Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum – Can It Go Beyond DeFi? #402

Transcript

hi I'm Sylvester cuccio and you're listening to epicenter the podcast worried of your crypto Founders Builders and thought leaders today we have a real treat for you we have a conversation with vitalik buterin sunny and I sat down with vitalik after ECC in the ECC studio and we talked for about an hour um mostly about the contents of his talk so he gave a really inspiring talk during the conference where he expressed his desire for the community to build products that go beyond defy the built products that go beyond things that are Financial in nature and I think this is something that he's been really passionate about for you know some time now but he really expressed it clearly

during this uh during this keynote presentation and one of the things that he expressed is his um his desire for new forms of social media platforms to emerge in the defy space and you know the convergence of you know scalable layer 2 technology apologies and nfts I think you know can really make that possible because we now have the Technologies to build scalable social media platforms that can attract uh you know non-crypto users or new types of users to the space he also discussed another area that he's really into which is retroactive public good funding and being able to fund things after the fact and sort of

flipping the funding model around and you know generally we just talked about you know where his head's at currently you know with the pandemic and how that may have sort of shifted his areas of focus so it was a really fun conversation uh it was really kind of like lightweight and uh just like informal and really cool so uh after the after the after we we finished the interview sunny and I both looked at each other and said like this was one of our favorite interviews in a long time and I think you'll enjoy it as well if you're listening to this on the audio version of the show there's also a full-length video of this conversation it's uh it's on YouTube on our YouTube channel so check that out as well before we go to the interview though I'd like

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multi-sig and Dows as well as some other fun and entertaining surprises so head over to cow swap dot exchange and start swapping today so without further delay here is our conversation with metallic buterin [Music] we're here with Stella buterin and I'm here with my co-host Sunny Agarwal um thanks for joining us thank you it's good to be here yeah it's been a really long time since you've won epicenter so I think a lot of people have been waiting for this um yeah so how have I guess like how's have you been since the beginning of the panic like what has the pandemic been treating you I mean for the a big part of it I guess that was just hold up in Singapore you know just having less

human context than I had in I guess any of the six or seven years previously so that was interesting just like focused on some virtual things also doing a lot of walking and running and just reading and uh continuing to do all the ethereum really related various things of course I guess in in the past year you know last year's been so emblematic I suppose um has has your sort of focused changed as a result of the pandemic has the pandemic sort of like awakened things like interests and things that perhaps uh you know how's things changed last year for you with regards to ethereum it's a challenging question because like at the same time as the pandemic a lot of things have changed I mean a lot a

lot of things about the world have changed a lot of things about the crypto world have uh also changed at the same time um I think the most important thing about League yeah crypto world that's changed in the last year and a half is just like how big it's gotten right and I mean obviously like you can see on the numbers the price bumps and all of those things but like they're like that's the a sign of a bigger thing and there's other signs too right like there's uh all sorts of just mainstream figures talking about it like even just one example is that uh tweets um or that uh blog post from myself and uh Jiang and Optimum and optimism on our attractive public goods funding like uh Dominic Cummings one of the atop I think Greg

brexit people retweeted that um so that was uh yeah obviously you know there's all the celebrities focusing on uh crypto and um you know Elon Musk like fumbling around the space in in his own very special way and like there's just like large percentages of the population in general like actually have heard of cryptocurrency at this point and like this is both good and bad right it's good because crypto is not going to slide into irrelevance but it's also a uh time when we have to think uh carefully about responsibility um because we know for the last 10 years of the space I've basically been able to hide behind the excuse that hey this is

experimental technology and I know that like to most people this seems kind of useless except for some prices going up but it's um you know really when the technology gets better this is really going to go uh go places and so now like it's uh the technology is close to ready right let's see alien Solutions lots of them are coming out this year some of them are coming out next year um the ecosystem is maturing in all sorts of ways like you know proof of stake actually is um happening um all of uh a whole bunch of technologies that we've set are happening for a long time actually are happening and um there's just a lot of eyes on the space and so five years from now we're not going to be able to get away with saying this is just an experiment so

like people are going to need some kind of results from the crypto space and the question of like exactly how much value and like what kind of value we can actually provide for people that's uh it's something that I think has been on people's minds since the beginning but I think it just has to be on people's minds and uh you know in a much more serious way right and I think like so far there is definitely value that has been provided right like but so far it's mostly been financial and like there's a lot of financial value that doesn't uh get recognized like even just a whole bunch of random people in various countries around the world that just like quietly use it as a way to you know send money back to their families

or just make international transactions for businesses and all of these things but like the kinds of hopes that people have on the crypto space at least from what I've seen like go even further than that right like even like Tyler Cohen one of the GMU economists um I think has even like called was like myself in biology like so like the the two most interesting like Libertarians or something like this um so what do you think about his whole like State uh libertarianism State capacity libertarianism I mean it's definitely one of those kind of interesting uh synthesis uh perspectives I guess um like ice I see I see the philosophy and like I see lots of correct things

about the philosophy which is basically that um like like surgical higher like high quality smart government action happening earlier can be a substitute for problems that end up creating a trade-off between or end up waiting time uh otherwise much more ham-fisted government regulation later like even just coveted vaccines were an excellent example of this right like if governments had just gotten off their butts realized the enormity of the problem and just properly like told Pfizer and moderna hey guys like if you guys figure this out we're literally going to give you a hundred billion dollar price like lots of people would yell and scream at this but in my opinion like the world would have been so much better had that happen right and like the problem would have been solved

in you know like six months instead of 18 potentially um so and I mean obviously on top of that also do the work of like queering off the red tape and all um and all of that but like that requires a actually like skilled response yeah so that's the like the good side of I guess some of that perspective and the interesting thing actually is that I think there is parallels between that perspective and things that the crypto space is doing because like the crypto space has these kind of constructs that sometimes get analogized to being kind of like nation states but also kind of not like nation states and they have these foundations that are kind of uh like governments but they're also not like governments right like they have a pool of funds that they can use to fund public goods but they do

not have the ability to like enforce and change rules in the um in the blockchain they can only propose things and then people may or may not accept them if you treat these like foundations as sort of these like public entities um do you think that there's like current in the space there's a lack of accountability or just like voice that the people of the uh communities have over the their governments or these foundations I think the challenge is that in the crypto space we don't really know how to define or quantify membership right like the cons once you start talking about voice then their question is who deserves to have that voice and the the queerly the answer is not like everyone in the world to an equal extent right but then what is the

answer and it's a question that actually does like have a lot of meaning right because if you go back to say the Dow fork and you remember some of the arguments around the Del Fork right like one of the comments that I remember being made at the time was um that um people who were in favor of the Dao Fork were arguing that people who were against the Dell Fork at the beginning and then people who are in favor of VTC later on um were just like shows coming in from the Bitcoin side basically trying to either impose their therefore and values on the ethereum community or worse just like stir trouble and create chaos in the ethereum community because that's good for Bitcoin now my opinion is that like those kinds of perspectives tends to be overblown and people tend to underappreciate that like even you know

people within their own Community it tends to like don't align exactly on value as to the extent that they think they do but like even still it would have been interesting if we had like a a queer way to know the answer right and like so far the ways that we have of defining Community membership they're not not very good like what is there like there's coin Holdings but like in my opinion coin Holdings are in extremely imperfect proxy right like for example if you compare I don't know the number of coins let's say like Joe Rubin has to the number of coins down let's say Tim Baker has right like that's uh it's gonna end up being pretty lopsided right but that's I like let's say that I

don't know what the difference is but I'm gonna guess somewhere between a factor of 100 and a thousand could be wrong in either direction um but that does not mean that Joe Rubin is like you know a hundred to a thousand times more of a uh importance to ethereum than tobacco as well Tim does a lot of importance chords have coordination work and so like money is a very imperfect proxy but then what are the more perfect what are the better proxies and like there are things like for example in the Z cash Foundation there's like this community advisory Council and like you know you're either part of it or you're not and it's somewhat more of a kind of I guess um yeah technocratic uh design um there's uh obviously just foundations themselves that have kind of even more closed membership so I think systems

yeah exactly like I think my answer to this is that like I don't think there's there is a perfect solution but I do think we need more thinking more ideas and more work on like better approaches like I think if we can just figure out like what is a sensible concept of membership so we can figure out like what is like if we want to and what crew are are we even trying to give representation to then we've at least made the first steps where we're like figuring out what the actual problem is right and then like potentially governance is going to become easier and like potentially can you know there's uh you know a possibility that uh actually could be kind of more responsive to the community's actual values and

um you know going back to kind of state capacity libertarianism like even by being more competent at the same time be more respectful of the fundamental guarantee is that League yeah Community wants to preserve what are some of the most interesting like experiments that you're seeing right now in crypto of like new ways of defining membership so aside from coins um I mean they're what what is there like there's there's just like I guess the zero to one function where you get one if you put in the tiniest amount of effort or like proof of humanity is one example like I think if you do ethereum governance by proof of community vote like it's not going to be great but it's I'm actually not going to be terrible either um like you are still selecting for

people who care at least a little bit about ethereum now in the long term I mean once like eventually you are going to get like hostile blockchain communities that start like you know registering identities and brigading but you know for now it's already an improvement we actually had this in the uh in the cosmos Hub launch like there was like the game of stakes thing and you need we use like a passports to like do it and it you know one validator uh actually just like basically got like a bunch of their community members to like submit passports and they disable attack the game of stakes as to like show that uh show off that they could but like right yeah it's also like philosophically interesting what the dividing line is between a just a successful political campaign in a civil attack no no no get

coin get Quinn grants has had a lot of like deep philosophical debates about this as well which was also fascinating so there's that if you want to get more granular there's like Pope tokens right and with Pope tokens you know you can have one but you can get five and you can get ten and so there's like a greater ladder of effort um the get coin doubt was is trying this interesting quadratic voting thing where your voting Powers I think proportional to the square root of your token counts which could be an interesting 50 50 compromise between coin quantity but also being a more egalitarian um what what other things are there there's and you know there's obviously the whole kind of like abology thing of like basically proof of uh passing education education and um you know

getting some kind of proof that like you're knowledgeable about some topic um there's I mean there's a collection of ideas like I think the optimal mixes just or the result is just going to end up mixing a lot of them look we don't really know what that looks like yet and we need to just keep trying more so yesterday during your talk you you you talked about defy and I I guess I don't know if lament is the right word but um you uh cautioned perhaps that the defy space uh was turning into um you know something that is um far far too speculative and of financial nature and it seems that you're hopeful that D5 sort of comes I mean ethereum uh comes back to its

original vision of building you know useful uh and like utilitarian products and like you said you know the price should be the price of ethereum should be a consequence of utility um do you think that like ethereum has gone too far into the financial side of things and that you know there isn't enough utility in the applications that are being built on the platform I think I guess I mentioned in my presentation I do think that the early kind of dominance of Finance is a bit inevitable um I think like the two reasons that I mentioned right one is that um like centralized Finance is crap to a greater extent than the centralized non-finances crap right like say what you want about like email and how like if I send a

centralized email to someone in Guatemala they are going to receive it in one second now maybe the NSA is also going to receive it in one second but like at least the receiving Guatemala is going to receive it in one second but if like International Bank wires do not work like this right and so the level of quality that you need as or like basically it's much easier to be like not only better than CFI but better than see if I buy enough to actually get people to switch over on mass um but in the case of non-financial things like that barrier or smaller right so that's fact one and then Fact Two is that finances just more willing to to pay high fees inherently because of what it is you know like you're willing to pay a 12.42 transaction fee to do some like fancy five thousand

dollar insta flash of a thing but like you're not going to be willing to make that um that much to follow someone on decentralized Twitter um so the like and this has been my consistent opinion for probably the last five years like I think uh once uh we had solved scaling and fees can go back down we at least have a fair chance at getting the non-financial stuff to take off um but once so we'll see right like this year what's interesting is that we actually have the scaling Solutions right like there's uh optimism there's arbitrum there's ZK saying come looping Stark net um but do you think these like roll up Solutions are you know so obviously you know as you know I work on Cosmos and so

what what one of the worries I see is that you have these like great roll-up platforms but they're at the end of the day there's still these generalized chains and I see that Defy is just going to start dominating These Chains as well and so one of the interesting things we see in Cosmos right now is a lot of the chains are actually non-defy things I I think most of them are actually non-defy so we have like Akash Network which is a decentralized cloud we have like Sentinel which is a decentralized VPN and so I see a lot of these like web3 and you know stargaze this is a social network do you think like it the way for how important do you think like application specific chains or Roll-Ups are going to be to sort of giving these non-d5 applications a you know I'm

bearish on that um the reason why I'm bearish on that is that I think the most interesting future applications are not going to be defy or non-defi I think they're going to be a combination of like fire non-dfi and I think being able to benefit from even like tightly coupled compost ability between like five things and a non-fy things is going to be valuable um I think in terms of solving scalability problems like I personally just think that like they're obvious obviously you know any chain if the fees are low there's going to be certain kind of like use cases that just kind of like flow in there because they have to flow somewhere right like they're like if a gas fees ever go down to like 10 way then I'm just gonna like use the chain to store and encrypted backup of my hard

drive so yeah like there's always going to be this kind of like you know user my kind of cosmic microwave background right radiation and as long as the the total level of scalability is high enough that the intersection of uh you know the the supply with that Cosmic microwave you know demand curve is like at a point that's low enough then like whatever people want to do is going to be affordable um and like the nice thing about non-d5 I think is that non-d5 depends on synchronous composability less than D5 does and it's like it's still useful but it depends on like especially even depends on synchrony less right like you don't need five apps to talk to each other in one like Atomic transaction and so like non-d5 things I think we'll be able to bounce between shards or like

bounce between Roll-Ups more easily um so I'm like I'm confident that you know in the more mature ecosystem at least I think they're not going to be screwed over by fees how much of how much of like to the the Degen side of defy do you think is a consequence of I I you know it's like General more broad like broad macroeconomic trends of um decreasing scarcity in uh you know in the traditional Finance uh system with like just like massive monetary inflation but on the crypto side also just the ability to just create new assets I don't know if you're familiar with this idea of financial nihilism but to me like I feel that um the the uh the the the the incentive to just like create new assets and like

to create new forms of value is so high that there's there's a little incentive to say create something that isn't like in a finance Financial in nature um like for Founders but also for like communities that are following those things because they're like sort of naturally going to go to the thing that could potentially um you know make make them money like I I tend to agree with with sunny on this and I wonder like if you've given any thought to this and I think Trend like all of that Trend like there's a few different aspects to that right like one is this kind of I guess um ideological and a philosophical thing of like hey you know the like mainstream civilization is like basically and uh so like you know for if if we're

gonna make a you know a couple of like fire pods is and uh like send arounds like links to the ens to them then like that's that's not doing anything worse than the game that's just playing the game that already exists um so like it's it's definitely a mindset that I think motivates uh at least it you know some people in the space so so that's something that exists um there's also the uh um well this question of like well you know if you want to build something meaningful then like to what extent um is uh this possibility hanging there of like building some D5 thing and potentially getting more money more easily look to what extent does that

take is um that taking away from uh the uh from your motivation to do that I mean I think my answer is uh short term it definitely can um long term it won't and I think part of the reason is like it's a there's a common meme that right that the crypto space is more productive in Bear markets and like I think I think it's true in my uh observation it's true and it's definitely true that in the short periods of time during which like there are these big ball cycles and everyone's just uh you know making uh ten thousand dollars a day from just like sitting back on their chairs like there's there's less motivation to do anything um but at the same time like those faces are illusory right and uh you might think that you're earning ten thousand

dollars a day and that's a replacement for your job but then when the bear cycle comes you lose it all again and then you're gonna be sad you didn't you you weren't actually doing anything substantive So eventually these things do like burn out right like eventually like if making a some crazy Financial Contraption actually is more profitable than doing other things than at some point enough people are gonna do it and people are gonna start doing it really even like really formulaically until like that stops being true so I'm I guess optimistic in the medium and long term though at the same time like I do think that it's not a given like I think that it's also important to kind of explicitly uh talk about support and spread the ideas and culture of building

things that are not just Financial like both to like let people who have those ideas know that you know there are other people who also who also feel that way kind of give them some kind of framework to start with um and just like point out to people in general that like this is a community where you can come and do those kinds of things like I think communities that don't do that right there gonna end up just like degrading into being like Financial whatevers right like like binance smart chain you know it's not going to be the uh like a locus of like you know super meaning like meaningful like uh revamp social media to improve Humanity type of projects um do you think that this like degenification of

everything so you mentioned the talk yesterday about like is the price the product and that's not we don't want that but it seems like you know I think what we saw with like the Wall Street bet stuff that happened earlier this year where it's like this whole the price is the product idea is spreading even you know you got like meme coins like for Dogecoin maybe if the price is the product but like for stocks they're supposed to be something that's more utility driven but like well now gme is the price of the product and do you think this was is there something in our culture that's like leading us this way or did we just like pull the rug back up pull up the covers and it turns out you know we just this has always been the case and it's just more transparent now

again I guess gambling has been like a human cultural Universal for thousands of years right but how do we but how do we the over gamblification of all things like you know let's say you know there's a lot of really useful D5 products that are like you know have like utility in but I feel for a lot of them the price has is slowly starting to become the product rather than the actual product itself do you think that's a long-term property of the space or do you think that's a property of the bull market because we have been into into two years of a bull market now right so I guess we'll see how people think in 2022.

right like uh like in like if you remember even going back to how you thought in 2019 and how you thought in 2017 for example like I would bet that your perspective right now is probably more similar to your perspective in 29 17s your perspective in 2019 right right because you know in 2019 like nobody had the ability to say the price is the product except uh die but um so I remember a little while ago you had you tweeted I don't know I remember how long ago but it was like you said like defy and like bitcoin-esque stuff is solving the problems of the world in 2008 but those aren't necessarily the problem the biggest problems of the world today what would you say are the biggest problems of the world today that

we should be thinking about um I mean I actually yeah well I talked yesterday once again about this concept of just coming up with ways to improve social media right like I think that's like that's a big like cultural and mechanism design and like very interdisciplinary problem and it's an important problem and like it's an important problem for lots of different communities for lots of different reasons right like there's like we're getting all the problems at once right like you get the yeah like the censorship and the arbitrary D platforming that happens in a just extremely closed and uh not and non-transparent way um there's uh the just very poor quality like I can't have

conversations on Twitter anymore it's so sad buy some Sheba buy some Harmony dollar sign one Harmony dollar sign one is the best cryptocurrency look at it yeah uh so the um and then there's um just um you know the ways in which like engagement is misaligned with uh like any longer term goals that pretty much like any reasonable person has um so look these are all important problems and like I talked about why I think crypto has some unique and interesting tools for solving that problem and I think like we could be doing more to try right do you think that the that the um so the explosion of nfts and like all the standards around nfts and combined with that

um you know layer twos being more like being ready and like being more available do you think that the combination of these two technologies can be can make it such that now you know because there's been so many attempts of doing decentralized um social networks and you said that like uh you know big cloud and all these things were not graveyards but I mean like hmm relatively speaking their graveyards compared to like the Facebooks and stuff but do you think that these Technologies and and sort of like their convergence and uh can can can um be the Catalyst for you know decentralized social networks to finally emerge and like have you know sufficient like Network effects right I think a really underrated aspect of the crypto space is just how it's like in the wake of just being a financial

like a DJ an apical whatever system it's also creating Network effects that could be piggybacked on for very meaningful purposes right like one example of this that's I think a little different from what you were saying is um like how just giving everyone public keys and creating a registry of public Keys has been a dream of The Cypher bug since the 1990s right like everyone wanted to have just like a society where just everyone has a key and you can just like go and send an encrypted message to someone that doesn't require any uh any kind of extra setup right but those pgp Wubs of trust and never will end up taking off but now you know we have everyone's got an ethereum wallet or at least everyone within the AGI Community

has an ethereum wallet so it's not the world but it is a subset of the world that talks to each other um and you know everyone in the they've got either a matter Mouse quality or a status wallet or some other kind of ethereum wallet or it could also even be a hardware wallet so on top of the just having keys there is even this powerful ecosystem of coming up with better ways of storing your keys and you can use those keys for signing and potentially you could also use those keys for encryption um I think like ifmail.cc it was like trying to do an encryption I mean I think that that's something that should be standardized much more potentially and I'll turn into some kind of standard um then once you have an account you can use that accounts to log into things and

so basic and then at this also what we have is you have just a community of people who have common values and interests right and who um talk to each other and that's also an excellent uh bootstrapping ground for any kind of uh system right like new projects that were demand depends on network effects can take off like they just need to have seat communities to take off in right like if Facebook started with I think it was Harvard college students right so like why why can't the next generation of like actually good social media take off starting from the crypto Community do you think it's possible to or do you think it would be beneficial to bootstrap off of the existing identity systems so for context

um so two years ago I eat the Waterloo I created a something called sheet coin which was a way of like moving eth onto a Google sheet and blah blah blah but I've actually met someone at the hack at HCC uh yesterday and he was really excited about cheat coin because one of the things we did was we actually made it so you can send to an email address address and then we actually like sort of hacked Google oauth to allow us to verify RSA on like ethereum and we got Google to sign but the coolest part is I could send to people's email addresses everyone already has an email address not everyone has a private key yet and then you use that as an onboarding flow into when they want to come on to main chain then they can uh you know create a

private key then I mean I that sounds both enticing and scary um enticing because like I actually wants to like directly compete with Google and the Twitter on the identity side and not interact them but and also enticing because like that again that definitely is a very fast onboarding process that like it does for a lot of users have higher security than a wallet they might lose the keys for you could have an influencer who wants to airdrop an nft to all their followers you can just snapshot yeah totally right I mean I think like poly Market also like they were using magic links right so we're basically doing a very similar thing so that's yeah like that's definitely interesting

um I'm also bullish on social recovery like I think social because social recovery in my opinion is like a very like a noob friendly way of um storing like just having accounts because like even people who are very non-technical like they can understand the concept of like here I'm selecting 10 people and I trust at least five of them right so that's something like if we just come up so I think that's good for onboarding but at the same time like I do also wants to uh kind of onboard people like not just onto an application but actually properly on those kind of accounts that gives the within the crypto ecosystem when it comes to social media

um you know there's one view of crypto which is that like it's about making scarcity more legible and so what do you have you heard of like the Friends with Benefits community and that token well I mean the concept of friends and benefits is that like when you have like a sexual relationship and then you're also there's a token oh wait wait wait wait yeah just to like look at this category of human activity and they made a token of it no no no so it's um by uh Trevor mcfadry's he's uh he created this he has a company called broad uh he came really you know a lot from the nft space but they basically created this community which is like token gated and you like you know everyone who's in the community has an opportunity to invite the Friends with Benefits names just

like a little bit of a meme but like what do you think do you think that what are the I guess maybe in other ways like what are the applications of blockchains that can help social media like you know we talked a lot about cryptography you know everyone having a private key that's great but is there anything about this blockchain thing about scary or anything so I think like two possible two or three possible directions one of them is accounts and just the concept that like you could basically have an account that is multi-platform um and the interesting thing about ens names right is that they're in accounts that is multi-platform and they're all and they're a name that is Multiplied form that people are willing to use as a name right like the only other like really widely adopted multiplatform accounts

would be like email addresses but like nobody wants to use your email address as your name right like it's I think it's because of uh like names are self-expression and like you're okay with um like like what's your ens name Sunny a97.e yeah Sunny a97.e thread look that's the handle I use yeah like that's like a you know it's it's something that you know you'd be happy to use as like one in one of your names but like having something at gmail.com as your name like it feels like you know like awkward yeah like why why would I want to be like basically wearing a Gmail Pride sticker that's part of my name so biology has the other take right where he's like he you know he's been pushing recently that everyone should have their own personal

domain and like so your email address is I'm not gonna say it but um but you know it it is more personal no it's not gmail.com right so what do you think about that view I mean that's also possible but like in practice so far like that's not there aren't really easy to use tools for that and there isn't really a good incentive to make easier to use tools for that because like centralized people they don't want to build tools they want to build Empires right and web rope three space is all about fewer Empires and more tools but there isn't a natural incentive to build a tool the natural incentive is to build an Empire so you can capture the network effect so like there's yeah the the incentives to like actually build the tools to make it easier to work with having your own domain name like don't

seem like they're there whereas with a uh like a a crypto based name they kind of like they are there um like to some extent right because um you know you have the crypto tokens and Foundations and like good grants and all and projects and all of these entities um but I guess this was a this was a digression right because like the names are only one at one one aspect of uh where I think crypto was interesting right so identifiers that are like accounts that are also that also have nice names as one another is uh a lot of people try thinking about improving social media or interested in this concept of a kind of content view separation right so you there's like the content layer where anyone can just

publish whatever content they want and like maybe you can bundle in a bit of anti-spam and like either it's on chain or it's on some whisper-like Network where if you have an identity you can send maximum and things every day um and then the views are interfaces that look at that information and show you some of it in some order and if you want to have content view separation which is really powerful because instead of uh different platforms having totally being separate from each other different views can still share most of the same network effects um but the content has to be on some credibly neutral ground and like decentralized cryptographic networks are an excellent kind of a cryptographical neutral ground so that's number two and

then number three is incentives right like I don't know exactly what is the correct way to incorporate incentives and crypto social media I know that there's definitely like a lot of very wrong ways to do that but I mean I'm sure there's some like a potentially correct and very powerful ways too but if you want to do that then like the blockchains have their own Financial layer built in which is which makes them once again like I think a really powerful ground for doing this sort of stuff so so those are the three areas where I see it like why I see the crypto space is sort of natural really fit to do something so during your talk to you you also discussed retroactive public good funding which is a concept that was new to me and I thought it was really

interesting so um what is retro retroactive public good funding and why do you think it's interesting sure so the concept of uh retroactive public goods finding is basically that you would have some mechanism that decides like what projects what are important and like what projects are good and provide and what projects deserve funding because they provide like value just to a community and it funds them but the difference from a grants program is that a grants program is proactive right it's like it gives you a hundred thousand dollars because you wrote up a plan for how you believe that you can use this without a hundred thousand dollars to do good things and like here are some reasons why it's credible but here it's giving grants after the fact to projects that have

already shown some uh some value and this is coupled with basically like a prediction Market through an investment ecosystem right so like one of the ways of doing this uh well what obviously you you you could just as a solo developer develop something like spend your own time work for free and then if you create something it's really valuable then like after two years you get a bigger attractive Grant and it was all worth it but what you could also do is you could do you issue what I call Project tokens right so you just create a project token for a project and you could set up some allocation mechanism anyone who like contribute contributes to that project gets some project tokens um you could even sell some project

tokens on uniswap and then the project tokens become tradable and I mean think about it was that right like ethos a project token for this world computer nope definitely um and the idea would be that like these the this retroactive Grant mechanism will then basically just buy up these uh project tokens after the fact right and so not only do the founders of the project benefit but also anyone who bought into the project token and so um gave the uh gave the founders like funding in like you know Fiat or ether like whatever normal currencies um to actually like do the work ahead of time um they will also get rewarded for that right so I think the core principle behind retroactive public goods funding

is um that like institutions in general like I think they're either centralized or they're decentralized if an institution is centralized then it ends up excluding a lot of important perspectives and if an institution is decentralized it's informist right and those are both problems and so but in both cases um it's uh easier for something conformist um or to be right about retrospective questions to be right about what what already was important than it is for something to conformist to be right about prospective questions right um and we look back on the last 50 years we can say like yeah certain vaccines were yes certain vaccines for Humanity but yeah had we thought about that 50

years ago perhaps it would not have been so right exactly like I think um like you like take life extension research for example right like this is sort of my one of my pet um entrepreneurial public goods that I think is really important like there's like someone like Aubry to gray like he has just been working really hard on just making life extension research happen ever since you know the early 2000s so pretty much nobody believed him and like there just isn't an Institutional structure by which people who believe in these kinds of things ahead of everyone else get any kind of uh reward for it um like and so like just like if that kind of structure existed then like you know Aubry could have gotten quite a bit more a kind of

like fire uh economic Firepower behind him much more quickly um would that also work for it's like private investment do you think that there could be like retroactive VC investment or this well I mean I think like VC investment already is retroactive investment right because uh like the VC investment itself is proactive the thing that's retroactive is the exit right so like a lot of the VC ecosystem is already implicitly a retroactive grants program because there is an entire set of startups whose exit strategy is entirely entirely designed on the possibility that they'll just get bought up by Facebook and Google like this is this literally exists right and there's plenty of startups that just pitch to VC so this is a possible exit for us Yeah so basically I think just to a large extent this already exists in the

startup space so they're just trying like retroactive public goods finding is about taking that same principle and like basically making an equivalent version of that but where the metric people we're optimizing for instead of just being like profit generation or satisfying the desires of you know the the Zucker or the Sergey it like it is something that tries to approximate a a community's values and like the public good more so do you think Dows are good at doing this because one of my worries right now is that Dows are a little bit too short-term thinking too and so an example I'm thinking about is on YouTube swap you know there was a proposal to do a 30 million dollar grant to get development and a lot of people were like up in arms like oh my God this is

so much money it's like no don't you understand that this is actually a retroactive grant for like all the work that the Geth team has done for the last four years but so do you think that Dao's there's a decentralized collectives will ever be as on being able to play long-term games as like for example maybe more centralized institutions can and Dallas are definitely conformists at least in their current form right and it's hard to say things about Dao's as a category because Dallas are a much broader category than like Dallas actually exists today are um but Dallas are definitely conformist and so a Dao that that whose governance is like constrained to give retroactive uh grants like is something that could potentially be quite powerful

potentially more powerful than Adele that's giving proactive grants right because uh like make like in order to succeed you have to make some risky bets about the future and a conformist system is just not going to do that um so make like can you describe a little bit what conformance versus non-conformist like basically the just uh making this like only taking actions on the basis of viewpoints for which there was already consensus I'm one of the things you mentioned in your talk was about how we have to make sure crypto continues to align with our values as the community grows how do you we think like

we the values shift as well so one of the things is like you know nfts right this or I don't I don't like calling things nft movement because I think nft is like a technical term let's call it the digital art movement um that has brought definitely a big cultural shift right we've brought it and it I think it has some good aspects like you know I think that Friends with Benefits Community is something that really I don't would I think only would have come out of the kind of person who came from the digital art world but at the same time it brings like those crypto influencers who are Shilling ethereum Max and how do we like so how do you like what was the was the ethereum max thing even connected to nfts so I thought that was just like a garden variety coin but it's no

it's not connected to nfts but it the people that targeted like the Kim Kardashians right these are people who came into crypto from via this digital Arch movement and so how do you sort of how do you think the culture and values have to evolve or try to yeah how do you think it goes forward as the as the scope and of crypto again I don't think the nft space was like net bad even as far as scamminess goes because like you know there's definitely specific examples of um like scammy people in projects that either are nfts or were inspired by the nft space but like before nfts existed there were a

lot of that right like no one's thinking one scams before the other person who uh who came to bitcoin Miami within a theater with an ethereum Max t-shirt which is like I don't know it's such a Chad move in a very dark way because he just like like totally yeah discredited himself in front of both the Bitcoin and ethereum communities but like he he um even I believe even in 2018 right like he I think I was uh sued by or by the SEC I believe for like Shilling some other uh very scammy project like Ico project right so like he was definitely not brought into the space by nfts like this was just um you know he seems like a yeah honestly yeah not very joyful fellow who also has multiple domestic

violence convictions who like also is interested in chilling stuff uh but um so those kinds of people exist and like anything that has money is going to attract those kinds of people um but them the thing that nft is um abroad that I like is just like it did bring cultural balance because like it brought this kind of a community that cares about artistic things and um that is less kind like purely money oriented and like if it was if ethereum was just the nft community it would have it like very weird excesses of its own but it's a it's a good compliment and it's a good balance too like what was there before the naft community which is like the D5

community and then the D5 Community itself was uh an improvements to what was there before which is the Ico Community right so like whatever the philosophy of the new thing you know you you do have to I think also think about it it's like remember the yeah often even crazier older things that came before yeah to me it actually does feel like you know the craziness is slowly decreasing and the interestingness is increasing and like especially like if um after nfts we start talking about like crypto social you know there are going to be crypto social things that like we at um you know epicenter 2023 um are going to can just laugh at it and consider to be totally like you know crazy but after these logos back here

oh no status is fine um but like it's uh the thing but it does I mean at the same time there's going to be a lot of like actually like genuine and very interesting crypto social stuff happening too um so I think the other thing right is that ethereum as it's growing it's uh like early on in ethereum's history you could call with here I'm a community but now I think ethereum like it's not a community it's an ecosystem right and ecosystems like there's definitely a lower level of cohesion than you can expect from an ecosystem but that's okay that's like the price of growth and the price of like getting past a higher power of dunbar's number yeah right but at the same time like in an ecosystem there are sub communities and as long as there are like meaningful sub

communities that are doing things that like we find is important and the the good work continues to be done so I guess one last thing what I want to talk about is um you know they're I know you like Tyler Cohen's book podcast um so there is another uh well-known figure who has also been sued by the SEC that has also been uh very active in crypto recently so overrated underrated Elon Musk what do you think his game here like what do you think is it is he just trolling or do you think there's like something a larger thing that he's pushing for I think people overstate the extent to which he is um like he has some really

deep like scheming and thought behind there the way that he is approaching crypto look I think he is just like a fun computer geek who likes dogs oh yeah Nike Keith squarely attracted to um some of the ideals and values behind crypto and that's um you know that it's just something that he's excited on and he is acting on that excitement and I think that's a totally healthy thing to be doing um but I mean at the same time obviously there's definitely been you know big mistakes in the way that he's handled and like oh I love Bitcoin and oh actually wait there's all these environmental issues and then oh Doge um and oh well so and then like also

like I don't have the highest view for example of like the way that he is just kind of like walked into the Dogecoin community and like he's just basically acting like he can be an important figure inside of it like I don't know like my own personal style is that I think like if I wanted to join a community it'd become important uh in a diet I would do some significant good thing for the community first and then chill second I'd like to see him do some development yeah exactly like if he even if all that he does is like donates I'm you know 15 million dollars to a doge Dev fund like that that would be amazing right so you know Elon if you're listening to this like if you if you just donate 15 million dollars to a dojo fund then I'm sure you know Doge people

you know including myself I'm a doge person well I definitely have a lot of respect for you for that if I got you a gift which is a pair of Sheba pajamas oh amazing hopefully you can't dump these ones um but yeah so okay yeah I I I think it's you know it's funny I actually before I started my current project osmosis I was thinking about building a how to get Dogecoin on to prove a stake and I started like kind of implementing it and I spent like a week really looking into it and I came up with a conclusion that uh no one's interested in Dojo anymore not worth my time uh well I think I was a bit wrong about that one but so let's let's wrap it up here uh but uh

before we do you know we talked about about the space growing and everything and you talked about in your talk about like you know aligning values and you know aligning what's useful how do we ensure that you know we sort of like stick to um you know the initial values and the sort of initial principles and like how does that not get diluted with you know like an influx I mean you may have noticed like there's a lot of a lot of OG's here but there's like a lot of new people too which is great because it brings in like all this sort of like new energy but it can also dilute some of the values and some of the things that we you know as like the you know initial community building ethereum I think is are useful um what's your what's your advice to say to the

community to like stay true to like the your initial vision and sort of like the initial vision for ethereum and you know I think like either like come up with an idea and actually like build some interesting project or like find like a look at the things that already exist and participate in them I mean one very concrete example is status right like it's a decentralized messenger it's like well it's right there it's one of the sponsors yay I'm everyone bowed down to the sponsor status um status dot I am um so the um you like I don't know like it's a decentralized messenger you know like it uses like waku which is basically like uh the fork of a whisper I'm under the hood uh it's got It's got it built-in

crypto wallet like it's uh it's also not a ghost town there's actually a lot of discussion and activity happening inside of it the quality is like it's not perfect but it's like slowly improving and I think it's usable as a messenger at this point so like you can just like can I move my family chat to status I actually yeah no I I actually literally think that it's uh that like it is ready for that now okay great yeah yeah so like actually good signal was hard enough yeah no go around and actually like uh look into all of these things and try actually using them great and um one thing that's been on my mind is this morning what's this whole Mila Kunis uh Ashton Kutcher like how did this come together like what is going on here I don't know like some like a friend um he

introduced me to Ashton and like he is uh he's actually been well interested in crypto for some time I think I I even might have like met him a few years ago at some point um so he is you know also interested in crypto things and I mean he and Neil are also interested in nfts and they're just interested in kind of like finding the word their way around the space and making something meaningful out of it I think that's great yeah that'd be terrific thanks so much for joining us yeah so like uh it's been a pleasure and uh hopefully we'll see you again it happens no no thank you for the interrogation it's been great