Rhys Lindmark: MIT's Digital Currency Initiative – Why We Need Blockchain Ethics (#311)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 311 with guest Rhys linmark hi welcome to epicenter my name is Celeste mpg and I infinity can't today our guest is Rhys linmark Rhys is the head of community and long-term social impact at MIT Media labs digital currency initiative of course we've talked about the DCI before on the show we had the director Nahanni houla on the podcast last year I meant Rhys a couple years ago and I was always impressed

with the way that he thinks about social issues I was also really amazed to find out that he gives a non-negligible part of his salary to charity and I remember at the time it had led me to really rethink the way that I can make an impact and I had started doing a little bit more volunteer work in local nonprofits in in my vicinity Rhys is also a fellow podcaster and he's the host of grey mirror which is a podcast about technology society and ethics it used to be called training a humanist blockchain future that used to be the best blockchain Titor ever i loved-ed yeah it's a good name for a podcast a

little hard to remember but good name nonetheless so we talked about how one can make better choices around making a positive impact on the world we also addressed the turmoil happening at the Media Lab at the moment surrounding the funding that they've received from no impediment rly the conversation was the topic of blockchain ethics and that's because Rhys and Neha are giving a blockchain ethics class at the moment and I think surround blockchain is not something that's discussed very much but since the technology has a potential for such a massive social impact it's worth considering and I think that it's something that all of us collectively

should be spending a lot more time thinking and talking about absolutely so I think we kind of tend to scare this issue as technologists just because the questions are actually really hard and there's no clear right and wrong words you know just drawing the line in the sand is super difficult so I think it's super commendable that the MIT Media Lab digital currency initiative actually takes this on as a challenge instead of just you know saying this is technology we're not really responsible for the societal outcome of this and I mean basically we've we've seen these kinds of Institute's for AI pop up in the last couple of years and I think

it's time that we actually have them for blockchain as well well hopefully with this course it'll get more people thinking of the ethical questions surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrencies and get a conversation going that will hopefully have a positive impact before we go to our interview with Rhys I would love to tell you about our sponsors for today's episode as you know we're going to San Francisco for SF blockchain week and cosmos is sponsoring the defy hackathon that's happening over the weekend there's a $50,000 prize pool in Adam for winning teams it's gonna be a huge event hundreds of people have already registered you don't have to be a developer to attend in fact if you're a designer or project manager or a legal

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really exciting to see what people build with IBC so to register go to epicenter dot rocks /sf cosmos and when you fill the form make sure to let them know that epicenter sent you we're also brought to you by benign lab the blockchain education specialists and epicenter is all about education so this is really a perfect fit they have a new smart contract auditing course and it is for experienced Theorem developers it starts on November 18th it's part-time and it's seven to eight weeks long what's great about this course is that you'll learn through real-world examples of smart contract vulnerabilities that found in the wild like this recent one a user named Luke Ashe dev was

participating in a bug bounty and he won 50 grand for finding a critical bug in a yet to be launched maker dau upgrade and so this flaw would put large amounts of collateral at risk through multi collateral die so basically a user an attacker could create a fake auction and put up very little collateral for a large amount of die and the system would trust this number and use this credit so that when the multi collateral die was in liquidation phase the attacker could steal all the collateral in it basically in one transaction so this user Lou cash dev well he found the bug and well nothing happened cuz it was never put in production so these are the kind of skills that you'll learn from this

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vulnerability never made it through to the production maker dow smart contract and you should be also taking the steps necessary to make sure that you catch those bugs there was major vulnerabilities before you go to production and so this is why getting your systems audited and creating robust security processes and fostering a call of security in your organization is really important and trailer pets can help you do that they work with your team to audit every aspect of your project they check your smart contract code and they help you implement best practices around things like DevOps and key storage and user facing applications like your website in your app but it doesn't stop there because once your software has been tested by trail of bits they'll provide tools to make sure

your code remains safe after every new commit so they kind of put this security firewall that checks your code every time you do a git commit trail of bits is constantly putting out papers and research and the results of their security audits on github so you should check out their publications repo for more on that and they recently did a formal analysis of the CBC Kasper consensus algorithm which should be one day used in the etherium so that's up on their blog you should check it out there's some interesting conclusions there so to learn more go to trail off bits comm and if you decide to reach out please do me a favor make sure to let them know you heard about them on epicenter and with that here is our interview with Reese Lynne mark we're

here with Reese Lynne mark Reese thanks for joining us today yeah I excited to be on the show I've been a fan for a while and excited to chat over zoom today well likewise I mean you know I've been a fan of you and your podcasts and just your work in general for the last little while since we met I can't remember I think it DEFCON 3 at least that's the first time we met in person yeah that's probably right so tell us a bit about your background like who you are and how you became the person that you came to be well we were just talking about this before the show it's lots of conditioning in childhood and all of that and I think more generally though for me within the blockchain a crypto currency world I I guess I was a

computer science major going into college it was always into math and science kind of things and after college I did a music education startup for a bit but around 2016 it was Trump and it was brexit and there was all those things and I was like hmm should I really just be focusing on making music education apps for kids and the answer was no and so I kind of left and took a more macro take on society in the world and put on various lenses that we might talk about a unit over the show like effective altruism and systems thinking and things like that and really from that perspective thought about how I could have the most impact on the world and from that perspective got into blocked inna cryptocurrency technology as a

powerful a thing that is it both the decentralizing force which is powerful if you want to create kind of anti fragility in a system and also as a source that changes how we think about trust and money and when you start to change core primitives like trust and money that is also powerful for changing a macro system so essentially got into blockchain and crypto at that time I guess two and a half years ago and from there did a variety of things in the space I helped start the first eath denver and get eath global off the ground to some extent and then was doing podcasting as you noted i have a podcast called grey mirror which everybody can listen to and about a I was all self funded through patreon at that point in

time and then now I guess a year year and a half ago is when I joined the MIT Media Lab and specifically the digital currency initiative here as a head of community and long-term societal impact yes that's kind of my background on how I got here and there's kind of a sub strand as well or a parallel strand about like how I think about ethics and how that relates to my professional life but that's how kind of the tech side of me has progressed through time where we're a deep dive into many of the things you have talked about just now but let's go to the MIT Media Lab so head of community and long-term societal impact that's a fantastic job title so what does this position actually entail yeah good question well it was the job

title was made up by myself and my boss and yeah I think that long-term societal impact is honestly the most the more important piece though the community piece shows that I'm having that impact not through code I don't code anymore but rather through norms and teaching and those kinds of things so I guess when I think about my job it's primarily thinking about as the title says thinking about the long term impacts of blockchain cryptocurrency technology and then trying to shape them as in a positive way so that can look like podcasting or I'm teaching a class this semester on blockchain ethics it can also look like you know going on this podcast you know doing some writing

so a variety of small things like that we're helping to kind of build the academic field of blockchain cryptocurrency technology with other fields besides ethics like law and computer science and economics but ethics is also a piece of that so it's kind of a mismatch of a variety of non-coding things in thinking about the positive impacts of the tech cool.if so before you came into this position your podcast was called creating a humanist blockchain future which I thought was the greatest name for a podcast what was the transition from that into a gray mirror how did that happen and covering the same topics is it the same podcast or is it another podcast or is it just a different name so creating a humanist

blockchain future when I think about it now it's like man that was a funny title too long also no one could remember it when I heard to help people the title they could not remember it I changed the name because I didn't want to focus exclusively on blockchain and wanted to focus more on the loop between how tech changes society and how a society changes technology and so gray mirror the idea behind that name was to say hey instead of like black mirror at the Netflix show we're tech changes society in all negative ways we should think about tech changing society in both positive and negative ways and so that's what I kind of topics that I tackled my show are the positive and negative ways that tech society and ethics all kind of Co and evolve and interact with each

other so no real it's all the same podcast and RSS feed but now it is just I guess it's technically within the digital currency initiative now and it the focus is more wide in scope you're an outspoken proponent of effective altruism for the folks out there who are not familiar with this concept what is effective at RISM and can you explain what it got you into that yeah good question so let me say I think of I am both an outspoken you know proponent of effective altruism and I think that is just one of many lenses that we can use to view the world so effective altruism is really good for

thinking about kind of long-term social impact and for like cost-effectiveness of these things but also there are things like social justice activism which is really good for thinking about power structures and how kind of you know privilege over time there's other things like you know systems thinking that's another really good lens where you can view how the world how things kind of co-evolved with each other so I add sets to say effective altruism is one lens to view the world and it is a powerful one but it's not my only lens the way that I think about it for listeners is it's essentially a mindset in a group of people who are trying to answer and think about and act on the question how can they have the most impact in the world and usually when they think about that and they think

about it in this kind of very the birth of it was from the rationalist community in San Francisco and kind of a philosophical PhD Philosophy PhD community in Oxford and so they think about this very kind of rational logical way and once you start to think about how to have that kind of impact then the kind of questions that you think about are things like okay well what should we be maximizing for should it be happiness or should it be a meaning or should be some other positive metric and when they start to think about maximizing for these metrics they think from this term called consequentialism which is where they think about the outcomes of actions so it's like okay we have if we're trying to do good in the world how

should you measure good well let's measure it based off like the outcomes and you know the consequences or the the outcomes of the of the stuff that we do and then once you measure the outcome strike Oh are we thinking about happiness or are we thinking about meaning or whatever and then once you think about maximizing for those things and you can start to think about who we are maximizing them for and then when you come from that perspective you can either think you know effective altruists think about something like animal rights as a big cause area for them where they say hmm you know there's 70 billion factory farmed land animals every year so maybe we should care a lot about that that's a lot of you know bad happiness that's happening or maybe we should think about you know if we think about human

don't just think about the people around you but think about you know you know we have about 7.5 billion people on earth and about 10% of them 750 million are still living in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day and that really is an awful situation and so let's think about them and how we can help them or they think about you know not just humans live today and not just human and not just animals live today but all the future people so you say if society you know we've had about there's 7.5 billion people today we've had about a hundred billion humans all together depending on when you count but in the future if humanity keeps going we'll have hundreds of billions or trillions of humans and so if we were to extinct ourselves or self-terminate from climate change or

nuclear you know weapons or whatever then that would be sad for all those future lives that couldn't be lived and so let's kind of think about that as well so this is to say it is a mindset that thinks about consequences and how to have a positive impact in the world and depending on your view on it you can kind of optimize for different things within that framework let me say one final bit on that which is the most crucial piece for me actually which is so when you're optimizing for happiness one crucial result that you get quickly is um that money has diminishing returns on happiness so for example if I have zero dollars and I get a thousand dollars that's awesome now I can like eat into all these great things if I'm one of those people and you're living on less

than $2 a day but for myself and for you all if we get a thousand dollars it's not that big of a deal and so studies have shown that uh this correlation pretty much holds true that money has diminishing returns on happiness happiness is logarithmic with respect to money uh-huh so it essentially doubles every time you double money you only get a little bit more happiness and so for me the way that I implement that within my life is after about forty five thousand dollars you stop getting happier when you make more money it just really really levels out and so I decide to self tax myself ten to twenty percent of my post tax income so I give about $500 a month to charity and two other things every month because I have enough

I I'm living in abundance like I'm drinking great coffee right now I'm on this awesome podcast I have a loving family and I really can help the world in a way and it doesn't even it doesn't hurt my happiness at all to to self tax myself five hundred or a thousand bucks a month in fact it makes me more happy and so that mindset is crucial for how I act as well that's one of the things that I thought has always been so interesting about you because I think that of all the people I know you're probably the only person that gives that much money to charity every month and so I've always found this fascinating now how do you explain this to people because most people will say well I'm living on like two three four grand a month or something I want to put

money like aside from a future I want to buy a house I want to set money aside for like my kids college or university and that's money that I could be putting to those uses how do you explain that to people or like how do you tackle those specific issues when like half of your sort of disposable income is going to a charity like a charitable cause so for me personally I mean a obviously when I tell my parents about this then they kind of think I'm an idiot they're like what what do you mean you should be saving for your future you know saving for you know your kids or whatever put money in a retirement account so I have definitely felt that I've also felt it myself personally

around like okay how much can i really give and do should I do 10% should I do 20% what should those numbers look like and how much can I kind of stress test myself there so I've definitely the nice piece is that I can empathize with folks who are dealing with that and I think that mainly what I do when folks you know push back or say like wait a second this money that I have it's really I need it for all these little pieces of my life I I mostly say yeah totally that's cool I agree with you and I just recommend that they kind of experiment you know start with 1% or 5% and start to think about those pieces in your life and how I think for a lot of folks it depends on how people do their budgeting but really you know you get into

spreadsheets and you think about how the money that they have and in what percentage is going to each of these different things for them and to think about their boat essentially the bonus money that they have are ways to create bonus money and then cause is I think part of it is like understanding that self perspective and like how to create the enoughness or the abundance in yourself and part of its also getting really excited about the impact you can have so for me I mean there's a lot of examples of this but like you can essentially pay 10 or 15 bucks to carbon offset your emissions for a full year so I get really excited about that you can pay 30 bucks a month to give someone a universal basic income in rural Kenya with this thing called give directly so I get really excited

about that so there's things like or just like giving random people money on the internet like I just went on Craigslist and like gave somebody 120 bucks and so there's that stuff feels really good so I think it's partially the you know getting people to start to reflect on their own abundance and enoughness and it's starting to think about the impact they can have and getting excited about that and when you can combine those two things together you can kind of make this shift though I will say I do think that this shift from scarcity to abundance especially around money is one that us all as a society need to deeply deeply make and it is going to be very difficult because for the last you know definitely the last 300 years we've we've been in and more generally speaking we've definitely been in this

self facing individual kind of win-lose greed mindset and it made sense for a long time because only up until recently was it the case that you could actively self tax yourself and not change your happiness at all like if I tried this 300 years ago it would not work but you can try it now so I think it's small things it's little conversations with people and meeting them where they're at now do you think that the money that you're giving to charity could be are you looking also at ways that you can optimize the way that that money impacts those people say for example like investing that money in some sort of a fund where like you know the end result is that you end up having more money

that you could give to those charities or like what are some ways that as a donor you can optimize on the amounts that you're giving yeah good question so I think there are kind of two perspectives that effective altruists bring to this one is there's the quote unquote cause selection level and what that means is based it's kind of that that pro/con that I gave earlier if oh should you care about animal rights and help the seventy billion factory farm land animals or should you care about global health and help you know the 750 billion people in extreme poverty or should you help the long-term future and you know try to like mitigate existential risks to humanity and so you can optimize from that level in seitan which of these do I

think is the most important do I am most care about and then start to give to that cause and then once you start to give within a cause then you can do what's called like cost-effectiveness stuff in that cause so for example if I were to try to give to something if I'm trying to help with like global health then I should probably not give to my brother or to you know my local art you know place around town or even to in general to folks in developed countries where and that's a difficult thing here but the amount of impact that you can have for folks in developed countries versus developing countries is huge it's almost like a hundred x difference and so you should this cost-effectiveness piece is choosing between the charities and saying which ones have had the most

impact compared to other ones so those are kind of the two big kind of optimizing vectors that you can look at and then I guess on this question of should you invest your money and give more later or should you just give money now is always an open question I think that and I haven't it's kind of funny because you know the answer to that I've seen a variety of people the debates on each side of this I think that for me I pretty much fall on the just give it straight now perspective because I'm already it's not like I'm not doing the investing side and so I already do the investing side and in addition to that giving them money I really think about as giving the money to people now and then that has a massive it's very

difficult to to judge the impact of the money that you would give to someone like this universal basic income now versus being able to wait a bit and then give it later and I think that because all of us are over indexed on investing and then maybe later once you have a bunch of money or whatever then giving it I essentially super try to over index the other way and try to give now instead of giving later do I recognize that's not a very powerful answers that and I'll look more deeply into it I do get that because I think basically when you when you put things off often you tend to not do them in the end so I think basically doing it now is a good way of doing it at all I'm just wondering in US how much giving someone a ubi why give direct for

instance it's better than taking the same money and supporting someone who makes a promise to change the structures how how society works in that everyone is guaranteed a basic income for instance so basically in the inners how much it's worth just fighting the symptoms and how much we should actually look at the root cause of things and try to treat that obviously I mean that's a long shot and giving someone $15 a month is a good start and basically weighing these options against one another I think is really really difficult but of course I mean basically that shouldn't paralyze you

and lead you to not give anything which I think it does actually do for many people so I think that's a great question though and I think well one note is that these kinds of questions are the exact questions that the effective ultras community engages with and they engage with it in a very rational kind of way of like okay let's you know think about the consequences of these two things let's make some expected value calculations etc etc and determine which one would be better so that that kind of question is is right in line with all of that and I think yet to hope to not be paralyzed with it is definitely true I know for me that that difference yeah it's a question of like cysts macro systems change versus yet dealing with the root causes or versus you know dealing with the symptoms of it

and I think that you can see this balance with something like climate change and effective altruism this balance is talked about a lot and some of the most impactful charities that they have they don't actually like plant trees for carbon you know offsets what they do is this macro political work like this one called coalition of reinforced Nations and what it does is it protects rainforests more generally but doesn't actually like plant trees but effective altruism has found it to be super super impactful because it does some of that more macro political systemic work so that's an open question for sure and I just personally love to give directly one because it's a so I mean when you compare give directly to some other pieces it's still surprisingly effective and it just feels so nice to just be

able to give someone it's an easy really easy story to tell where you're just like I'm just giving this person money and like it makes them happier it makes me happier it's a win-win scenario and I agree I could think about with some more macro systemic stuff but I just really love the story you've give directly okay that's really fascinating let's switch gears a little bit I mean we want to spend some time on your blockchain ethics course but first I think it's worth spending a little bit time on what's happening at the Media Lab at the moment so yeah can you break down what's been going on over the last two three months and how it's affected the DCI let me say before I say anything here is that this is a little bit whenever

dealing with some of these very hot topic issues especially over something like a podcast it's kind of scary and so I just want to be vulnerable about that for a second which is that you know I'm gonna continue to speak words in these next couple minutes and if I speak the wrong words then like who knows maybe like the Twitter mobs will be after me and so I say that in kind of a funny way but it's also pretty serious or it's like when you deal with these very hot topic issues it can be a little bit scary so I just want to share that so for the listeners what's been happening at the Media Lab is if you haven't been aware there's been there's this person Jeffrey Epstein who has recently killed himself in jail and he is a person who is a sex trafficker and a pedophile and

has been doing that for a long time and in America he was also very connected to essentially lots of elite billionaires and philanthropists in academia and his ties to that world have been coming out more and more over time and more recently those ties were very explicitly seen with the MIT Media Lab and with the director of the Media Lab Joey Ito and those ties were essentially epstein giving money to the Media Lab and giving money to Joey Ito's kind of funds and so he's like venture capital funds and so when all that came out and especially when there was this New Yorker article about how Epstein's philanthropy was seen within the Media

Lab and it was a pretty negative article that is the Joie resigned from the Media Lab and now there is both more macro kind of systemic I like kind of bureaucratic but also kind of like community led processes happening within the Media Lab to to heal the Media Lab and to find a new director and also within in my team or generally around how they should think about funders and fundraising so that's kind of how what has been happening and specifically for the DCI it's funny because it doesn't affect us that much it is it was definitely jarring and I think that you know for us I mean part of it is I know for me part of it's just a kind of

beautiful I mean beautiful is not the right word here but once this Epstein stuff start to become news then I was like oh I hadn't really looked that deeply into it and so I've read the there's this Miami Herald article which was kind of like a whistleblower article about Epstein's kind of child had a philia ring in in Florida and whenever talking about any of this Epstein stuff is really thinking about the victims there is so crucial and I think reading if anybody has and if you've been reading this article you know just type in Miami Herald Epstein it's a long article but it's really it's very well done and it's really sad and awful to see what Epstein did to these girls it's

it's girls between the ages of 13 and 17 who are really poor and he had offered them very small sums of money a hundred bucks 200 bucks to come to him and to give him massages and to do sexual favors and to bring other girls into the mix and and then the when all of this was found out about the the US government the legal system essentially treated Epstein as a as a plutocrat and didn't give him a serious sentence and and it is just a it's both a despicable act of Epstein and and the legal system and it's awful to see what was done and to hear what was done for for these victims of sexual assault and so I about that because when I think about the impact on

DC I part of it's just like re-engaging more of that world and thinking more and then revitalizing our mission towards you know changing money and transparency for the public good and thinking about this as a good example of that and thinking of this as a manifestation of you know plutocratic billionaire late-stage capitalism and you know a patriarchal misogynistic society and how those are the things are trying to fight and so the DC I took that it was also impacted with by it emotionally but also more than anything I mean we're just continuing to try to do impactful work and so that's the various research and education and kind of ecosystem initiatives that that we have so hasn't affected us too deeply but all those

kind of reinvigoration of the mission and emotional kind of taking a step back we're definitely part of it Jeffrey Epstein had given to the MIT for a long time and had been blacklisted from giving to the MIT at a certain point after I think this this trial in New York happened where he was convicted but given a very lenient sentence MIT Media Lab continued to take money from Epstein basically earmarking his funds as anonymous donations so do you think the Media Lab can emerge from this on the other side and does the future of the Media Lab look like well let me say and I don't think we need to get too deep

into the the different and I really honestly I don't know that much about it the blacklisting I think is a hum from my understanding of the of the two articles I read that are these are just public articles The New Yorker article which talked about how Epstein was a not blacklisted but they could note people in the MIT database about like the ain't wasn't blacklist was called like certain giver was you know noted as you know not wanted or something but actually that wasn't a blacklist that was just like hey we tried to hit this person up for money three times and they didn't respond and so there was no notion I think there will be a notion now of like what blacklist looked like in these databases but as far as I understand at least of

time that that was it wasn't like Epstein was blacklisted from the MIT perspective but rather he was saw I wish I could remember the term for this donor but he was called a donor that they tried to hit up for money but did not give them money initially any case this is to say how can you have so those are all the like simple like whoof kind of logistics things about how academia operates and how donors operate with that I think the Media Lab specifically how it will resolve this it is gonna be yeah it's gonna be a process I mean I think there's a lot of strength the real question I think for folks is is a classic exit versus voice question that anybody can ask within any system that they're in and say hey when

something bad happens in the system do I want to express voice within the system or do I want to exit the system so do I want to help the question for folks is they want to help govern and create a new awesome Media Lab or do they want to exit the Media Lab and go to do things in other places and I think that more than anything what I've seen is that there is a lot of long term people who are in it for the long term here and then into the long term strength of the Media Lab and so there's a lot of you could think of them as either bureaucratic processes or kind of community-led processes that are happening now there's like an executive committee of five folks there's a bunch of different working groups that are happening around funding transparency and you know gender and identity at the

Media Lab and and things like that and I think that those processes will essentially run for the next you know six to 24 months and then likely still continue after that and so we're kind of in that stage now if like people working through and having lots and lots of conversations when I think from a very abstract like long term perspective what will happen with the Media Lab I think in general I would be very surprised if it went away I mean it is a place with 80 million dollars of annual funding with a bunch of the you know scientists from all around the world and a bunch of students and a bunch of companies that that support it and so I'd be surprised if it went away though I definitely think that this will be a time a little bit of a time of contraction and a

reevaluation of its goals and its mission and things like that I think more than anything we'll see who the next executive director is I think that will be the big part of the media labs future mission thank you for that answer it's good to hear the inside perspective so let's switch gears a little bit your subject matter expertise as blockchain ethics and you're teaching a course on blockchain ethics at the Media Lab and we want to dig into the nitty-gritty of this in a bit but maybe before we embark on this conversation and it would be super helpful to properly define the term ethics and especially off set it off set it from the term morals since these two terms are often used

interchangeably would you be able to do that for us yeah so I think I agree that the term ethics is a semantically overloaded term and is kind of it's unfortunate in that way and I think that something like blockchain ethics the main reason why I use the term ethics to talk about bhakti and ethics is because it is from the field of tech ethics and AI ethics and things like that and it was just when thinking about you know the goal of something like blockchain ethics is kind of a is a group of people and of movement in a field aligned around how to positively shape this technology and that thing doesn't need to be called blockchain ethics not really I kind of wish it was called

something like the impact of you know crypto economic systems or something like that you're positively shaping the impact of crypto economic systems but that's that would not get traction essentially and so you have to kind of put it in the field of tech ethics more generally that's my first answer is just from a semantic kind of meme perspective you have to fit with tech ethics and AI ethics and therefore blockchain ethics the other piece here is around yeah kind of the philosophical academic underpinnings of the field of ethics I guess I'd make three differentiations the first is ethics versus morals and generally speaking people think about ethics as kind of an external thing where society is saying okay what's a

society say are the good external things to do versus morals which are more laconic to internal good things to do but I actually think that that framing is not as quite as helpful as thinking about F in the field of what's called normative ethics which is like what should we do in the world it's this question of should versus something like science which is really good at determining like is questions so it's like is questions versus odd questions or is questions versus should questions within normative ethics what should we do they're kind of three big types one of them and this connects back to the effective ultros piece one of them is consequentialism where you say what is or what you know what should we do or we should do the thing that maximizes impact you know

this is a very utilitarian kind of mindset in utilitarianism is a subfield or some idea within consequentialism so there's consequentialism and then there's deontology and then there's virtue ethics and virtue ethics are you know if virtue ethics and deontology are kind of you could map them onto morals if you want to there are more kind of internal things virtue ethics is thinking about what are the virtues that I want to do in society that is good and so that's like oh maybe I want to be honest or I want to be compassionate or whatever and so think about the outcomes of your actions you think about you know doing these really good processes or the you know doing the actions rather than the outcomes and think about the virtues and then the final piece here is

deontology which is thinking about laws and like thinking about okay what is good is actually you know how I you know conform to these you know norms or laws of society so those are kind of the three big buckets that I put it into for normative ethics and how that relates to morals more generally does that help yeah that's really helpful too it helps to frame I guess this discussion talk about your blockchain ethics class why did you want to do this yeah I think you know the deep underlying reason for why I wanted to do it was I mean just I think has you know both of you believe when you see something like this technology and you say oh okay you have a lot of people rewriting how money

works that could be very impactful on society and when you see that you say okay how do we want to positively shape this thing and and so I think that we start to think in those ways you say okay if you know blockchain have even 10% of the Internet's impact you know we should take great care and proactively developing it when you start to think from that perspective you so say oh okay what already exists around new the proactive development of this field and positively shaping it and the issue right now is that to some extent something like AI ethics has a really robust kind of mature ecosystem of AI ethics centers I mean if you think 10 or 15 years ago there almost none of these

centers around the world there was like this you know zero dollars in funding ish but now there's you know hundreds or hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and they're you know dozens of centers around the world that focus on AI ethics and I really expect something similar to happen with blockchain and blockchain ethics over the next kind of 10 or 15 years and so this is really just kind of kick starting that conversation and starting to build this new field of tech epics specifically around blockchain and and trying to positively shape that so it's the reason why I do it is because I think this could be a very impactful technology and I want to make sure that there's a kind of a civil society nonprofit academic movement that is contributing to the positive shaping of it in addition to companies and governments so

technologists and themselves often tend to shy away from these fundamental questions to which there isn't one right answer and so you know the smooshy questions if you will and so how should we deal with this and should there be an ethics committee or should people from within this ways aim to serve regulate or what what's the structure that you proposed for me personally the structure that I proposed I almost always come from the meta framework level with these things and and don't want to necessarily propose any specific structures for folks you know I'm thinking about it as there's this great thing called Lawrence there's this person Lawrence Lessig who

has this thing called pathetic pathetic dot theorem and he their pathetic theory and it came up when he was thinking about the creative commons in the early internet and when you're both thinking about how to shape something and how something is being shaped you can think about how it's being changed through the code itself and so this is like okay what what actual you know code have we put into our you know crypto wallets or um you know the exchanges or things like that are smart contracts but then you could also shape things by saying ok let's use market so let's like change the incentive system here or you can you know shoot things by using the law itself and saying ok we want to use make something illegal or not illegal or you can shape things using norms where you kind of shame people for doing something

bad and give people praise for doing something good and so I think that I think about ethics committees and things like that I think that there will be we will see people try to use each of those four different categories in order to positively shape this technology and I think that kind of the way that I think about it is you already have government's to some extent doing the law side of things you already have kind of native to blockchain cryptocurrency you already have kind of the incentives and code base side of things and I think that really trying to amplify the self regulatory norm piece will be the is probably the piece that's the least well-defined right now and the piece that could use the most emphasis I think

all those pieces will be part of shaping this and that will look like you know centers around the world and you know both you know blockchain ethics centers around the world that are focused on this and focused on researching these kinds of things it will look like you know committees at the you know the state you know level at the government level that are looking into these things and it will look like possibly within these new protocol networks people who are specifically focused on the long term impact of this just like people like Salesforce or Google have like ethics boards and things like that so do you think that the ethics process in blockchain will be fundamentally the same as say in AI or biotechnology or geoengineering because one of the

hallmarks of blockchain technology that's always being touted um is that in principle it's unsensible right so basically that's not true for any of these these other technologies so so would you say that blockchain in that respect is fundamentally different or is it just is it just another emerging technology that needs to be thought about in terms of consequences and what we want for it and what we don't want yeah that's question I think so I would say definitely different is my high level answer and you kind of they're two different ways to answer your question there the first is so I was I've been talking about this thus far as a new field of tech ethics I think that that's true and that obviously blockchain

cryptocurrency technology is all about the technology and it's like it's new digital technology but you could also think about it as a new in the field of like financial ethics because it is money in and of itself and so you know when you come from the field of finance you have a whole different set of questions that kind of come up things like macro systemic stability of the financial system or investor regulation or you know you know protecting its illicit transactions things like that or you can think of it from an institutional perspective and so this is this field of what's called new institutional economics and you know Ronald Coase and the theory of the firm which is thinking about these new kinds of you know in 1937 this guy Ronald Coase was asking questions around why do

firms exist and markets exist why do both of those kind of coordinating and motivating institutions exist and it came down to transaction costs and things like that and so you can think of blockchain cryptocurrency networks as a new kind of institution just like you know the internet aggregators like Google Amazon Facebook or new kinds of institutions just like you know when the nation-state the first you know nations say started that there was a new kind of institution so I think that that's one huge difference between blockchain crypto and something like AI ethics is that a is ecstatic einde of naturally baked in financial ethics piece or the naturally baked in institutional piece and then specifically to your question around you know censorship resistance

and how that's another key piece of this I think that that is another key difference which is for something like AI you still have some of these questions of like the route goal of AI is to I don't know that much about AI but in general you're trying to outsource the decisions to the computer or to outsource the sense making to the computer and that is kind of that that brings up questions of unstoppable 'ti and when you should bring in humans into the loop and so that is kind of this question of you know bringing ethics into something where you just allow the compute to do the decisions that is kind of you know they're kind of in in juxtaposition with each other and same with something like the internet where the early internet was something designed to be

permissionless designed to be as you know a trust less quote unquote protocol and these questions of oh you're trying to bring ethics into this thing that's designed to be totally permissionless that was still kind of you know in opposition to the original idea and so I think exactly what you're saying is true which is a key part of the blockchain encrypted world is this kind of permissionless you know decentralized protocol aspect of it that has this censorship resistance money and when you try say oh we're gonna bring in ethics into that you say whoa whoa whoa Wow how dare you censor our thing and bring in ethics into this when the goal is to have that not be possible within these systems so yeah I think that's the difference as well in the context of a baktun Network what role do you see a minor play who you know in effect the

miners are the last line of defense if you will and are able to collectively censor transactions on blockchain do they have any ethical obligations to do this in your opinion I think this is an awesome question I think there's an very connected of course to the censorship resistance piece which is and the reason why we have the censorship resistance is this to some extent because of the decentralized nature of the network and things like miners not censoring transactions or they say okay even if this is from you know X Y Z we're gonna put it you know into the blockchain and so it's very difficult where my personal

instinct is it of course it depends if I was trying to send a bunch of money somewhere else in the world and when that money was received and that other point in the world it would blow up all of society and it would blow up the earth and all the solar system and all the universe that would be sad and so I think that a miner at that point in time would have the moral obligation to censor that transaction say you know what this is in the mempool but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna add that however that is obviously an extreme case and so I think in general if I were to talk about this with lawmakers or with other folks I would try to not have miners have much moral or legal obligation here as part of the system and actually one

final piece here which is that there's this great book called blockchain in the law by Primavera de filippi and Aran right and what they do is they essentially a lot of these questions have been asked before around you know you can ask a very similar question with someone like Internet service providers or people like that where you say hey there's this packet going over the network which is child porn or there's this packet going over the network which is you know telling people to you know give you know give me money for drugs or whatever and so a question that was brought up then was very similar of hey should the people who are sending the packets over the network should they do they have a moral obligation to check out what those packets are and/or censor them and so I think and in the end what

we saw is that the minors can be regulated just like the packet Network folks can be regulated but you can really regulate so many different parts of this stack whether it's the Internet service providers or the minors or the exchanges or a bunch of different pieces here and in general I think the higher leverage points are not necessarily the minors but rather other pieces that's that's my personal instinct to not want minors to censor transactions yeah I think I agree on that point pretty much completely so if minors are not meant to censor transactions which other parts of the sack or service provider stack do you think perhaps should lend themselves to be regulated and so just has a note for

folks what we're diving into here when you think about those for different parts of Lessig's but then I thought we're really thinking about the kind of the law piece now and saying okay if we want to ship positively shake this technology with law how should we do that in aka what regulations should we put on the various actors in the system what should we determine legal and illegal and I think that way with blockchain crypto just like stuff with the Internet and you have this big global regulatory environment and all the regulatory arbitrage that happens there and I think that there's a question of who should be regulated and the question of who is regulated and you can see that folks like exchanges are the ones that's really the leverage point that lots of

law enforcement agencies have pushed which is you know of the bitwise top ten exchanges I think you know six of them have a bit license in New York City and then nine of them have whenever the other big regulatory thing is there some kind of F ATF style like hey we are a actual regulated crypto currency exchange and so I think that the only one that doesn't by the way is by Nance which is classic uhm and I do think it makes sense for there to be for exchanges themselves for a lot of them to have kyc and AML and at the same time I think that it makes sense for things like finance to exist where if you want

to kind of exit the system and to try to not be kyc e or AML to kind of do that and and the other thing here is that this is always this cat-and-mouse game between okay who should we regulate in the system and then once you start to regulate it how will the system respond then how old law enforcement respond to the response and so there's a recent you know child pornography ring that was busted that was using you know Bitcoin and tor and all these things and what you saw is that although Bitcoin has pseudonymous properties and that they were using stuff like tor you could still you know law enforcement agencies and people like Genesis were able to look at the the blockchain and look at these transactions and go

through these kind of tor style mixers and say okay we can still determine who is actually doing this child porn ring and so I think this is a long form right answer question which is in general I think regulating exchanges makes some moderate sense and there's always going to be regulatory arbitrage to escape that and when we see this kind of cat-and-mouse game play out it will be always a question of how hard the nation's state governments want to clamp down on this stuff do they want to do 51% attacks do they want to really go deep on you know Tor and Bitcoin monitoring those kind of questions how do you feel about ckase Knox and other privacy enabling technology in this in this context I think and we see it both with ZK snarks but also things like in

to end encryption more generally on these these your platforms and saying oh boy how should we allow in to end encryption should we not who these things are very difficult I really like that Society has a anonymous way to transfer value around and that's we've had for you know many years with something like cash and so when we go on to the internet we have this kind of very difficult state where you have the anonymity is going away and you have surveillance tor authoritarianism and the ability for these companies or nation-states to both you know to track all of our both social media things but then soon you know all of our you know financial transactions that's a very scary state of affairs and

so I think that to keep the old status quo which is some kinds of ability to transact anonymously with other folks I think that makes a lot of sense the question though is it's it is categorically different than the way that cash used to work which is we want to have this anonymous and payment system yes however do we want to have an anonymous payment system where you can transact as much money as you want to anybody else in the world all anonymously I think that's a more open question you know that doesn't directly map on to the old status quo of cash and things like that that's my kind of the way I think about this question when I think about them the march of technologies over time I think that more

than anything the response that I want to have is one of kind of like my answer earlier is one of norms where if you have these technologies that allow for bad things to happen yes it is possible for law enforcement and in nation states to kind of regulate them at various parts in the protocol internet protocol stack but more than anything I think we need to focus on regulating ourselves and in making sure that hey we do have something like ZK snarks and the ability to send money anonymously over the internet but even if we do have that given that power we have this great responsibility to not use it to fund you know terrorist financing and things like that and so really it all comes back to for me as the long slow march of

technology continues to happen we as a society need to respond and turn with increased responsibility and Norm's around how to use this technology effectively so you're talking about norms and ethics are very much about forming social norms and I think we've established that blockchain protocols in the context of ethics should be seen in a similar light as sort of tcp/ip networks right like the network layer is not something that where transactions shouldn't be held with much scrutiny at least not from the point of view of minors but block chains are just a technology I mean there's many different variances of block chains we've got like

Bitcoin aetherium different public networks also permission block chains and I think the ethical considerations are better suited when it comes to the applications that we're building on top of blockchain so for example you know at Dow on a on a public blockchain or you know if some company's building in the enterprise consortium settling system on like corta or you might have a funding mechanism built on some other blockchain construction what's the framework by which we should be applying ethics to all these different types of applications which are very different from each other and where the ethical

considerations may be very different is there a one-size-fits-all framework or or should every one of these sort of sub groups or like sub communities or whatever you want to call it have their own ethics that's a good question so let me say I guess a couple things one is I directionally agree with you that building out the protocol layer versus the application layer that generally speaking ethics should come more into play at the application layer than the protocol layer I also agree with you to say like hey this is so a whole bunch of different things in Bakhtin ethics and so it would be nice if there's a one-size-fits-all framework and my response to that is my meta

one-size-fits-all framework is giving people the tools with which they can make their own ethical choices to say hey let's a start by being self-aware of these things and be able to you know counteract an imbalance you know consequence ethics versus something like virtue ethics and then as they start to think in that way them to say okay let's say we've determined there are some good or bad things about these systems how should we affect that should we affect it you know back to is lesyk start with norms or law or markets or code or whatever so just giving people those frameworks with which to view the world I think is the most important piece who and I think about the actual when people start to say like hey I'm a developer should I build this thing or not I think the most important thing is probably

what people are already doing which is saying hey when I'm building this thing Who am i building it for what is the value that I'm trying to create who is the internal team that's trying to create this thing do we have a you know lots of good voices trying to produce and create this this new technology and once you start to think about like hey what value are we creating for the world then you can say okay well how would people weaponize this technology what could it be used for in other senses so I think just kind of thinking through those things that people are probably already thinking about which is how do you create value for this and then what does this thing also enable long term I think you know asking those two questions are the the best first start to this and that will give you a long

way down the road of how should you build the thing or not or can you make changes to the things such that it would be more or less positive for society so if I were to build something where I thought well this is tremendously useful for a set of people so let's say for instance it's super useful for whistleblowers and journalists and all of these other people but at the same time it could potentially be used by people for things that I don't agree with so whatever it may be terrorism or pornography or human trafficking or whatever doesn't really matter so what would I then do ideally so I think my

point is that almost everything can be used for good or for evil so for as the creator of that technology what exactly is my burden what exactly do I have to evaluate and how do I make make a decision based on that so what I would say is I personally don't really agree with the term like technology is not good or bad it's purely just this neutral thing I think that technology can be used for good or bad things but I think that certain kinds of technology are more can be used for have natural inclinations towards good or have natural inclinations towards bad for example it's like if I'm thinking about things that can I was just debating this with someone else last night of like you know

we were talking about how much a hammer allows one to kill other people for how much a gun allows one to kill other people and it's like you could say that they're both just technologies and like kind of throw up your hands say you know what hammer and gun both the same it's not you know the technology that kills people it's like the people who kill people and we can't really control it or you could say you know what it is different that like something like a nuclear bomb is different than a hammer is different than an ak-47 is different than a hunting rifle and so I think part of it if you're building the technology that you talked about there I think that part of it is of asking that question and saying okay is this thing more and I would come from a consequentialist

perspective which is one where you kind of pro/con the positive that you think you'll create with it versus the negative and if you create something you know like oh god this looks like it's only going to be used for like people to do you know like terrorist financing or whatever like child trafficking maybe don't build it but if you're building something that you think and you're going to try to share it with but the whistleblower community you're going to put things in place that make it so it's like you know something like secure drop which a lot of whistleblowers use is like very technical and hard to use and things like that so you say okay maybe I'll try to do things like this that will make it you know more difficult that will make it may be easier for some folks to use than others and so I think

you know my answer is again kind of a no answer but that a you know technology's not totally neutral things have positive and negative inclinations be when you start to build it evaluate what you think the positive impact will be versus what the negative impact will be cause it'll definitely be both and then if it's going to be mostly positive impacts then try to say okay how do we re emphasize those positive impacts share with those communities that I think will be positive and try to mitigate those other communities and how they may use it for negative means interesting I'd like to zoom out a little bit from here so from inside the blockchain community it's very easy to feel that this is the greatest technological advancement more or less since the Internet so as someone with more of a bird's

perspective do you think there's a chance that blockchain is going to go away or maybe not go away completely but you know find its niche and then just be stuck in that niche forever without causing a major paradigm shift in how society works and how the future of humanity is going to be shaped out yeah definitely from within the ecosystem it often looks like whoa like you have a bunch of smart people who are working on building a lot of like underlying protocols here like this is gonna be really impactful and it's still like a very small piece I mean if you think about the total you know cryptocurrency market cap about 200 billion that's still gold is about eight trillion so it still like 40 X less than gold and so we're still at the very beginning stages here the other question is back to

Sebastian's question from earlier of like what do we define as blockchain do you define blockchain as purely these new permissionless style networks something like Bitcoin and and you know censorship resistance of money or kind of new smart contract networks or do we define it in addition as these kind of you know permissions validator set networks where you have these permission validator sets and you know the enterprise blockchain world or - we also define it as kind of this instigate or II piece with you know FinTech more generally to say hey existing financial system hey central bankers you should you should think about these things more and you should implement some of the things that we're doing in your central bank digital currencies and things like that and so I think depending on which level you look at it from it will have different amounts of impact or how you

define kind of blockchain it will have differing amounts of impact my general instinct is that it will not be a small evolutionary niche and I think that that's true because for a variety of reasons but I think perhaps the most important of which is a it has catalyzed the more general banking and financial ecosystem more generally and I think that that should be thought of as part of blockchains impacts and those I think will be large and then second I think that gets into another long conversation that we don't necessarily need to have but it blockchain and cryptocurrency technology is a you can think of it as this kind of anti fragile nonviolent protest where you had this small community in this white paper that was

produced to make this magic internet money ten years ago with Bitcoin and now you have this whole ecosystem of folks who are really excited to exit our current state of late states capitalism and to build this new parallel world where they change how money works and in how we should think about institutions and things like that and people are more bought into that world of you know Bitcoin in aetherium and stuff like that then they are bought into stuff like old nation-states and so I think that when you have this new system that's being built of an evolutionary niche that has money naturally baked into it what that allows for that new nonviolent movement to do is it allows it to propagate through time more easily than unlike some of these things like you know

peer-to-peer you know encrypted communication which didn't have money baked into it naturally something like blockchain cryptocurrency there's too much money in the ecosystem and that allows the kind of evolutionary being that is blockchain as an institution to continue to survive and compete versus existing institutions and to be very strong at battling them oh that's super interesting would you be able to expand on the role of nation-states in the context of the future of blockchain so I think that the role of nation-states will be a couple fold one will be their continued existing attempts to you know regulate a global world and be the primary institution in a global world

and and to get people excited by them and you can see that battle happening with like in nation states versus these new like internet aggregators like Google Amazon Facebook whatever so how nation-states are continuing to their own like demise essentially or how they kind of work through their own demise I think will be one piece and if they demise more quickly then more people will exit to things like blockchain and cryptocurrency networks and or you know other kinds of institutions that motivate people like religion or whatever so that's one piece I think the other piece is how nation-states are connected to their central banking systems and how those central banking systems both think about blockchain cryptocurrency technology but more importantly at this point again

blockchain cryptocurrencies are very small in the macro scheme of things for how much like money they have and how much involved and so it's really a question of how they implement and start to do experiment with things like central bank digital currencies and how those kind of co-evolved with with you know permissionless blockchain networks so that's kind of one other piece here and then the third piece is yeah how as they're starting to both lose their power and as they are starting to evaluate these new networks and start to think about regulating them it's all these questions that we talked about you know through the show of how should nation-states want to still have these great public policy goals of like hey

let's try to like mitigate the amount of terrorist financing or a child porn or whatever that happens with these new technologies and so I think how they regulate that it will be the third big kind of axis of of interaction between nation-states and blockchain networks does that answer your questions yeah I think yeah we could talk about this for hours but at some point we have to get to the end and put you to sleep and eat food so tell us about this what have you learned since starting this course and what's the future for this class yeah good question so the class is it's about 15 to 20 students mostly folks at MIT but also folks at Harvard mostly

computer scientists folks but also we got you know policy makers and designers and city planners and things like that too and mostly graduate students you know like 60 years you know computer science PhDs but also undergrads it's kind of a wide variety of folks in the class um and I think that you know what I've personally learned a I've learned a lot of things about teaching just like you know selfishly personally that has been a great piece of this I've done a good amount of teaching in my past but never within a an explicit you know university setting it's very difficult to teach this class because a blockchain cryptocurrency technology is very complex subject and be taking a very complex thing and then trying to understand how that thing will actually

impact Society is even more complex and especially that's difficult because it hasn't been done before so there aren't there's no like field of blockchain ethics where I can just like take existing syllabi or whatever like as far as I know this is the first blockchain ethics class to be clear it's myself and my boss and director the DCI in a Honda Rula who are teaching it and so it's great to have her input as well especially around a lot of the technical things she's like a distributed systems ph.d and all these great things so I think that that's been a learning for myself is you know just have been teaching and trying to teach this very new thing let me say one final piece on that new thing although this is technically the first blockchain ethics class there are lots of like blockchain

and law classes and they deal with a lot of these similar issues and what I would say personally for things I've learned are just it's been very helpful for me to take these loose ideas that had had before around how to think about this stuff and to kind of categorize it and scaffold it in more explicit ways and then part of its also been my own learning for these things so one quick specific example of this is you know when you think about financial ethics there's a question of how should one thing about financial ethics and we are lucky to have you know one of the DCI advisors is this guy Gary Gensler who is the ex chairman of the CFTC and he you know spoke at the Libre hearings and things like that and he was just able to provide me with like hey here's how we

think about you know financial regulation and the public policy goals there and and so being able to think through those things with experts and then to try to teach those to students and get a good feedback loop with them has been really really helpful is the content of this class available to folks outside of Harvard and MIT definitely yeah the class is really one specific implementation of the more macro goal which is build the field of blockchain ethics and make it the case that you know there are lots of people in civil society who are actively thinking about how to positively shape this stuff and so this is just one implementation and I hope that there will be many other blockchain ethics courses or whatever in the world in the future and so yeah thus if people go to blockchain ethics co-ceo

they can find there's a forum there there's a syllabus there and so I definitely think starting with the syllabus you know it's a kind of a long syllabus like you know 20 or 30 pages but there's a lot of awesome readings and things to do there and eventually we'll upload the videos from the lectures and stuff online as well so yeah the goal is to be as open source as possible to kind of help catalyze this as a field well it's a fantastic initiative and I wish you lots of luck in the future with this course and you should definitely subscribe to Reese's podcast grey mirror which I'm sure you can find everywhere where one finds podcasts and yeah thanks for coming on the show yeah thank you all for having me and thank you for engaging

do I think that you all an epicenter do a good job of both engaging with the deep technical stuff which is super super important to say like hey let's actually build this thing first and with engaging with more these kind of macro ethical or systemic questions so so thank you for your time as well and thank you listeners and good luck and definitely go to blockchain ethics Co and check it out mm-hmm Thank You Reese thanks ray sir thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV

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