VCS like VCS that made it in crypto people that they believe in your course and they they invest based as a Believer but there's also VCS you know like there's Angel Investors there's devil investors that's it like uh the Central Bank prints money and gives it to his friends is essentially taking money from the productive members of society by

printing money it devalues the money everybody else has and it gives it to its friends and their friends LP in in funds and those funds like honestly like sometimes I I spoke with funds where they go they were literally people they're like they they manage over a billion dollars of investment over one billion dollars but they're because you don't they don't want to have smart people there smart people are a liability you want to have stupid people people they're safe and and I honestly I wonder I was like why is some of the technology that we use today crap like why there's so many

dog garbage apps like you go to a restaurant it's like install our app and it's like oh no I just I just give me a paper menu I just I just want to pay with cash you know like why do you have QR codes that point still like QR code.te everyone like it's totally but plus like menus are tiny you should literally be able to put the menu onto a QR code yeah and but it but it and I thought crypto was bad but it's it's not as crypto specific problem it's big Tech in general where these VCS with big funds because it's a hierarchy the big funds have the brand name they're at the top and then there's the smaller funds underneath and the ones at the bottom and it's like the big ones lead then the next tranche follows

and then the very bottom ones try to push in and it's very predatory that that money game works and at the top those VCS is a central bank capital or it's capital from the the system essentially and they're the ones that are dictating the technology that we create because they have a checklist the checklist goes uh has a shiny website has a JavaScript electron webship GUI has a big team that's why uh I I saw an article two months ago which said Google and Facebook were hiring tens of thousands or fake employees is to pump their stocks it has to look professional

it doesn't matter if it takes 43.4 seconds to load in 92 if you're into that connection exactly yeah so um so like there is an element of of pragmatism the but we also have to realize that okay cryptocurrency what we're trying to do we're trying to we're trying to construct a parallel society that Society is a that contains the seeds of the free society which is resist inside its DNA is resistant to authoritarianism and essentially our tours is enabling for example Dao's that movement to to mobilize that free movement to to kind

of happen and um uh the the Linux movement there's a lot of history that we can learn but right now uh because a lot of cryptocurrency is a historical we're making a lot of the same mistakes over again that happened in the 90s happened in the 80s like in order how do we escape from that well it's like there is a Silicon Valley mindset we were talking about applications like why the applications are like that uh there's a Silicon Valley mindset which is okay you create a startup you hire like a big flashy team like for example I give you another example I have a

friend and this is really up I'm a friend and he says to me Amir is a big cryptocurrency project over 500 million market cap he says Amir you can't have too many Alphas in your team you can only have three Alphas otherwise their fight until the projects apart you have to have betas essentially slaves slave Slave people so it's like we're we're creating projects we're hiring Slave people into the projects and then we're like wondering why the products we're creating are not delivering the value for for crypto so that that's what he was saying about Community it's a social structure there and essentially uh

you have these Silicon Valley companies and they're creating applications and they're like uh their their focus is not the technology their focus is for example in in a vendor they're like okay we have to capture this is what they mean by mass adoption we have to capture as many people as possible so we can tax those people they're not interested in forming some kind of community that's meaningful they're like okay how do we make it as uh uh how do we get people into this many people in because they it's like the classic game where you're just you're trying to pump the thing and and it's kind of like uh now we're talking about Linux but

Linux had this crisis where you know we started playing catch up and then what happened is Bam uh Mac computers came and passed us by and then bam uh mobile phones came and passed us by and we're like damn we missed two markets we was we we weren't able to capture that value that was happening but but then now there's there's a kind of realization going on the Linux Community where it's like okay at Linux it's not Microsoft it's not windows it's a Linux it's different and the whole the whole economic value proposition which is

crypto as well it enables us to build infrastructure that infrastructure allows us as a community to aggregate wealth to to mobilize to to become strong as a community that's that's what we have to realize because everybody they're playing the economic game of the system which and they're getting absorbed by the system as opposed to trying to understand and that's why and and honestly if is the uh the realization of the Agora uh now like if you said where is the Agora in crypto I have to say oh it's on Eve but but okay yeah but that's something to be cheered

but also and it's easy to go I was done the wrong way I would have done this better Etc because you know like in the end somebody moved and and created that market okay now we can retroactively look go okay how can we reorientate because movements are successful our movements are able to adapt he mentioned the economic ideology at the in the 2010 2011 Bitcoin the the libertarian uh economic rationalism which was like oh the free market laissez-faire will solve all the issues uh that was important that gave us there was a there was the gold people the Austrian economists the free software people the the crypto

Anarchy people at the time it gave us a framework to conceptualize the world that moved us forwards but now we've discarded that we've realized okay we've like through our experience we've realized okay that worldview you no longer holds weight now our job our main job is to build our intellectual fabric essentially to create a cryptography with a nice ones because that's what's going to deliver the technology it's like the the people the mines here and we have to and and it's it's part of it is political philosophy but it's also the the skills the mathematics the the programming I see a separation between these people every person needs to integrate both of these things together

right now there is a class of the Visionary thinkers and then the the slave deaths we need to bring these two crowds together and we need to go okay what's our goal our goal is to make uh the parallel economy is to build that infrastructure because that's our economic value and then mobilize and realize it that's when we start delivering those those uh applications so thank you so much gentlemen the time is up I'll have to we'll have to close

things here so again one round of applause for Amira metallic thank you unfortunately it's not just the time that we run out we also run out of oxygen in this room uh so um you know feel free to do your thing and like ask questions on the internet unfortunately we can extend this now this is the last uh last talk of of today so again thank you gentlemen uh you can enjoy the rest of your time here this venue closes at nine so you can hang out hang at the bar for the hackers uh the venue runs 24 7. so if you're

hacking you don't have to worry police closes at midnight uh so please stick with us and tomorrow morning at nine we start with the Morgan morning yoga session and uh zero knowledge proves 101 at 10 um and an auditing Workshop in the workshop room so thanks so much