#188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0

[0] The following is a conversation with Vitalik Buterin, his second time on the podcast.

[1] Vitalik is the co -founder of Ethereum and one of the most influential people in cryptocurrency and technology broadly defined.

[2] Quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, 4Sigmatic, and BetterHelp.

[3] Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

[4] As a side note, let me say that Ethereum, Bitcoin, and many other cryptocurrencies have been taking a wild ride of prices going up and down in the past few months.

[5] To me, the prices were never as important as the ideas, both technical and philosophical.

[6] Cryptocurrency has the potential to empower billions of people to participate in the global economy in a way that resists the manipulation by centralized power.

[7] Also, with smart contracts, layer two technologies, data pools, NFTs, and of course, integration of artificial intelligence into the whole thing, We have the opportunity to build tools and worlds that transform physical and digital life as we know it, hopefully minimizing the suffering in the world and maximizing the fun.

[8] And now is the part of the program where I read the ads.

[9] You can skip them, if you must.

[10] I even give you time stamps to make it super easy, but please still check out the sponsors.

[11] We're very picky about which sponsors we take on.

[12] So hopefully if you buy their stuff and you definitely should, you'll find value in it just as I have.

[13] It really is the best way to support this podcast.

[14] This show is sponsored by Athletic Greens, the all -in -one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.

[15] It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals.

[16] It's the first thing I drink every day to break my fast, whether I'm eating twice a day or a one meal a day.

[17] When I was doing the 72 -hour fast, I didn't do athletic greens, but that was because I was going super restrict.

[18] It definitely gives you a great base of nutrition where you can mess up and everything else, but you always have that little bit of health that you can count on.

[19] I usually like to mix it with really cold water, shake it up really well in their affected greens container.

[20] I think I easily fall in love with things that both taste good and create a kind of ritual, a daily ritual.

[21] It creates a structure for the day where you can inject the chaos through exploratory.

[22] but you always can count on the basic structure of ritual to be there.

[23] They give you fish oil when you sign up at Athletic Greens .com slash Lex.

[24] That's the other supplement I take is fish oil.

[25] Anyway, Athletic Greens .com slash Lex.

[26] Go get them.

[27] This episode is also sponsored by a magic spoon, low -carb keto -friendly cereal.

[28] It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only 4 .9 grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving.

[29] They keep releasing new flavors.

[30] I think it's birthday cake this time.

[31] But friends, my favorite flavor still, the flavor of champions is cocoa.

[32] Also, they now ship to Canada, which is great for our Canadian friends.

[33] Some of my friends keep sending me pictures of cereal boxes that they bought in support of me. This is how you show love by buying cereal.

[34] I think there's a lot of ways to show love, but one of them is buying keto friendly cereal.

[35] I honestly do think that cereal represents joy for a huge number of people because it's the thing they ate in childhood, but they kind of ran away from it because it's like really unhealthy for you because it has so much sugar.

[36] And like magic spoon allows you to bring back the joy and still stay healthy because it has zero grams of sugar.

[37] There you go.

[38] It's a low carb way of showing love.

[39] These ad reads are getting more and more ridiculous every time.

[40] Anyway, MagicSpoon has a 100 % happiness guarantee.

[41] So if you don't like it, they refunded.

[42] Go to magic spoon .com slash Lex.

[43] Link and use code Lex at checkout to save five bucks off your order.

[44] That's magic spoon .com slash Lex and use code Lex.

[45] Okay.

[46] This episode is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website.

[47] I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led.

[48] They have tools like Indeed Instant Match, giving you quality candidate whose resumes I indeed fit your job description immediately.

[49] Basically, they really speed up that whole early candidate selection process.

[50] It's nice.

[51] And if you listen to this podcast, you may have heard me mention that I'm currently hiring for a bunch of positions related to the podcast, actually.

[52] So not related to any startup work, but more for video editing, camera operator, even virtual assistant, robotics engineer.

[53] If you're interested in that, I'm going to be closing those job posting soon, but you can apply on the website and I'll probably use Indeed to help me out on that as well.

[54] Anyway, right now you can get a free $75 -sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed .com slash Lex.

[55] Get it at a dean .com slash Lex terms and conditions apply offer valid through June 30th.

[56] Indeed .com slash Lex.

[57] My voice can be so frustratingly monotone sometimes.

[58] What are you going to do?

[59] At some point you have to accept who you are.

[60] This show is also sponsored by ForSigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee and plant -based protein.

[61] The coffee doesn't taste like mushroom, which is the first question I would ask.

[62] Speaking of mushrooms, there is no psychedelics mushrooms in this coffee, for better or worse, but I am having a bunch of conversations about psychedelics, including psilocybin, coming up.

[63] So look forward to that.

[64] I should probably talk to a coffee expert.

[65] That would be really interesting conversation.

[66] Just the amount of coffee that's consumed every day.

[67] Just think about it.

[68] What do a lot of people do every single day?

[69] Let's see.

[70] Have sex, drink coffee, go to the bathroom, sleep.

[71] But the funny thing is coffee is one of them.

[72] Drink water.

[73] So water and coffee.

[74] I feel like it would be fascinating to explore coffee from both the chemistry, maybe even the distribution, the supply chain, the taste.

[75] This world is full of beautiful knowledge to discover.

[76] Get up to 40 % off and free shipping and mushroom coffee bundles if you go to foursigmatic .com slash Lex.

[77] That's foursigmatic .com slash Lex.

[78] F -O -U -R -Sigmatic .com slash Lex.

[79] This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H -E -L -P -E -H -E -H -E -H -E -L -P.

[80] They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours.

[81] Kind of think a podcast as a form of talk therapy.

[82] So through talking, you can explore ideas in your mind.

[83] And if you dig deep enough, you can deal with some of the trauma that keeps you trapped in the past.

[84] And if you can let go of that, you can be free.

[85] Free to live in the future, to define your future, to pave whatever the health path you want.

[86] My path seems to be increasingly likely to still run through Mr. David Guggins, even though I got injured a couple months ago, so we decided not to do the 48 -hour challenge together, decided to delay it, probably to the summer.

[87] We'll do something crazy together.

[88] So that's going to be a kind of therapy where I get to meet my demons, get to meet his demons, and make friends.

[89] Anyway, BetterHelp is easy, private, affordable, available worldwide.

[90] Check them out at BetterHelp .com slash Lex.

[91] that's betterhelp .com slash Lex.

[92] This is the Lex Freedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Vitalik Buterin.

[93] Let's first talk about Shiba Ino, if we can.

[94] Also known as Shiba token, Code Shib.

[95] For context, Shiba Uno was created in August 2020, modeled off of Dochecoin by the anonymous founder known as Rioshi.

[96] On May 10th, this year, it had a market capitalization of over $13 billion.

[97] And maybe you can explain this, but in a crazy move, you were given half of Shib's total supply.

[98] You burned, aka.

[99] destroyed 90 % of it.

[100] That's worth $6 .7 billion.

[101] And you donated 10 % that's worth $10 .5.

[102] 1 .2 billion at the time to an India COVID -19 relief fund, saying you don't want to be the locus of this much power.

[103] This is fascinating.

[104] Why and how were you able to walk away from this much money and this much power?

[105] So I should probably start by giving some of the backstory around these coins and this concept of giving me coins.

[106] So, you know, first of all, in Shiba Inu, as you said, is this kind of knockoff of Doge coin, right?

[107] And Dogecoin was this initial and kind of fun coin that was created back, I think, around 2014 or so.

[108] And it was just created by Jackson Palmer and put it out as a joke for a couple of hours and a community formed around it.

[109] And at the beginning, people didn't take it very seriously.

[110] I actually remember putting about $25 ,000 into Doge sometime around 2016.

[111] And I just remember thinking to myself, like, okay, how am I going to explain to my mom that I just invested $25 ,000 into dog coins?

[112] And like, what even are dog coins?

[113] Like, the only interesting thing about this coin is that there's, you know, a logo of a dog somewhere.

[114] But, you know, of course, that ended up being one of the best investments I've ever made.

[115] And it did really well.

[116] And then at the end of 2020, Elon Musk, of course, I started talking about Dogecoin.

[117] And the market cap just, like, shot up to about $50 billion.

[118] Actually, it shot up multiple times, right?

[119] Like, the first time it went up from about 0 .8 cents to about like 7 cents.

[120] And this just happened all in one day.

[121] And I remember this was when I was still in Singapore, in the middle of COVID.

[122] And I saw that the price just went up by 1 ,000%.

[123] And it was like, oh, my God, my doge is worth, like, a lot.

[124] And so I immediately called up some of my friends and told them to, like, drop everything in scramble.

[125] I sold half the Doge, and I got $4 .3 million donated the proceeds to give directly.

[126] And a few hours after I did this, the price dropped back down from about seven cents to four cents, right?

[127] So I managed to sell the Doge at the top, and I remember just feeling like I was such an amazing trader.

[128] But then, of course, you know, the price went up for four cents, then to seven, and then 50, and just like Doge becoming this big phenomenon where there's even a lot of people that have heard of Doge that have not heard of Ethereum is just like something even I wasn't predicting, right?

[129] And so after that, of course, you know, we have Doge and then people are thinking, well, you know, if the leading dog token is worth $50 billion, then surely the second largest dog token deserves, you know, at least $7 or $8 billion, right?

[130] I feel like that's kind of what the mindset of these Shiba people is.

[131] So then, of course, they did this other gimmick, right, where they gave me half the Shiba token supply.

[132] They were actually not the first project to do this.

[133] So around the end of 2020, there was this weird project called Teller, it's like T -E -L -L -O -R.

[134] I think they're a chain link competitor or something like this, but I remember they just dumped $50 ,000 worth of their token into my wallet.

[135] And then they had their Twitter RBi just like basically run around saying, look, look at Vitellick's wallet.

[136] Vitalik holds tellers.

[137] He's one of us.

[138] He's a supporter.

[139] And as soon as I discovered this, I just, like, publicly sold the teller tokens on you to swap, and this created a bit of a Twitter splat.

[140] Now, the Shiba people were more clever.

[141] The Shiba people, instead of dumping to that wallet, they dumped to my cold wallet, right?

[142] So in a cryptocurrency, right, there's this concept of, like, cold wallets and hot wallets, basically, like, the thing that actually owns your money is, like, this 80 -digit number called a private key, right?

[143] And a hot wallet is when that private key is just stored in memory on your computer, on your phone, really easy to access.

[144] Cold wallet means it's either written down on a piece of paper or it's on a computer that's just never access to the internet.

[145] So cold is very inconvenient, but cold is also much more secure, right?

[146] Because even if that computer has some viruses on it, like, it's like air -gapped, it's not actually going to be able to upload it.

[147] So this cold wallet, and like all the money is out of the cold wallet.

[148] so it's safe for me to talk about my setup now, right?

[149] But it was a laptop that was sitting in Canada.

[150] And I also had two pieces of paper where I wrote down two numbers on those two pieces of paper.

[151] One was with me, one was in Canada.

[152] And if you add those two numbers together, you get the private key.

[153] So because of COVID travel restrictions, and, you know, this is cold wallets in Canada.

[154] Like, it's very difficult for me to actually access it, right?

[155] And I'm not sure if they knew this.

[156] Maybe they just got lucky.

[157] But basically they sent a lot of these dog tokens into this wallet where it was very difficult for me to access it.

[158] But then I saw these dog tokens.

[159] I saw more and more people talking about them.

[160] And then at some point I realized that like, hey, these things are worth billions of dollars.

[161] And like, you know, there's lots of really good things that you could do with that amount of money.

[162] And it would actually be a waste to just like see a go.

[163] So I made the decision that like I would actually power through and figure out.

[164] out how to, like, safely, like, basically get my private key.

[165] I actually had to call up my family, tell them to read out their number off of their piece of paper.

[166] I entered that into a fresh laptop that I bought from Target.

[167] Then I put in my other number on my piece of paper, added the two numbers together on the computer.

[168] There's the key.

[169] And at the same time, like, just scrambled for two day is setting up a new wallet where I can move my ETH to safely, like getting people to be multi -sig partners, just like doing all sorts of like stuff that, you know, 10 years ago you would expect to just be part of a cyberpunk, you know, science fiction novel, but, you know, now it's all real.

[170] So you're doing this all by yourself, essentially.

[171] Most of it by myself.

[172] So I need to keep it secret.

[173] Right.

[174] And I needed my family to actually like go and read the number on their piece of paper.

[175] And then I am in my new multi -sig wallet, like there's other people that are signatories.

[176] But, you know, I'm obviously not going to reveal any details beyond that.

[177] So I did this, right?

[178] And I actually managed to get the private key, make the first transaction that would just move all my ether to the multi -sig wallet so it's safe.

[179] And then second transaction, put the private key on my main computer, then started, you know, like going in and just selling some of the dog tokens and then just like giving them to these.

[180] different charities.

[181] Now, at the time, I actually did not even, like, have any idea of how much you would be able to get, right?

[182] Because, like, on paper, the dog tokens are $7 billion, but, like, in reality, it's a very liquid market, you know, are you going to crash it by, after you sell one million worth, you're going to crash it after $10 million?

[183] Are you going to, might you actually be able to get, like, an entire $200 million?

[184] I had no idea.

[185] So I definitely was just, of the mindset, like, okay, I mean, I'll sell a bit, maybe I get some ETH, and then, you know, donated some ETH to give well, donated some to other groups.

[186] And then, okay, have some dog tokens.

[187] Like, I don't have an easy ability to sell more myself.

[188] But then I'll just, like, give them to these groups and, like, you know, hopefully they'll do good things with them.

[189] It was actually, I actually donated at 20 % and dumped 80%.

[190] Yeah.

[191] So the COVID, the COVID -India group got one batch.

[192] And then there's another group that got another batch.

[193] And I don't want to say who they are because I think they want to announce themselves at some point.

[194] Sure.

[195] Yeah, but you can see the fact that these transactions were made on the blockchain.

[196] But it was just very interesting and unexpected and just an insanely crazy situation.

[197] It's been a couple of weeks.

[198] First of all, thank you for helping me hang up some curtains.

[199] This is a first for the podcast and shows that you're a truly a special person.

[200] person to be willing to help.

[201] But now a couple of weeks later, do you regret any aspect of that decision?

[202] I'm sure there are some things that I probably could have done better.

[203] I was actually talking to some of these charities and I was impressed by just how much money they managed to get out of selling some of these coins.

[204] So I probably could have done better by just like talking more with the traders and actually ensuring that, you know, they can do a better job of maximizing the value of all of them.

[205] But, like, you know, it was a very stressful time and I did have to act quickly.

[206] Like, I did manage to, you know, make a lot of the donations before, like, a few days before the great crypto crash happened.

[207] So it was, and it's difficult to, like, obviously there's parallel universe.

[208] in which I did better, but at the same time, there's also lots of parallel universes where because I hesitated more and tried to spend more time thinking I missed the opportunity, so, you know, on net, it's like a luck of the draw, and I'm just, you know, happy that everything was able to turn out as well as it did.

[209] But psychologically, you mentioned stress.

[210] How hard was it?

[211] It was stressful, right?

[212] I think, well, one of the really stressful parts was just the fact that I had to basically move all of my funds, you know, including the 325 ,000 ether from one cold wallet into another hot wallet, or sorry, into another multi -sig wallet.

[213] And, you know, maybe the multi -sig wallet had a bug in it.

[214] Maybe there's like some mistake I'll make in the middle that causes the funds to get lost.

[215] Like, you know, that's, that part was stressful.

[216] And I was definitely stressing out for two days.

[217] I mean, you know, triple checking the new wallet.

[218] I even did a bit of an audit of the code myself.

[219] I, yeah.

[220] wrote my own JavaScript to DAP to make confirmations because Gnosis safe didn't work with the status well at well.

[221] So there was definitely, that whole thing was definitely a bit of a marathon.

[222] I was also a kind of definitely a bit worried about or uncertain, I guess, how the public and, you know, including the coin communities would perceive the whole thing.

[223] But I was actually impressed.

[224] For every poster that was saying, like, no, you know, why did Vitalik, like, rug pull on as he was, his wallet was supposed to be a burn address.

[225] You know, there's like 10 people that are like, oh, you know, I thought I was just in this because it's a fun pyramid gambling thing.

[226] But instead, I ended up being part of this, you know, great public good thing for humanity.

[227] And that's, like, even more amazing.

[228] So the amount of that that I got was very impressive.

[229] So, you know, all in all, I think the dog people did great.

[230] The dog people.

[231] Is there something you can extend to the bigger picture of it in the principles you apply to making this decision?

[232] Is there some principles, philosophies that you apply also to the decisions you make around Ethereum?

[233] I think a big one for me is just this idea that crypto, you know, isn't just an opportunity to give people slightly better ways to save value in all of these things it's also an opportunity to basically create these new digital institutions that could serve the public good in new ways and that's something that I've been interested in for a long time I actually even have this article in Bitcoin magazine back in 2014 where I basically suggested this idea that you would have coins that represent causes and people would just like buy into accept those coins because they support those causes.

[234] So I think it's called markets, institutions, and currencies, a new form of social incentivization or something like that.

[235] And I'm sure you can find it and throw it in the links.

[236] So that was interesting to kind of see becoming real.

[237] And like in general, right, I think, you know, public goods are very important.

[238] And on the internet, public goods are even more importance, right?

[239] Like every single Lex Friedman podcast is just on YouTube and, you know, anyone can go and see it.

[240] Like, there's no way for you to, like, you know, sell it and so that some people can see it, but then other people can see it.

[241] Like, you know, you could do that, but then you'd obviously be, you know, reducing your impact.

[242] So thank you for making the amazing Lexveen podcast still freely available.

[243] Well, that's actually a tense thing is how do you do it in a way that's not controlled in a centralized fashion?

[244] Because actually YouTube feels free and open, but it nevertheless less is one company making centralized decisions.

[245] And the first time I realized YouTube is not forever is when a lot of the Joe Rogan experience library was pulled from YouTube as part of the Spotify deal.

[246] And it made me realize we need to, it's like the realization that fiat money is centralized.

[247] It's realizing that, you know, this is not forever.

[248] And you might want to come up with schemes to distribute it to decentralize the control of it in the way that audio for podcast is with just an RSS feed.

[249] Exactly.

[250] One of the kind of philosophical things that I hope to achieve is kind of decouple the concept of public goods, which are incredibly important and are the lifeblood of modern civilization, from the idea that there is or can be one central organization that represents the public and perfectly understands and can impose their idea of what is the good.

[251] Like, it's, when people talk about public goods, like, it just often comes with this baggage of, you know, either centralization or conformism.

[252] And I think, like, it doesn't have to, right?

[253] Like, often the most important public goods are the ones that are created by, you know, the crazy individualists that disagree with everyone else.

[254] So trying to make this kind of synthesis where, you know, you combine the values of decentralization and the values of open source, but you're not naive.

[255] about it.

[256] And, you know, you realize that for these things to be produced, there needs to be a way for it to be sustainable.

[257] There needs to be some way of supporting people who are working these projects.

[258] But at the same time, you want to avoid that turning into a vector of centralization, like trying to sort of get all of the good things without the bad things.

[259] To me, that's a big part of sort of what my grand experiment in crypto is about.

[260] And, and, Like, we are doing things in different kinds of things for this, right?

[261] Like, there's the Gipcoin grants quadratic funding in the Ethereum ecosystem.

[262] There's, you know, obviously these dog coins that just happens, like, I guess, accidentally.

[263] There's other projects that, like, for example, you know, Uniswap has their Uniswap Dow that just has a huge amount of funding.

[264] And, like, we haven't seen yet how that's going to be deployed.

[265] But, you know, it could be potentially deployed to.

[266] do lots of really good and amazing things.

[267] Do you see Ethereum as essentially a mechanism to fight for social causes?

[268] I definitely see Ethereum as being a mechanism to fight for.

[269] Definitely some specific things that are social causes.

[270] like just, you know, the fact of creating an open financial system that anyone can participate in no matter where they are in the world, that's a social cause.

[271] Just, you know, giving people the ability to organize and create projects, even if it's five people in five different countries.

[272] Like that kind of inclusiveness, I think that's a social cause and it's a core crypto value.

[273] But then at the same time, like the other important kind of part of the magic of Ethereum that you have to balance that against is that it is also this open platform where ultimately the things that are on Ethereum is just the things that the community makes of it.

[274] Well, you kind of briefly open the door, so let's go there.

[275] When it comes to government regulation of crypto, what's the best case scenario, what's the worst case scenario?

[276] In terms of, you know, as you've kind of mentioned, Ethereum challenges the power centers of the world, and how do you see the interplay between governments and this new technology that resists centralized power?

[277] Best case and worst case.

[278] The best case is that, you know, blockchains continue to prosper, and we figure out scalability is so that people can actually start doing things on block, you know, all of the amazing use cases that people have been talking about instead of today where a lot of the great stuff gets priced out because, you know, transaction fees are at $5 to $10.

[279] And then we see a lot of different amazing applications happening on blockchains.

[280] You know, it could be like Dow is creating new ways for people to interact and organize with each other, new ways for artists to get funded.

[281] And just all sorts.

[282] of these amazing things.

[283] And there's just enough public support and just enough people that see that, you know, look, crypto is cruelly doing a lot of good things.

[284] And, you know, there are definitely areas where there's tensions.

[285] But in those areas where there's tensions, like there could be some kind of creative and interesting approaches that get figured out, right?

[286] Like, you know, the concept of corporate taxes, for example, right?

[287] Like, you know, it doesn't, it, it, it, it, it's, it, it, it, that would disappear as a revenue stream if theoretically corporations just all get replaced by DOWs.

[288] But, you know, like maybe there's some other creative way by which, you know, like DOWs themselves can kind of be, you know, have some kind of encoded governance that ensures that they, you know, have at least some of us, some kind of bias towards serving the global public good.

[289] And, you know, maybe it does enough of, Dows can do enough of that that people are happy with.

[290] it.

[291] And, you know, there are going to be things that people are unhappy about.

[292] There's always going to be the people that, you know, wants to surveil everyone.

[293] But if on the kind of effect of crypto from just empowering people is greater than that and greater than that in a way that people can just easily see, then, you know, that would be a good scenario, right?

[294] And we'll just, like, become kind of incorporated and accepted the same way as happened with the internet.

[295] But in the worst case scenario would of course be just like people suddenly, you know, flipping and going into moral panic mode and just, you know, oh my God, like this technology is used by like, you know, insert bad group of the day.

[296] And then I don't think governments have the ability to ban crypto to the extent of just complete, like preventing blockchains from existing.

[297] But they definitely have the ability to really marginalize it, right?

[298] Like if you just ban all exchanges, like and ban all links from the fiat's ecosystem to crypto, and, you know, you ban all a kind of mainstream employers from accepting or paying in cryptocurrency, then, like, you can successfully, like, turn it into a, like, you know, a fairly kind of niche countercultural thing that has much less impact than otherwise would.

[299] So it's somewhere between the good scenario and the bad scenario.

[300] I'm obviously hoping for the good.

[301] Well, that's interesting also, the tension between governments and companies, like, if you have a bunch of billionaires or a bunch of companies like Tesla investing in Bitcoin and then governments resisting that it's interesting who wins out in that worst case scenario and almost when companies and rich quote unquote respectable people embrace cryptocurrencies bitcoin Ethereum so on even the dog coins it's almost sends a signal to everybody else that this is a revolutionist here to stay.

[302] On this one little tangent that you brought up, this is almost an outdated idea, but it's still with us, which is cryptocurrencies are used for illegal activity, for drugs, for crime, and so on.

[303] Is there some sense that worries you that if cryptocurrency, if Ethereum runs the world, then crime, making money, from crime will be easier.

[304] There's always that possibility, but at the same time, I think, if you look at, you know, the world as a whole and, like, the way all the other technological trends are going, like, you know, in -person surveillance is just going up every year, right?

[305] Like, if you commit a crime in, you know, meat space, it's getting harder and harder to get away with it.

[306] So, like, you know, if you wants to do something, and this is something that's just, like, happening as a result of, you know, just better technology information and information transparency, like a lot of it's hard to prevent, even if you really tried.

[307] So the world where, like, things go dark to such an, you know, as the law, the police hawks sometimes like to say, to such an extent that, like, you know, oh, my God, the criminals are committing crimes with impunity and we can't see anything.

[308] Like, that just seems unlikely.

[309] But on the other hand, like the world where there just is no privacy, for example, or the world where there's just like is no ability to kind of act outside of the confines of mainstream institutions, like that's something that's more realistic.

[310] and that seems like something that could lead to a lot of kind of scary things, right?

[311] And, like, even from a government's point of view, right?

[312] Like, I think governments over the last few years, a lot of them, they're very worried about sovereignty.

[313] You know, they're worried about, like, if their country is economy as, you know, social environments, they're just completely dependent on basically foreign tech companies controlled by foreign governments.

[314] Like, you know, governments are not on team government, right?

[315] It's like, you know, the Indian government is on, you know, team.

[316] India, you know, the Russian government is on team Russia and so forth, right?

[317] So like, you know, they don't want the U .S. to be able to like have this big back door into everything.

[318] So, I mean, I do think that a balance is needed, but at the same time, I do think, I guess I definitely like worry more about the possibility that just like, without things like crypto acting outside of institutions becomes too impossible and I don't even necessarily mean outside of governments even just outside of corporations becomes too impossible and there's just like terrible things that come as a result and if things going in the other direction it obviously is a risk but at the same time I think in the long term a crypto can potentially even offer defenses as much as attacks against that sort of thing Yeah, throughout history, many of the most destructive things came from centralized institutions versus sort of from the people operating in the shadows.

[319] And, you know, I've been talking to a bunch of psychedelics folks, that people doing researchers like Greg Doblin in Johns Hopkins, there's a lot of exciting research on psychedelics.

[320] And one thing you could say about operating at the edge of legality, it could actually accelerate the adoption of particular things like whether it's marijuana or psychedelics, they can help people out.

[321] It almost accelerates the policy.

[322] It forces the policy to catch up to where the people stand.

[323] So there's a positive way of doing things that are in the gray area of legality and creating a market that allows people to, in a safe way, be able to participate in this gray area of legal.

[324] Yeah, I mean, the other thing to keep in mind, of course, is that The set of, like, the kinds of things that just, like, payment processors as companies try to restrict people you from is much larger than the set of things that's illegal, right?

[325] Right.

[326] Like, part of that is because they want to be super conservative and, like, the more layers you have, the more they're, like, conservative because they're scared of what the layer below them will do to them.

[327] Sometimes they have their own, you know, moral opinions of various kinds.

[328] Like, you know, they go after lots of people, right?

[329] Like, they make life really hard for, you know, like sex workers, for example.

[330] know psychedelics as you mentioned there's a like a lot of activity even including stuff that is totally legal that just you know there's this like you know shadow like PayPal credit card government or whatever you want to call it and you know no that makes it just hard to participate in this stuff so I think like reducing the number of intermediaries is definitely normally a good thing.

[331] All right.

[332] Let's talk about one of the most exciting technologies, like technically, philosophically, like socially, financially in every way, which is Ethereum 2 .0.

[333] There's a million things to talk about, but at the step one is probably a good thing to do, which is can you briefly summarize your vision how Ethereum 2 .0 will make Ethereum more scalable, secure, and sustainable?

[334] Sure.

[335] So I think recently we've actually been kind of de -emphasizing the ETH 2 .0 branding, I guess.

[336] So the reason behind that was that, like, originally we envisioned something more like a big grand event where, you know, all the good things would happen at the same time.

[337] And it would be a new blockchain.

[338] And it would be a new protocol and people would have to take a lot of effort to migrate over.

[339] But later, we've slowly changed the roadmap over to something that's much more incremental.

[340] right so you know proof of stake happens kind of over time and then sharding gets added over time and all these features get added over time and so the experience for just a regular theorem user still feel is very seamless right it's like maybe a little bit more complex than the hard forks that we've already done but from a user's point of view but not by that much right so the big two things that are happening right these are what used to be considered the two flagship features of east 2 .0 and now that's or just, you know, the flagship features of the, you know, the next devolution of Ethereum, you know, as proof of stake and sharding.

[341] So proof of stake is a consensus algorithm.

[342] It's a the, or a consensus mechanism, I should say.

[343] The difference is that, like, an algorithm is something that you run by yourself, a mechanism as, like, interactions between people, and it could even include incentives and all of that.

[344] So, the consensus mechanism, so by which nodes in the network agree on, you know, which blocks came in, which transactions came in in what order, make sure that once a block gets accepted, it can't get reverted, and all of these things that we expect from a blockchain.

[345] So existing blockchains, including Bitcoin, including the Ethereum of today, and including a lot of them, they use proof of work, right?

[346] So the reason why we need proof of anything is because they serve this function that I call kind of economic civil resistance.

[347] So that's obviously a big word for especially if you've never heard of Sybil's before.

[348] But the basic idea is, right, that you have a network and you have lots of computers that agree on which block to accept.

[349] And sometimes you get two blocks that get published at the same time and you just have to agree in an order.

[350] So there has to be some kind of voting game.

[351] But then the question is, well, in this voting game, you know, who gets to vote?

[352] Who gets to participate?

[353] Now, you can't say one person, one vote, right?

[354] The reason why you cannot say one person, one vote is because you need some kind of, like, authority or some kind of mechanism to say, you know, who the humans are.

[355] And if you don't have that, then a bad guy could just come in with a virtual machine or with a computer that has on it 10 billion virtual machines that have 10 billion, you know, virtual nodes, and then just like say, look, I'm 99 % of the network.

[356] I should control everything.

[357] So to prevent this, what proof of work and proof of stake both do is they basically say, well, the weight of your vote, like how much influence your votes have in the consensus, is proportional to like what quantity of economic resources you bring in.

[358] So in the case of proof of work, you prove what economic resources you have because your economic resources are computers and you prove that you have them but just running them 24 -7 using these hash algorithms, right?

[359] So this does solve the problem, right?

[360] Because in order to attack the network, you have to come in with more computers and more money invested into computers and electricity than the rest of the network put together.

[361] And that's extremely expensive.

[362] In proof of stake, instead of relying on people with computers that are just constantly cranking out hash is 24 -7, you, as you're like a unit of economic, resources, you just use holdings of coins inside the system, right?

[363] So all of these watch chains, they have some kind of coin in them.

[364] Bitcoin has Bitcoin, Ethereum has ether.

[365] They all have a coin.

[366] So I'm not just use that as the economic resource that you're using to measure participation.

[367] So that's like the core distinction between proof of work and proof of stake.

[368] I like proof of stake and I've liked proof of stake for many years, basically because it just requires much less ongoing resource consumption, right?

[369] Like with proof of work, you know, you have to like actually go and buy these physical computers.

[370] And these days, you know, they have specialized hardware, A6 application -specific integrated circuits.

[371] You have to go produce them.

[372] You have to go buy them.

[373] And unless you have millions of dollars, you know, you have to buy them from one of these other people who creates them.

[374] And those other people often end up taking a huge cut of the profits themselves.

[375] And then, you know, you have to plug them in.

[376] you have to just burn all of this electricity that's just running 24 -7.

[377] So it consumes a huge amount of energy, right?

[378] And it's not just energy, it also, you know, just to create the hardware, right?

[379] Like people focus a lot on energy, but like actually about half the cost of proof of work mining is the cost of the hardware.

[380] So hardware is a very big deal too.

[381] And, you know, you need this like these really big and powerful, like very specialized hardware and other kind that fills up these big warehouses.

[382] So proof of stake, you don't really need that much electricity.

[383] You just need just a little bit to run a regular computer.

[384] You can run proof of stake validators on computers that you already have.

[385] So it's just much less resource intensive.

[386] And this is good for a few reasons, right?

[387] Like, one is the kind of environmental rationale that, you know, you're not breaking the environment.

[388] The second is that you're not taking away electricity and, like, other resources.

[389] from other people.

[390] I think just today I saw a story about Iran wanting to shut down some Bitcoin mining because it was just grabbing up so much electricity that it was outbidding the nearby towns and they didn't have enough.

[391] And then there was like Chia, the one that's doing proof of hard disk mining basically, is just like grabbing up so many hard disks.

[392] There's a shortage.

[393] So that's the second reason.

[394] And then the third more selfish reason is that because participating in consensus does not require so much energy expenditure, you don't need to pay people as much to participate, right?

[395] So like Bitcoin and Ethereum, they both issue somewhere around 4 % of the total supply every year right now to miners.

[396] So Ethereum is about 4 .7 million ether, and the current supply is about 115 million.

[397] But with proof of stake, like we expect it'll be somewhere between 500 ,000 and 1 million per year.

[398] So that means, you know, the supply doesn't have to increase so quickly.

[399] One of the pros that people sort of argue for the proof of work is that it is secure because it's much more difficult to sort of, as you've highlighted, is difficult to participate.

[400] Is there, what are your thoughts about the security of the proof of stake mechanism?

[401] Is there ways to make it secure?

[402] So I think proof of stake is very secure because in order to be able to attack the system, you need to have basically as much stake as the rest of the network.

[403] Right.

[404] So that means like right now, for example, we have five million eth staking.

[405] So you have to come up with five million eth and then join the network.

[406] And then the other, so five million eth is a lot.

[407] Right.

[408] It's like how much is it now?

[409] Like $15 billion.

[410] So that's actually more than I believe the cost of attacking the Bitcoin network.

[411] And then the second thing is that recovering from attacks is much easier in proof of stake than in proof of work, right?

[412] Because in proof of stake, you have, like, first of all, we have for many kinds of attacks that you do against this network, we have this concept of like automatic slashing, right?

[413] Which basically means that in order to like revert a finalized block.

[414] So if there's one block that's like accepted by the network and you try to convince the network to kind of revert that block and accept a different block, in order to make that kind of attack, you basically have to, have your validators, like a big portion of your validators signed to conflicting messages.

[415] And this is something that like, once these messages are on the network, like you can go and prove, like, look, these people did it.

[416] And so we have this feature in the protocol called slashing where you basically take all these people who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins, right?

[417] And you don't burn anyone else's coins.

[418] Now, there are other cases, like, for example, if instead of reverting blocks, the attack just tries to censor everyone, right?

[419] Then what you do, everyone who got censored would just basically create the minority chain, and then the community would basically have to do a soft fork, right?

[420] They would just have to say, like, look, this chain is clearly attacking us, this chain is the one not attacking us, and so we're going to join this chain.

[421] And then what happens is that on that new chain, the attackers also lose a lot of coins, right?

[422] So the difference between proof of stake and proof of work is that in a proof of state system, like you can identify specific participants, and you can say, you know, these, and Like, this isn't like, you know, a human going in and saying, I don't like you, I don't like you.

[423] I don't like you.

[424] This is like automated, right?

[425] So the slashing process is automated?

[426] Yes.

[427] Is there ways it can go wrong?

[428] So that's a painful process where the coins are burned.

[429] It is painful, yes.

[430] I think, I mean, the one big unknown, of course, is like, if an attack actually happens.

[431] And like, if an attack happens that requires the community to actually choose one of these minority forks, then, like, what would the community?

[432] community actually successfully coordinating on this look like, right?

[433] Like it's like, you know, we can talk about it and we can, you know, write like science fiction novels about it, but like until it's happened, you don't really know the details of like what it looks like at how difficult it is.

[434] What are the channels of communication for the community?

[435] If you can enlighten me a little bit, like what, you know, in many ways in the political realm, Twitter is often used as a way to kind of have these emergent phenomena of large groups of people coming to a consensus about a particular idea.

[436] And then there's battle for consensus.

[437] What's in the Ethereum community, how do people, what are the sources of natural language -based communication that have an emergent belief structure that you would say?

[438] Or is it all through money?

[439] Is it all through trading that the communication happens?

[440] They're definitely talking as well.

[441] I mean, like we have to agree on protocols.

[442] changes somehow, right?

[443] Like, there's Twitter, there's Reddit, there's GitHub, there's all of the various Ethereum forums, Ethereum magicians, Ethereum research.

[444] There's just in -person communication.

[445] Then there's just kind of like the hidden web of everyone talking to everyone on telegram or signal.

[446] So it's like some of everything, right?

[447] But I think like the thing to emphasize around like, can you actually come to consensus on, you know, whether or not to fork the chain because the attacker is censoring everyone, just for example, is like, you, everyone who's running a node is going to see almost the same thing, right?

[448] Like, they're going to be off by a few seconds and, like, maybe they'll be off by a few minutes.

[449] They'll disagree by a few minutes.

[450] But, like, if it's a serious attack, you know, people are going to know, right?

[451] It's not like one of those things where, you know, oh, we're trying to agree on like, I don't know, did Epstein kill himself or like some random, random political facts where, like, in reality, no one knows a single thing about what that was actually going on, and they're all speculating.

[452] Like, it is much more visible, right?

[453] So we do have that.

[454] But, you know, at the same time, I'm happy to admit that, like, these are fairly untested mechanisms.

[455] But, like, at the same time, they're also untested mechanisms in proof of work, right?

[456] And, like, in proof of work, it's even harder because in proof of work, you don't have the ability to, like, identify and say, like, you know, I'm going to, these miners attacked, and so we're not going to let these miners in, these miners not attack, so we're going to keep them in.

[457] Like, you have to pretty much, you know, either take out none of the miners or you do a fork that changes their proof of work algorithm, which takes out all of the minors, right?

[458] So the economics of, like, recovering from attacks and proof of work, at least to me, actually, do seem more unfavorable.

[459] But, you know, I'm sure the proof of work people you talk to will give very different and contradictory opinions, and that's totally fine and amazing.

[460] Some people describe M .E .V. Minor extractable value as an existential risk to Ethereum.

[461] What is M .E .V. How important is it to solve M .E .V. If it's important, what ideas do you have?

[462] Sure.

[463] How about after this one, we'll also talk about sharding, because it's amazing.

[464] And it's part of you'll return back to sharding, which is, we'll return to the big picture of the scaling problem, as you mentioned.

[465] I love this conversation, you know, depth first search instead of bread first.

[466] So, basically, okay, EBV minor extractable value.

[467] It is not different in proof of work and proof of stake, right?

[468] So, like, if you want to call it, you know, block proposer extractable value, like it sounds less sexy, but, you know, we can call it B -Pev instead of Mav, who cares?

[469] But the basic...

[470] So this is a problem in both proof of work and proof of stake.

[471] Yes.

[472] So the basic idea is that if you have the ability to choose which transactions go into a block and in what order, then you have the ability to, take advantage of that position for economic gain in a lot more ways than just collecting transaction fees, right?

[473] Like, for example, there's decentralized exchanges on chain, like uniswap.

[474] And, like, let's say the price of ETH versus USC was $2 ,700, the previous block, but then there was a bit of a market drop, and now it's $2680, where you can go on uniswap and you can just, like, gobble up the entire part of, you know, the automated order book that's, like, between 2700 and 2680 right and that's and then at the same time you like run a bot and you know you buy some eth back at 2680 and you've just like made about 10 dollars of profit right so or well 10 dollars times you know whatever the depth is right so and so there's lots of little things like that there's also things that involve like front running other people's transactions so one example of this would be that if someone sends a transaction that says like oh no buy me five for whatever price that you can get, but with a maximum of, let's say, $15 ,000, then you can go and, like, you can send each, put a transaction right in front of that transaction, and you can buy up that ETH first, and then you resell it to him at, you know, $15 ,000 minus one.

[475] So there's...

[476] And you get to make a little bit of money, though.

[477] Exactly.

[478] So there's a lot of these different, like, arbitrage, front running, back running, these different tricks that allow block proposers to...

[479] To get some percentage on top, like overhead.

[480] Exactly.

[481] And the reason why this is a challenge is because it's, like, first of all, it sometimes degrades user experience because users get less favorable trades.

[482] But there are sometimes ways to, like, mitigate that for applications.

[483] Sometimes it's not that bad.

[484] But like, the bigger risk that I think some people consider more existential is that there's just much more economies of scale in figuring out.

[485] how to extract all this revenue.

[486] Because if you're just collecting transaction fees, there aren't really economies of scale.

[487] There aren't really benefits to centralizing, right?

[488] Because it's a very simple formula.

[489] You just like grab up the transactions that pay you the most.

[490] But with MEV, there's all these sophisticated algorithms.

[491] And if you have lots of money, then you can hire really smart people to make amazing algorithms.

[492] And then you can use the other half of your money to get a lot of mining power or a lot of stake.

[493] And you get a lot of opportunities to use your even better algorithms.

[494] So there's this risk that, like, as a result of this, mining is basically or even validating proof of stake is going to centralize.

[495] So I think the ecosystem's best reply to this sort of risk, and it's the direction where projects like flashbots are going already, is if you can't eliminate the centralization, then you try to firewall it, right?

[496] And the way that you firewall it is you basically say, we're going to try to deliberately create a marketplace where people can just do the complicated work of creating what are called bundles, like bundles of transactions that are very profitable, right?

[497] And then at the other side of the market, you just have like block proposes reminders that are just dumb nodes.

[498] And they go and ask the what are called searchers, the bundle creators.

[499] And they just ask like, hey, how much can you give me if I put a your bundle, and then they just take the highest offer, right?

[500] So you sort of separate out the task, and, you know, you have the easy part, and then you have the hard part, and you have this special class of actor called a searcher that does the hard part, and then the easy part, the people doing the easy part, which is just minors and validators, they kind of just talk to all the different people doing the searching, and they just, you know, accept the highest better, right?

[501] So, I mean, this is also just, like, interesting, an interesting example of, like, economic design philosophy, right?

[502] Like, sometimes you can't just, like, make centralization go away.

[503] Sometimes it's inevitable.

[504] But, you know, at least you can try to kind of contain it.

[505] You can direct it or, you know, you can even sort of firewall it away from, you know, core consensus, the parts that really do need to be decentralized.

[506] But you don't see it as an existential risk.

[507] It's just a little, it's a bit of a problem that it has to be constantly dealt with.

[508] It's a, I mean, it's a risk.

[509] Like, there's obviously a risk that, you know, it's a very severe problem.

[510] problem and that even this flashbots approach has some fatal flaw or whatever.

[511] But I'm definitely, we're definitely approaching it with the mindset of, you know, this is a problem.

[512] And like, yes, we do have to do some work to solve it, but we're doing it.

[513] And so far it's being solved.

[514] Okay, let's talk about the other really, really fascinating part of the future of Ethereum.

[515] Let's not call it Ethereum 2 .0, but the future of Ethereum that also may require a hard fork.

[516] I don't know.

[517] you can correct man this is well broadly ideas for scaling yes and more specifically sort of layer two or layer one and two intersection ideas of how to achieve scaling and at the core of that is the idea of sharding so first what is sharding okay uh so there's two major paradig for scaling blockchains, right?

[518] As you said, layer one and layer two.

[519] And layer one basically means make the blockchain itself capable of processing more transactions by having some mechanism by which you can do that despite the fact that there's a limit to the capacity of each participant in the blockchain.

[520] And then layer two says, well, we're going to keep the blockchain as is, but we're going to create clever protocols that sit on top of the blockchain that still use the blockchain and then still kind of inherit things like the security guarantees of a blockchain, but at the same time, a lot of things are done off -chain, and so you get more scalability that way.

[521] So in Ethereum, the most popular paradigm for layer two is roll -ups, and the most popular paradigm for layer one is sharding.

[522] So one way to achieve layer one scaling is to increase the block size.

[523] Hence the block size wars, quote -unquote.

[524] And you actually tweeted something about, people are saying that Vital had changed his mind about the in it he be he went from being a small I went from being big to small is it big to small and uh but you said I've been a medium blocker all along so maybe you can also comment on on where on the very basic aspect before even get the sharding of where you stand on this block size debate sure so the way that I think about the tradeoff is I think about it as a tradeoff between making it easy to write to the blockchain and making it easy to read the blockchain right so So when I say read, I just mean, you know, have a node and actually verify it and make sure that it's correct and all of those things.

[525] And then by write, I mean, send transactions.

[526] So I think for decentralization, it's important for both of these tasks to be accessible.

[527] And I think that they're like about equally importance, right?

[528] If you have a chain that's too expensive to read, then everyone will just trust a few people to read for them.

[529] And then those people can change the rules without anyone else's permission.

[530] But if, on the other hand, it becomes really expensive to write, then everyone will move all.

[531] onto basically second layer systems that are incredibly centralized.

[532] And like that takes away from, you know, decentralization and self -sovereignty as well.

[533] So this has been my viewpoints like pretty much the whole time, right?

[534] It's like, you know, you need this balance and going in one direction or the other direction is very unhealthy.

[535] In the Bitcoin case, basically what happens was that Bitcoin originally, like at the very beginning, it didn't really have a block size.

[536] it just had an accidental block size of 32 meg or a block size limit of 32 megabytes because that just happens to be the limit of the peer -to -peer messages.

[537] Interesting.

[538] I didn't even know that part.

[539] Yeah, but then Satoshi back in 2010 was worried that even 32 -mabody blocks would be too hard to process.

[540] So he put the limit down to one megabyte.

[541] And, you know, I think the...

[542] By put, you mean, sneaked in there.

[543] Yeah, just like made an update to the Bitcoin software that made blocks bigger than one.

[544] I think it's a million bytes invalid.

[545] And I think the impression that most people had at the time is that, you know, this is just a temporary safety measure.

[546] And over time, you know, as we become more confident in the software, that limit would be and like raised somewhat.

[547] But then when the actual usage of the blockchain started going up and then it started going up, first to 100 kilobytes per block, then to 250 kilobytes per block, then to 500 kilobytes per block.

[548] There started kind of coming out of the woodworks, this opinion that, like, no, that limit should just not be increased.

[549] And, you know, then there are all of these attempts at compromising, right?

[550] You know, first there's like a proposal for 20 megabyte blocks.

[551] Then there was the 248 proposal, which is a bit ironic because the 248 proposal started off being like a small block negotiating position.

[552] But then when the big block people came back and said like, hey, aren't we going to do this?

[553] They're like, oh, no, no, no, no, we don't want the block size increases anymore.

[554] So, you know, there were these two different positions, right?

[555] The small blockers, I think they valued one megabyte blocks for two reasons.

[556] One is that they just like really, really believe in the importance of being able to read the chain.

[557] But two is that a lot of them really believe in maintaining this norm of never hard forking, right?

[558] So the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork is basically that in a soft fork, blocks that were, any block that's valid under the new rules was still valid under the old rules.

[559] So if you have a client that verifies according to the old rules, then you'll still be able to accept the chain that follows the new rules.

[560] Whereas with a hard fork, like you have to update your code in order to stay on the chain.

[561] And look, they have this belief that, you know, soft forks are kind of either less coercive than hard forks, which, by the way, I completely disagree with.

[562] I actually think soft forks are more coercive because, like, basically, they force everyone who disagrees to sort of go along by default.

[563] But, or they have this opinion that there's, like, it's more difficult to abuse soft forks to do really mean things, like, or that, like, you know, completely violate people's expectations, like increasing the supply, which is, like, you know, I think there is sumptuous to that.

[564] So because of, you know, these reasons, they just say, we're only going to do soft forks and we don't, we want to just not do any hard forks.

[565] And they eventually discovered this idea called segregated witness that allows for, like, a very tiny block size increase to, like, the equivalent of about two megabytes, um, with a soft fork.

[566] it's just a really like weird and devious trick like basically what they do is they take the signatures of transactions and then they put them outside of the block and then they add an extra rule that says that like every for a block to be valid the blog has to come with a separate like basically extension block that contains all of the transaction signatures right so you know when you measure it according to the old rules like you know hey it adds up to less than a million but actually there's this extension block that the old protocol it doesn't even know about.

[567] It's a hack that seemed to work to, in a small way, extend the size of the block side.

[568] So, you know, small block side was, like, happy with these very low levels of block size, and then the big block side wanted to expand to, you know, at the very least go to four megabytes and, you know, maybe go maybe 820.

[569] There's disagreements within there as well.

[570] I definitely was favoring the big side the whole way through, as you can probably tell.

[571] Even though, so the argument against, the big is that it makes things more centralized.

[572] Yes, because fewer people can run a note that verifies the chain and also because any of these things would require a hard fork and, you know, hard forks are inherently risky.

[573] Do you think there's truth to that?

[574] I'm pro -hard fork.

[575] I think hard forks are actually like in a, you know, political -economic sense, they're better than soft forks.

[576] Well, let's, okay, I think that's a beautiful principle as stated that's, soft forks may be more coercive than hard forks.

[577] This is not just about cryptocurrency.

[578] This is about politics and life.

[579] That's fascinating.

[580] So you're okay with hard forks.

[581] In fact, you think hard forks is the right way to make changes because then everybody's forced to make a decision.

[582] Do you accept this change or not as opposed to ideas being sneaked in behind the door and that decision is forced on you?

[583] Exactly.

[584] Yeah.

[585] Okay, so, but, you know, hard forks, some people say, this is when they talk about sort of Ethereum, is there some aspect to a hard fork where you're trying to upgrade a, what is it, airplane while it's flying.

[586] And I think soft forks are also upgrading an airplane while it's flying.

[587] But it's a smaller upgrades.

[588] That's, there's some truth to that.

[589] Like, there's definitely a bit more risk of like a split as a result of a hard fork than as a result.

[590] of a soft fork.

[591] And the split is highly undesirable, right?

[592] Well, it depends.

[593] Like, if it's a split because of a bug, then that's horrible.

[594] If it's a split as a result of political differences, then I think, like, a split is better than, you know, one side being forced to basically just, like, suck it up and accept the majority position, even if it really hates it.

[595] Well, there's also political connections throughout the history of the United States.

[596] It's, like, sometimes groups of people that strongly disagree with each other, should be forced to work it out even if they even when a split seems like an easy thing in the short term it depends and i think like well for blockchains in particular the costs of uh people being able to like peacefully do their go off and do their own thing or much lower right like you know okay if you have a country and you have two groups then uh like often enough like fighting out the new rules requires you know a civil war requires everyone to move and so forth but no on on a blockchain like you know, the costs are lower.

[597] And so if you were to look at the way things worked out with the block size wars, and there was a split, what is it, Bitcoin cash?

[598] And Bitcoin.

[599] Yeah.

[600] Would you, like you looking, putting on your historian hat, you mentioned offline, you liked Dan Carlin.

[601] So if Dan Carlin wanted to do an episode on the block size wars, do you think it could have turned out better?

[602] Or do you, are you okay with the way it turned out?

[603] I'm definitely disappointed with what happened with the big block side.

[604] I think the source of my disappointment is that, like, one of the things that you notice when just looking at like this political disagreements generally, especially when you have environments where, you know, they're authoritarian or like single party dominated.

[605] And then there's some opposition party.

[606] And the opposition often has like very legitimate grievances.

[607] But at the same time, the thing you notice is that often enough, the opposition just sucks, right?

[608] Like, it just doesn't have, you know, political capacity.

[609] It doesn't have, like, the ability to come up with policy because its entire culture is, like, designed around resisting much more.

[610] And then it's designed around, like, you know, actually debating serious policy tradeoffs.

[611] And I worry or I guess not so much worry because it's already happened.

[612] I, yeah, unfortunately think that Bitcoin Cash ended up being a victim of this.

[613] Right?

[614] Like, first, no, there was a split with Bitcoin cash.

[615] And then, of course, Craig Wright came in.

[616] And, you know, Craig Wright was this basically scammer who just keeps on pretending that he is Sissotian Akamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.

[617] Hey, Craig Wright's legal team, do you hear me?

[618] Yes.

[619] I still think your client is a scammer.

[620] So sue me. This is definitely going to be depth for a search because I got to ask you all, Craig.

[621] Because this people have been contacting me and I'm trying to figure out, like, what is up with this human being?

[622] So for people who don't know, there's somebody who is, let's start, there's Satoshi Nakamoto who is the creator of Bitcoin who's anonymous and actually most really big people in the cryptocurrency space do not, like yourself and others, do not dare claim that they are even for fun, Satoshi Nakamoto.

[623] In fact, if Satoshi Nakamoto is still alive and is like, if say you were a Satoshi Nakamoto, it seems like the thing he would do is probably, or she is trying to remain anonymous.

[624] On the flip side of that, there's a guy named Craig Wright who continually keeps claiming that he is in fact, Satoshi Nakamoto and keeps suing a lot of people.

[625] So on him, if we could just linger on him, what do you make of this character?

[626] What are we supposed to make of this character?

[627] Should he be ignored?

[628] Is there any possible truth to his claims?

[629] What do you make of him?

[630] The analogy that's at the top of my head will get a bit political, but that's fine.

[631] You've had Michael Malice.

[632] So I guess I view Craig Wright as being kind of like a Donald Trump figure in that he's not very intellectual, but I think he gets a big audience because he says things that like play to the resentments that people have and he says things that people want to hear.

[633] Like in the wake of this block size war, you know, the big walk.

[634] The big walk did feel very disenchanted.

[635] They felt that, you know, Bitcoin always had this vision that we were supposed to just keep increasing the block size, and Bitcoin is pure cash.

[636] It says so in the white paper.

[637] And then this elitist clique of core devs just like came in and said, you know, no, no, no, we're going to impose this totally different vision.

[638] And if you ever want your scalability, you'll have to wait for us to create this totally unproven fancy technology called the Lightning Network that works under a completely different principles.

[639] And, you know, they were very angry at this.

[640] And I mean, I think, like, I think a lot of that angry.

[641] is justified.

[642] But at the same time, you know, when people are in that mental state, like, it's very easy for you to just kind of, like, latch on.

[643] And if you find someone who expresses anger at the same things that you're angry at, and also, like, it seems like someone who's strong and seems like someone who, you know, might be good to rally around, it's very easy to just, like, get behind that.

[644] But that extra part about where he's Situci and Komara, I don't understand why that's necessary.

[645] I think that's, he could have done it without that, but that, I mean, that just, it's a marketing strategy.

[646] Like it sort of gives him more salience.

[647] Like, there's other big block personalities, right?

[648] Well, what's the difference between, with Greg, right?

[649] He's not just a big block personality.

[650] He's potentially Satoshi.

[651] And he did say all the big block things, right?

[652] Like, he talked about how, oh, the concept of a fee market is fundamentally, like, economically wrong.

[653] and it should be a free market and you should be able to have blocks as big as you want.

[654] He repeated all the talking points.

[655] And so a lot of people were kind of sucked into that, right?

[656] And so he unfortunately was able to basically dominate a big part of the Bitcoin Cash community for a long time.

[657] And then eventually, of course, you know, more and more people started to catch on.

[658] He would just say technical things that are completely wrong, right?

[659] Like one example of this that I remember.

[660] is that he mixed up the concept of 256 bits and two to the power of 256 bits, right?

[661] So, you know, the difference is, it's like the difference between, you know, 80 and the concept of 80 digit numbers, right?

[662] And because of this, like, he made this, made this argument that said that Bitcoin's elliptic curve is friendly to cryptographic pairings.

[663] Like, you don't have to understand what that is, but if you want to know, I have articles on both at Vitalik.

[664] But basically he made this technical argument that really hedged on this point.

[665] And then when people pressed him on it, it was like, yes, what, no, no, like, look, exactly.

[666] The height is like, what, two to the 256 bits.

[667] That's a very tiny amount of information.

[668] No, no, no, no, no. Two to the two, 56 bits is more than the amount of information in the universe.

[669] And, like, you know, equivocated and kind of like preyed on people's inability to understand that mathematical nuance.

[670] And I called him out.

[671] And eventually I even called him out in person at this conference in Seoul.

[672] Like I just stood up and asked the, you know, hey, you know, conference organizer, why are you letting this fraud speak at this conference?

[673] And I remember even some big blockers at the time getting angry at me. But, you know, eventually they did get rid of him.

[674] And then Craig, well, basically Craig Wright was forced to split off because the rest of the community refused to accept some network change that he wanted.

[675] And so then there was the BCH and BSP, and then in the Bitcoin Cash community, there was this drama of, are they going to add a developer fund where they redirects 12 .5 % of the revenue from the minors to the devs?

[676] And according to the Libertaria, not aggression principle, is this technically theft?

[677] Like, his understanding of the technical depths of cryptocurrency was lacking in a way that you, Satoshi Nakamoto, certainly would not.

[678] Yes, exactly.

[679] But the point is that even after Craig Wright got.

[680] expunged, the Bitcoin Cash community kept having these disagreements, right?

[681] And now after this development funds dispute, there was a further split between Bitcoin Cash and ABC.

[682] So, you know, the, the Bradwick Tree continues to extend, right?

[683] So in that way, it's disappointing to see those kinds of splitting.

[684] It was never resolved.

[685] It is.

[686] I would have definitely, like, wanted to see more of a, you kind of, like, principled coin with a, like, tries to be Bitcoin but follows consistent big block values.

[687] But I know, maybe I should just like stop expecting projects that I have no involvement in to care at all about what my values are.

[688] And, you know, like, maybe Ethereum just like is.

[689] I think you have a powerful voice and you can aspire other projects to do the, to live up to their best possible selves.

[690] Okay.

[691] So that's the level, that's the layer one approach.

[692] approach, the other layer one within the Ethereum is the idea of sharding.

[693] Yes.

[694] What the heck is sharding?

[695] Okay.

[696] What does the future of sharding look like?

[697] Right.

[698] So to summarize that big, long tangent that we just went in.

[699] It's a beautiful tangent by the way.

[700] It's a sort of basic tangent.

[701] And I think, like, crypto is just one of the most underrated aspects of crypto is, I think, how you can, like, analyze the, you know, the sociology and the politics and the anthropology.

[702] And, yeah, and I'm sure Dan Carlin would have fun exploring the space at some point.

[703] But the core trade -off, right, is that if you scale blockchains the dumb way, just by increasing the parameters, then eventually you just make it harder and harder to participate as a node, and you end up with a system where there's like 20 computers running the whole thing, and it's just very centralized.

[704] So sharding basically says, well, instead of just increasing the parameters, what we're going to do is we're going to change the blockchain architecture in such a way that each individual node in the blockchain only needs to store.

[705] a small portion of the data and only needs to process a small portion of the transactions.

[706] So you can think about it as being like inspired by BitTorrent, right?

[707] Like on BitTorrent, there's no such thing as a BitTorrent full node that has every movie, right?

[708] You know, the work is like split up among a huge number of computers.

[709] And like that makes sense.

[710] That's, you know, the only sane way to scale a system like that.

[711] And if they actually tried making a version of BitTorad that required full nodes that store every movie, then, you know, it would have like zero censorship resistance and it would just like like, you know, be dead in an instant.

[712] So the challenge with taking that model and applying it to blockchains, right, is that blockchains aren't just about, like, spreading data around.

[713] They're about agreeing on exactly what data was spread around and ensuring that everything that you agree on actually is correct.

[714] And so you have this paradox where, let's say, you want to have a system that supports 10 ,000 transactions a second, but each computer in the network can only personally verify 100 transactions, action the second.

[715] So how can each computer get a guarantee about the other 9 ,900 without actually going and verifying them themselves?

[716] And it turns out that there are some like a bundle of different tricks that can do that, right?

[717] So like one of them is just random sampling.

[718] So the idea behind random sampling is like let's say for simplicity, this is a proof of stake chain and you have 10 ,000 validators.

[719] validators are like, you know, the stakers.

[720] And like for simplicity, we'll assume they all have the same number of coins, right?

[721] If someone has more coins, we'll just kind of split them up and pretends they're 10 stakers.

[722] Then you use, you do like some random shuffling and you basically say, these random 100 validators are assigned to validate this block.

[723] These random 100 validators are assigned to validate this block.

[724] These random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block.

[725] And so each individual computer only gets assigned to validate like a small piece.

[726] But then the way that the information about what's valid gets passed around, right, is that when these hundred participants validate a block, they all sign a message basically saying, like, yes, we agree that this block is valid.

[727] And then, like, they combine that signature into one, and then they broadcast that signature.

[728] And then everyone else, instead of verifying the blocks directly, just verifies that signature, right?

[729] And so if I see the signature, I'm not directly convinced that that block is valid, but what I am convinced of is that out of, I would of this committee of, or this randomly selected group of 100 validators, let's say at least 70 of them agree that this block is valid.

[730] And so if I trust that the majority of these participants are all honest, then because it's all randomly selected, you know, the attacker can't just like force themselves into one committee.

[731] And so, you know, the attacker is going to be even at least spread out too.

[732] And so if, you know, the entire set of validators is mostly honest, every committee is going to be mostly honest, and so, like, bad blocks are not going to go through, right?

[733] So that's, like, one simple form of sharding.

[734] There's also other more clever things that you can do.

[735] So, for example, there's this concept of ZK.

[736] Snarks, right?

[737] I'll call it as zero knowledge proofs.

[738] So this is the idea that you can make a cryptographic proof that says, I verified, or I ran some complex computation on this piece of data, and I got this answer.

[739] And so, if you make these kinds of proofs, then, like, if you see a ZK.

[740] Snark that says some block is valid, then you're convinced that that block is valid.

[741] And even if, you know, everyone in that committee is evil, like, they have no way of making a valid proof for a bad block, right?

[742] Like, because the proof itself, like, it is a proof that you did the computation, where that proof is much easier to verify than just running the computation yourself.

[743] And, you know, the, there's, once again, you know, super awesome mathematical, cryptographic magic behind making ZK.

[744] Snark's work.

[745] So it gives you a little bit of a leg up over the 51 % honest assumption.

[746] So it's a little hack that improves upon the random sampling thing.

[747] Exactly.

[748] And like there's other hacks, right?

[749] Like there is another hack called data availability sampling that allows you to make sure that the data in the blocks was actually published.

[750] But like basically, like if you stack a couple of these tricks on top of each other, you can create a system where like I as an individual participant can be convinced that everything that's going on in this distributed blockchain thing is correct without actually personally checking more than like a percent of it so that's sharding that's sharding but but the as i understand maybe correct me on this is uh in the space of ethereum the sharding happens on some fixed number like the the split is on some fixed number i think it's 64 is the currently sort proposed number.

[751] So how does that help scaling?

[752] Is it just a fixed constant scaling by 64?

[753] And is that a way to achieve those crazy, the crazy amount of scaling that seems to be required to use cryptocurrency for purchasing?

[754] So doing like competing with credit cards and visa and so on.

[755] Right.

[756] So first I think like the 64 can be hard forked up over time.

[757] So we have said it so that like there's theoretically space in the data structure for 1 ,024 shards.

[758] It's just that 64 of them are turned on.

[759] There are challenges with having more shards because you have to have logic that just checks and manages all of those shards.

[760] And if there's too many of them, then that becomes too expensive.

[761] But even still, you can improve quite a bit.

[762] And then the other thing that we're doing is if we're getting maximum scalability by combining roll -ups and sharding.

[763] So this might be a good time to talk about roll -ups.

[764] What are roll -ups?

[765] Okay.

[766] Now we're moving into layer two ideas.

[767] Yes.

[768] So the idea behind a roll -up is basically that, so instead of just publishing transactions directly on chain and having everyone, you know, do all of the checking of those transactions, what you do is you create a system where users send their transactions to some part, like a central party called an aggregator.

[769] And, like, well, theoretically, you can have a system where, like, the aggregator switches around or anyone can be an aggregator.

[770] So, you know, it's still, like, permissionless to send things.

[771] Then what the aggregator does is they strip out all of the transaction data that, like, is not relevant to helping people update the state.

[772] So when I say the state, this is like, this is a very important kind of technicals around from blockchains.

[773] I mean, like, account balances, code, like, things that are, like, memory, internal memory of smart contracts.

[774] Like, basically everything the blockchain actually has to keep track of and remember, right?

[775] So you just put in that, you take all these transactions, strip out all the data that's not relevant to telling people how to update the state.

[776] And then you take the data that's needed to update the state, and then you're, like, really compress it, right?

[777] So, like, for example, if we say, you know, I, Vitalik have an account that's 0x, AB58, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's 20 bytes.

[778] Well, instead we can say, well, I have an account that is number 187442 in the tree, right?

[779] And that goes down from 20 bytes to just like an index in a position, which is three bytes, right?

[780] So you use all sorts of these fancy compression tricks, and you basically just, instead of publishing all these transactions, you publish this tiny compressed blob, right?

[781] So the amount of data that goes on chain goes down by maybe about a factor of 10, right?

[782] And then the second thing is that you don't do the computation on chain.

[783] Instead, you do the computation off chain, and there's one of two ways to do this, right?

[784] One is called a ZK roll -up, which is you just provide a ZK snark that basically says, hey, look, I did this computation, and I have this proof that here's some hash of the result, and it's correct.

[785] And then you stick it on chain, and everyone verifies this one proof instead of verifying all these transactions.

[786] And then the other approach is called an optimistic roll -up, which is basically made of the scheme where, like, first someone says, like, hey, this is what I think the result of applying these transactions is.

[787] And then someone else can say, I disagree.

[788] The result is different.

[789] And only if two people disagree, do you actually do it on, do you actually just like publish all of the data and run that whole blog on chain?

[790] So if there's disagreements, then you just like run everything on chain and whoever was wrong, like, loses a lot of of money.

[791] So disagreements are very rare and they're very expensive.

[792] And in a ZK roll -up, you don't even rely on this challenging game at all.

[793] You just rely on a proof.

[794] So, you know, the core principle is basically that instead of lots of transactions and all the trends, everyone verifies every transaction, it is you take the transactions, you strip them down and compress them as much as possible, then stick that on the blockchain.

[795] You do need to stick something on the blockchain just so that everyone else can like keep up to date with a state.

[796] so they know what all the contracts are, what all the balances are and all of this.

[797] But it's a very small amount of data.

[798] And then you use one of these other off -chain games, you know, could be this optimistic game, could be a ZK Snark, to just prove that somebody out there did the computation and the result is correct.

[799] So you're pushing like 90 % of the work off -chain, and then, you know, well, 90 % of the data and 90 % of the computation off -chain, and then you still have 10 % of the data and 1 % of the computation on -chain.

[800] And so, you know, your scalability goes up by a factor of about 100.

[801] So these systems are already alive for some applications, right?

[802] So there's something called loopering, which is just a ZK roll -up for payments, right?

[803] So you can have, you know, assets inside of the loopering system, and you can go around and transfer them, but what you, and you get, like, much lower transaction fees, right?

[804] Like, instead of $5, you'd have to pay, like, less than $0 .5.

[805] But the only problem is that this only supports a couple of applications right now.

[806] Like making one that supports anything that you can do on Ethereum just takes a bit more work.

[807] But that's being done as well, right?

[808] So, like, within a few months, I'm expecting, you know, fully Ethereum capable roll -ups to be available as well.

[809] So then it's a roll -ups.

[810] Just summarizing, you know, do most of the work off chain, put only a little bit on -chain, factor of 100 scaling, sharding, another factor of 100 scaling.

[811] 100 times 100 factor of 10 ,000, you know, hundreds of thousands of transactions a second and, like, you know, there's your scalability.

[812] Okay, so you achieve scalability.

[813] You can do a large number of transactions very quickly and the cost of doing those transactions are much lower.

[814] You wrote that in the long term, ZK roll -ups are going to win in terms of layer two technology.

[815] Specifically, you wrote, in general, my own view is that in the short -term, optimistic roll -ups, as you were saying, are likely to win out of general purpose, VM computation and ZK roll -ups are likely to win out for simple payments, exchange and other application -specific use cases, just as you were saying.

[816] But in the medium to long -term, ZK roll -ups will win out in all use cases as ZK SNARC technology improves.

[817] Why do you think ZK roll -ups are going to win the big -picture battle over layer two technologies?

[818] So I think ZK roll -ups, like once you accept that the technology works, are just like conceptually simpler and they have nicer properties.

[819] The reason is that they do not have this concept of a challenge game, right?

[820] Like, as I mentioned, in an optimistic roll -up, the way that you ensure that the results are correct is that you let one person submit.

[821] And like, they just submit with no proof.

[822] They just say, here's what I think the result is.

[823] And then if someone else disagrees, they make their own submission.

[824] And then if you have two disagreeing submissions, then you actually publish a. it on chain and you see who's right.

[825] But for this to work, like, you need to actually wait for someone to disagree, right?

[826] So, like, for example, if I have an asset inside of an optimistic roll -up and I wants to withdraw it, then I actually have to wait a week to withdraw it because, like, if the block that contains my withdrawal turned out to be invalid, then there needs to be space for someone to disagree with it, right?

[827] Whereas with a ZK roll -up, like, you don't need time for disagree because you just have a proof, right?

[828] As soon as a block is submitted, there's a proof and you know it's correct.

[829] So if disagreements, especially in the long -term or sparse, then you don't want to do the optimistic, the game theoretic thing.

[830] You want to do the ZKSark.

[831] Right.

[832] The ZK stuff is just, like, you can win the ZK roll -up, you can withdraw immediately.

[833] You don't have to, like, worry about the economics of proving as much.

[834] There's just, like, fewer issues.

[835] The reason why ZK.

[836] Roll -ups are not winning everywhere today is because, you know, ZK.

[837] Darks is still a crazy new technology, right?

[838] Like, this is something that 10 years ago, you know, it existed only in theory and there was not in practice.

[839] Then, you know, eight years ago, people were just getting excited about it in Bitcoin conferences for the first time.

[840] Like four years, starting four years ago or three and a half years ago, even, that was the first time you were able to make any Zikas Narc based anything on Ethereum.

[841] And then people started making them.

[842] And ZK technology has only really become efficient enough to do a lot of things.

[843] within the past maybe one and a half years.

[844] So it's new technology, it's crazy technology, it's admittedly scary technology.

[845] If you want to learn more, I also have an article about this on Vitalik .com.

[846] It's actually really, really good.

[847] Most of your writing, it goes, it's technical, but it's accessible.

[848] I would highly, highly recommend to check out Vitalik's articles and blogs, whatever you call them.

[849] It's brilliant summary of the work.

[850] Actually, Ethereum documentation period is really good.

[851] I think that's somewhat crowdsourced.

[852] That documentation is really, really accessible and brilliant.

[853] But let me ask about sort of other approaches to layer two, like side chain.

[854] So the one popular one is Polygon.

[855] What are your thoughts about Polygon, which is Layer 2 network?

[856] Is it positive?

[857] Is it negative for Ethereum?

[858] Is it both?

[859] Does it have a future, which is its own chain, but it's using Ethereum, it's like based on Ethereum, essentially.

[860] Or maybe you can describe what it is.

[861] So I think there's a really big and important difference in security models between roll -ups inside chains, which is basically that roll -ups inherit from the security of Ethereum, right?

[862] So, like, if I have coins inside of loopering or optimism or arbitram or ZK Sync, then even if, even If everyone else in the world who is participating in these ecosystems hates me and wants to steal my money, I can still personally make sure that, you know, no matter what happens, I get my money out.

[863] It might be a bit expensive for me to get my money out and I have to do transactions like on the main chain, but I'll be able to do it.

[864] Whereas in Polygon, which is a side chain, and so instead of being secured by Ethereum, it's also in part secured by its own proof of state consensus with its own token.

[865] so if 70 % of the whole or even 51 % of the holders of Polygon tokens wanted to take my money in Polygon they can right so that's the and like to be fair like there aren't even like the the supply I don't think is even that widely distributed right so like potentially you could you could this idea 51 % of the token holders come in together and stealing everything like it's it's not impossible right where does this scaling of Polygon come from?

[866] Why is it able to process much more transactions than the Ethereum main chain?

[867] What's the idea there?

[868] I think in part, I imagine, I'm not sure exactly what its capacity level is, but I imagine it has a higher capacity because it's a bit more willing to take centralization tradeoffs.

[869] And then another thing is that if the Ethereum ecosystem, like, even if it did not do that, right, if you think about an Ethereum ecosystem hypothetically scaling with side chains, then, you know, you would have 100 copies of Polygon.

[870] And, you know, they would each have their own tokens.

[871] They would each have their own chains.

[872] And so even if each one of those chains was only as scalable as Ethereum, you know, you could still, like the total sum of them would still be 100 times more than Ethereum.

[873] Okay.

[874] The thing that I want to say in Polygons favor, just to be very inferior to them.

[875] I like this.

[876] I really, you know, I definitely really, you know, respect the work that they're doing.

[877] So, you know, start with the, a bit with.

[878] that word of not criticism caution, right?

[879] It's that they made this kind of deliberate trade -off for very pragmatic reasons, which is that the Ethereum ecosystem needs to scale now.

[880] And there are applications that want to do something now.

[881] And, you know, if there aren't Ethereum -friendly options for them, then, like, they're not going to just wait peacefully and do nothing for 12 months.

[882] They're going to go to, you know, either Binance smart chain or, you know, one of some other system or potentially something that just has totally no alignment with Ethereum values whatsoever.

[883] But whereas with Polygon, like, the best thing that you can say in Polygon's favor and against optimism is that optimism is not live and Polygon is live, right?

[884] Like, it just takes more work to create a system that has these extra roll -up security features.

[885] And so Polygon just said, we're going to be the system that makes their pragmatic trade -off.

[886] We're going to go, you know, functionality first, and then, you know, we can talk about adding back the security later.

[887] So I've talked to them, and, like, in principle, I think they're very, you know, open to the idea of, like, adding more security and, like, becoming more, uh, becoming a rollup or at least, you know, adding a polygon chain, let's say roll up at some points in the future, which is definitely something I think they, yeah, you know, absolutely should follow through one.

[888] But, like, the fact that, like, they exist now and so, you know, applications can kind of bootstrap now on a chain that, you know, even though its security isn't perfect, at least it exists and people can go use it.

[889] And then over time, you know, the chain matures as the applications mature.

[890] I think of a very reasonable strategy.

[891] And I'm definitely, you know, really happy that they're part of the ecosystem.

[892] Yeah, it's kind of interesting.

[893] The history of cryptocurrency has this tension of really good ideas that are hard to implement, so they take longer to implement, and ideas that are not as good, but are faster to implement.

[894] This is like the story of like, you have like JavaScript that basically took over the world because it was quick to implement within 10 days, and then like later kept fixing itself.

[895] I don't know what to make of that.

[896] Sort of from the engineering perspective, I'm more and more becoming comfortable in accepting the fact that our whole world will run a technology that's not as good as it could have been, just because the crappy solution is faster to implement and it sticks.

[897] What do you make of that tension?

[898] I think the compromise that we've been taking within Ethereum is like when we have to take the crappy solution, we look for crappy solutions that are forward compatible with becoming good over time, right?

[899] Like when you build the quick and dirty thing.

[900] You would still already have ideas in your head about, you know, what the more complete thing with all the security features added on would look like, right?

[901] Even if it requires a hard fork?

[902] Yes.

[903] Like even so, you know, like for example, we're sharding, right?

[904] Like, I think it's likely that the first version of shardy that comes out, like is not going to have, you know, ZK snarks and data availability sampling, for example.

[905] But we know what these technologies are.

[906] We feel like we, you know, have wrapped our heads around them.

[907] And so we know how to build a system where we can put all the pieces in place so that it becomes very easy to bolt those components on in the future.

[908] So, like, if you do things that way, right, then at the beginning, you can have your system that has the functionality but, say, has less security or, like, less sustainability or less of something else.

[909] But then over time, like, it's designed in such a way that it has this easy on ramp to adding those things.

[910] And if you don't think explicitly about being future compatible, then you do often end up with a quick and dirty solution that backs you into a corner.

[911] And there are definitely cases where I think the Ethereum ecosystem has suffered from that and we have had to like expend pretty significant effort on, for example, removing features that we didn't realize that we actually can't sustain.

[912] Like one big example is just increasing the gas costs.

[913] So making some operations more expensive because they should be expensive because they actually take a lot of time in the process.

[914] So that's making something's more expensive, kind of like taking some functionality away.

[915] So if you can be cognizant of where you're likely going into the future, and if you don't know, like even be cognizant of both the most likely paths that you'll take in the future, and coming, like, thinking about your roadmap and coming up with a roadmap where you know that if you want to.

[916] to do either of those things, then you have a clean path toward it.

[917] That's probably the best, a kind of practical way to get the best of worth worlds that we have.

[918] Okay, let's talk about this wonderful process of merging.

[919] Okay, so there's the main net, which is the Ethereum 1 .0 chain, or the, what should we say, the chain that uses proof of work as a consensus mechanism.

[920] and then there is what is it called the beacon chain that uses the the proof of stake mechanism and I believe the beacon has been deployed successfully is working so that was in December 2020 there's a bunch of questions around that that's fascinating as well but I think the most fascinating question is about merging those two when do the two chains, one that's proof of work, one that's proof of stake, merge.

[921] And what are the most difficult parts of this process?

[922] Right.

[923] So as you've said, right, the way that we have set up this proof of stake transition is that at first, the proof of stake chain just launches on its own, right?

[924] And this is the thing that happened in December.

[925] And the proof of stake chain has been running for close to six months now.

[926] I mean, by the time people watch, this, it might actually be six months.

[927] But it isn't actually coming to consensus on anything except for itself, right?

[928] So the idea behind that is to just give the proof of stake chain time to mature, time for people to build the ecosystem around it, time to make sure that there aren't any bugs, and just like prove to the community that no, proof of stake actually is real.

[929] And a full transition is realistic because, you know, the thing that you're transitioning to already exist and already works.

[930] And then at some points in the future, you have this event called the merge where you basically take the activity that's being done inside of the proof of work chain and you actually move it over into the proof of stake chain so you get rid of the proof of work side completely.

[931] So the way that the merge will work is, it's definitely gone through a few different iterations.

[932] Like the earlier versions of this actually required more work for users and more work for clients.

[933] It was much more like, oh, there's this new chain, there's this old chain, and then everyone has to, like, migrate from the old chain to the new chain, and then at some point, we'll forget about the old chain.

[934] The new version is designed to be much more seamless for users, right?

[935] So basically, what actually happens is that the old chain basically becomes embedded inside the new chain, right?

[936] So starting from the merge transition block, every proof of stake chain block is going to contain a block of the, what we consider now to be the Ethereum chain today, but we'll call it the execution chain.

[937] And then at the same time, to create one of these blocks, you're not going to need proof of work anymore, right?

[938] So basically, at the same time, you would both get rid of the proof of work requirements for one of these blocks to be valid, but instead you require these blocks to be embedded inside of the proof of stake blocks, right?

[939] So you basically have like a chain inside a chain.

[940] And this is, you know, from an architecture perspective, it's, you know, you might think it's a little bit suboptimal, but it actually has some nice properties and makes it easier to kind of think about the consensus and think about the, what we call the execution layer, like transactions and contracts kind of separately and upgrade them separately.

[941] And it also just means that the upgrade process is extremely seamless, right?

[942] Because from the point of view of a client that's following the chain, you basically have to update nothing, right?

[943] You're still following the same chain and follows the same rules, except instead of checking proof of work, you'll switch to checking that these blocks are embedded inside of blocks of the proof stage.

[944] So there'll be this merge block that will mark this transition.

[945] And over time, I guess, the new chain will contain the full record of all the transactions that's ever happened on the previous chain, on the old chain.

[946] So maybe I'm asking a dumb question here, but in this process, is the new chain going to have all the information of the past transactions.

[947] The new chain is not going to hold information from what happened in the Ethereum chain before the merge, right?

[948] So like Ethereum clients that people are going to use like around the time of the merge and soon after the merge, they're probably just going to sink and check the proof of work chain up to the merge and then they're going to check the proof of stake chain.

[949] But at some points in the future, I think people will just stop bothering checking.

[950] the proof of work before the merge.

[951] Got it.

[952] So that old history information is not important for the future, like if you're operating actively on the new chain, that history is not important to you?

[953] It's not important.

[954] So it's not strictly important for just like in any smart contract or just like applications that run on the blockchain.

[955] It can be importance to users, and it can be important for some applications.

[956] but we're basically saying that maintaining and serving that is not going to be simultaneously the responsibility of every Ethereum node if you want that information, there can be separate protocols for backing it up.

[957] And like these other protocols actually exist, right?

[958] Like there's something called the graph, which is doing some history of retrieval.

[959] Potentially, you can just take that entire chain and stick it on BitTorrent.

[960] There's lots of ways to archive it and create kind of customized search protocols for it.

[961] So what's your sense?

[962] why, so there's a Python 2 and Python 3, and it took 4 ever for people to switch.

[963] What's your sense why this merge has been taking longer than perhaps was expected?

[964] I think the biggest reason is just, you know, we've been underestimating the technical complexity.

[965] There's a lot of technical complexity in making a successful proof of stake chain.

[966] There's a lot of technical complexity in actually figuring out the transition process.

[967] There's so that's bigger than social complexity so the technical complexity you would say is the bigger reason for any delays than the social complexity i actually think so i think we've been very fortunate to not have too much social complexity around the merge so not much drama no um i think the the biggest part of the reason is just because we have been talking about proof of stake and charting as being part of the road map since um almost the very beginning of the project right like the very first proof -of -stake blog post from January 2014, which was, you know, two months after the project started and like maybe even a day after the announcement.

[968] So, you know, it was proof of stake was not something that we kind of put on anybody by surprise.

[969] And then when the Dow fork happened and, you know, the people on the ETC side split off, I think it also just happens that a lot of the people that were not willing to stomach the Dow fork and then join the ETC side, they were were the more Bitcoin -y types, and the more Bitcoin -y types do also tends to like Proof -Work more.

[970] And so, like, that also sort of ended up, you know, sort of purifying the communities on both sides, I guess.

[971] So Ethereum Classic is not switching to Proof -Stake, and, you know, they're happy with their setup.

[972] And by the time that, you know, it came to the beacon chain launching and now, I think the community is very strongly in favor of the Proof -Stake switch.

[973] But let me ask the question that no engineer wants to hear, which is the question of timeline.

[974] When do you think the merge will happen?

[975] Do you have a sense it might happen this year?

[976] Do you have a sense it might be pushed towards next year, 2022, or even beyond?

[977] I think early 2022 is the most realistic.

[978] There's definitely still an optimistic case of it happening this year, but the realistic thing to count on is definitely the early part of a very early part of next year.

[979] Is there specific things that stand out to you that are like, they'll make you feel good about progress if you see it happening?

[980] So the thing that we had last month is that we had this online hackathon called Rayanism, where basically a bunch of, the different client developers that are going to be part of the transition, like, hacks together some test nets of the post -merge Ethereum chain.

[981] So these were only test nets of what would happen after the merge.

[982] There were not test -nets of the transition itself.

[983] So the thing that people are working on now, actually, is the transition.

[984] So having a full specification of both the transition and post -transition.

[985] I mean, we have specifications now, but, like, realistically, they'll probably needs to have a couple of changes and have things that continue to be ironed out.

[986] And then have a test net that does both the transition and the post -transition.

[987] And then, like, once you have a test network, then you just have to do a lot of testing and audit it.

[988] And then, you know, do some runs on not just a specialized test network, but on, say, an existing test network like Robson or Rinkaby that Ethereum people already significantly used.

[989] And if it works, then you can deploy the transition on Mainnet.

[990] Just as a quick comment, because this is fascinating.

[991] In August of last year, there was this Madala.

[992] I believe it's pronounced Medasha.

[993] It's a South American subway station.

[994] I forget where.

[995] But spelled the two Ls.

[996] Yeah, yeah, because that's how Spanish works, right?

[997] Like the two Ls have...

[998] Madasha.

[999] Yeah.

[1000] Okay, cool.

[1001] Anyway, but I read about it.

[1002] in middle of August, August 14th, there was an incident on that test net.

[1003] How does this process work?

[1004] Like, what do you learn from those kinds of incidents when stuff goes wrong in the test process?

[1005] I think that incident was that there was a consensus failure of some kind, as I remember.

[1006] Basically, just different clients interpreting things in different ways, and then one of them getting kicked off the network.

[1007] And then it ended up taking a while to actually, like, get everyone to get back online.

[1008] Like, a big part of the reason why it took weeks to resolve, right?

[1009] Is because it's on a test network, like, the coins are valueless.

[1010] And so there's not really this big push of any kind for people to actually, you know, go and download the new clients so they can start participating again.

[1011] And so, you know, it definitely took a while until the chain started finalizing again.

[1012] But, and then also, like, there was, I think, another round of just not finalizing in October.

[1013] as I remember.

[1014] There were definitely things that we learned.

[1015] There were a lot of things, especially, that client developers just learned about optimization and how to build their clients in a way they can process things efficiently.

[1016] There's a lot that we learned from just seeing the full life cycle of what happens when more than a third of the validators go offline and then finalization stops.

[1017] And then that kind of weird, unusual state of the chain continues for a while and then eventually everyone who is not participating just gets enough of their stake.

[1018] We don't use the word slash, we use the word leaked for this, but basically also burned until the people who are participating go back up to two thirds and then the chain goes back to finalizing.

[1019] So just seeing all of those edge cases play out live, I think actually helped a lot and probably helped to really contribute to making us feel better about Mainnet.

[1020] I mean, there's also an incident just recently, and April 24th of 2021, where this was on Beacon, I guess, that was a bug discovered in the software client Prism that prevented roughly 70 % of validators on the network from producing blocks.

[1021] I mean, maybe you can comment on what happened, but broadly, like the big picture, what kind of stuff are you worried about in terms of problems that might arise?

[1022] We're talking about small bugs?

[1023] Are we talking about like emergent, social, unexpected social bugs?

[1024] You know, what are the things that worry about the future of Ethereum that you want to make sure you construct mechanisms that prevent those things from happening?

[1025] So one of the lucky things there was that this particular bug only prevented proposed also of blocks.

[1026] It did not prevent attestations.

[1027] So attestations is just a mechanism for voting on blocks.

[1028] And it's the attestations that are actually responsible for the chain finalizing, so like coming to this more permanent agreements on blocks, right?

[1029] So the chain was actually quite stable all the way through.

[1030] I think the thing that we generally learn from these experiences is just how valuable it is to have this multi -client network.

[1031] So this is one of these areas where I think Ethereum distinguishes itself from like Bitcoin, for example, right, that in Ethereum, we don't have one single client that everyone just runs, right?

[1032] There's multiple implementations of the protocol.

[1033] And these multiple implementations, they all process and verify the blocks that each other can verify, right?

[1034] So they all speak the same language.

[1035] Now, sometimes when there's a bug, they disagree.

[1036] And when two clients disagree because of a bug, we call this a consensus failure.

[1037] And consensus failures are pretty serious, right?

[1038] And when you have a client monoculture like Bitcoin does, then it's more rare to have consensus failures.

[1039] There, you still have them, actually.

[1040] Bitcoin had a consensus failure between two different versions of the same client back in 2013.

[1041] But they're less likely to happen.

[1042] But the interesting thing is that the multi -client architecture has actually, I think, saved Ethereum much more than it's heard it.

[1043] So even in this most recent incident, right, like Prism was not produced.

[1044] blocks, but all the other clients were still producing blocks.

[1045] There's four others, right?

[1046] Yes, it's Prism, Nimbus, Teku, and the Lighthouse.

[1047] And then also, Ethereum back in 2016 had this fun events that we call the Shanghai DOS attacks.

[1048] They're called that because the attacks started right on the first day of our annual conference, DefCon, that happens to be in Shanghai that year.

[1049] So what happens, like basically was that someone.

[1050] came up with a way to create blocks that were very slow for one clients to process, but not the other client.

[1051] So at that time, there were basically two Ethereum clients.

[1052] They were called Geith and Parity.

[1053] Right now, I think the top three ones are Geith, Nethermind, and Bezu.

[1054] But what happened as a result of us having two clients is that the attacker was just not able to come up with blocks that both clients were completely failing at processing.

[1055] And so, like, a lot of the miners and a lot of network participants, they just kept on switching between the two implementations, depending on which one worked.

[1056] And that actually really helped the chain, the chain, I kind of survived through that month of attacks as the attacker just, like, kept on hammering at our system and identifying all of the weaknesses and just, like, forcing our clients to do this, you know, rapid sprint of just, like, optimizing the hell out of everything and make sure.

[1057] there aren't any of those DOS blocks or DOS bugs remaining.

[1058] So that was another example.

[1059] And then like as a counter example, so like something that also shows the point from the other side, Bitcoin had this bug in 2010, right?

[1060] The balance overflow bug.

[1061] Basically, someone created a transaction that had two outputs.

[1062] And those outputs had, were both of a few billion Bitcoin.

[1063] So like about two to the power of 63 Satoshi's.

[1064] And then if you add those numbers together, you go above to the power of 64.

[1065] And, of course, you know, computers, like, once you go above to the power of 64, you wrap around.

[1066] And so the Bitcoin nodes thought that there was enough money to pay for the transaction because it was asking for, let's say, like, a billion, Satoshes or something.

[1067] But actually, it was asking for to the power of 64 plus a billion.

[1068] And so, you know, the attacker just managed to create, like, billions of Bitcoin out of thin air.

[1069] And this was not only discovered and fixed after something like 12 hours, but if there had been, if Bitcoin had been a multiple implementation system, then, but what if almost certainly happened is like one of the clients would have bugged out, but the other clients would have probably, you know, actually had a check for that, right?

[1070] And so there would have been a consensus failure, but at least that would have, like, alerted everyone that there is a problem.

[1071] very quickly, and it also would have given everyone just, like, obvious social permission to go and, you know, pick whichever one of the chains is correct and solve the problem.

[1072] So, like, that's, I think, a big learning that we've had from multiple of our experiences in the Ethereum ecosystem, just, like, validating this multi -client model.

[1073] And, like, to be fair, it's a model that we get criticized for a lot, right?

[1074] Like, Bitcoin people talk about, you know, the risk of consensus failures that this creates.

[1075] VC types are like, well, you know, isn't it expensive and wasteful to funds through software teams or you could just be making, you know, one quote focused effort?

[1076] You know, they love the word focused.

[1077] And like, you know, Ethereum is not that, but it's amazing despite not being that.

[1078] Yeah.

[1079] The basically, yeah, so that was interesting.

[1080] And then there have definitely been other learnings as well just from like seeing the chain alive and seeing what actually is the staking experience like what are the actual incentives for all the different participants so I definitely feel like we're gaining a lot from this sort of one year of trial running the chain before we actually make all of Ethereum depend on it let me ask perhaps a strange question but proponents of Bitcoin will say things like Bitcoin fixes everything so why do we need Ethereum versus like Bitcoin plus Lightning Network for scalability and then using Bitcoin with its proof of work for security.

[1081] So in this kind of, it is perhaps sort of a strange question, but it's a high level question.

[1082] Why do we need another technology?

[1083] Yes, it has a bunch of nice features, but like doesn't Bitcoin fix everything already?

[1084] So the thing that I always attracted me about Bitcoin is, you know, these values of, you know, decentralization, creating these open provisional systems that anyone can participate in and that aren't just going to flop over and die if whoever created them gets bored and, like, you know, that are resisted to, like, whoever runs them breaking the rules and all of these things, right?

[1085] And I think that pretty strongly that these principles are, like, really valid and importance to much more things than just money, right?

[1086] Like, Bitcoin is the blockchain for money and Ethereum is built from the start.

[1087] as a general purpose blockchain, right?

[1088] It's, you know, there is ether the asset on Ethereum, but then you can also make, you know, decentralized financial things, what we call defy today.

[1089] You know, you can make like ENS, the decentralized domain name system.

[1090] You can put, make prediction markets on it.

[1091] You can make totally non -financial systems that just, like, keep track of whether or not some certificate was signed or whether or not some, like, cryptographic key got revoked.

[1092] there's this big long list of just interesting things that you could use about blockchains to do, right?

[1093] Like basically, they are sort of the missing piece that we are without them, the kinds of things that a decentralized computer network can do is very limited.

[1094] And once you have them, you know, a lot of those limitations end up going away.

[1095] And so Ethereum was like always from the beginning about that, right?

[1096] It's about like, hey, this isn't just money.

[1097] There's so much more that you could do if you could just go ahead and make any infrastructure or, you know, digital institution or Dow or whatever you want to call it, where you, the kind of the base layer of the logic is just executed in this open and transparent way where everyone can see what's going on or, you know, if you like your zero knowledge proofs, at least everyone can see proofs that prove to you that what's going on follows the rules.

[1098] And, you know, you don't need to just constantly keep trusting centralized actors.

[1099] And hence the smart contracts as being a sort of a core technology as part of Ethereum.

[1100] Yes, exactly.

[1101] Smart contracts, the computer programs that are running on Ethereum, they are like the core of what makes Ethereum general purpose.

[1102] So I think like I do think that, you know, there's a lot more that wrong with the world than just money, right?

[1103] Like I'm not one of these people who thinks that, you know, if you get rid of fiat currency and you replace it with cryptocurrency and then suddenly wars are going to go away.

[1104] Right, because, like, first of all, you know, like, San Yoraj revenue is only a small portion of government revenue, right?

[1105] It's like, what, 5, 10 percent, something like that.

[1106] Second of all, like, if you are the sort of, this is one of the things I don't even get about their philosophy.

[1107] Like, let's say you're the sort of person who is a, like, in extreme and very distrusting libertarian, and you think that these governments are terrible, right?

[1108] Like, we know today that governments find a combination of, you know, things like welfare and things like, you know, the military that, you know, goes and, like, bombs people in Afghanistan, right?

[1109] And so the question you have to ask is, like, okay, you with your new, you know, magic newfangled's cyber currency that takes over the world, take away the government's ability to have senior as revenue.

[1110] And so you reduce the government's revenue by 10%.

[1111] If the government is that evil, which portion of its expenses is it going to take that 10 % from?

[1112] Is it going to stop the bombing people in Afghanistan or is it going to cut welfare?

[1113] If you think it's the first, you have a very optimistic view of the government.

[1114] So that's, I guess, my perspective on like why the whole, you know, we're going to save the world and create peace by, like, denying governments the right to stealth taxation kind of perspective.

[1115] doesn't really make much sense for me. I do think that there is real value that comes from a decentralized and open currency.

[1116] Just the fact that there is a financial infrastructure that anyone in the world can go ahead and use, right?

[1117] Like, it's, that's something that can easily be a big moon for people, right?

[1118] There's a lot of places where the currency is much less stable than the dollar.

[1119] And, you know, these people, like, they don't, well, if they use big, Bitcoin, their only option is to get Bitcoins, which are also pretty volatile.

[1120] If they use Ethereum, then they can get ether, but then they can also get stable coins, right?

[1121] And you might think that, you know, oh, you're not being ideologically pure.

[1122] Now you're giving them stable coins, which are mirroring dollars, and obviously dollars are going to collapse too.

[1123] But the reality is that dollars are vastly more stable than the Venezuelan Bolivar.

[1124] So, like, there are really meaningful and beneficial things that you can give to people by having a global and open financial system.

[1125] But I think if you want to actually do that, like you have to have much more than just a currency, right?

[1126] And then if you want to go beyond financial things, then, you know, I have to obviously have much more than a currency.

[1127] And then, you know, you also have to actually take scalability seriously because the non -financial applications, like nobody's going to pay $5 a transaction for them.

[1128] can we return to dogs sure no no no no no no no the other ones categorically forbidden is there any cryptocurrency based on cats actually i think there are like was there was cat coin there was nan coin for some reason they just didn't catch on as much as the dog coins did okay so let's talk about Dogecoin and Elon Musk.

[1129] Elon said that, quote, ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10x, increases block size 10x, and drops fee 100x.

[1130] Then it wins hands down, end quote.

[1131] You said in a blog post, partially responding to that, that there are subtle technical reasons why this is not possible.

[1132] to this Elon said that you quote fear the doge uh so let's talk about this what are the technical hurdles for doge coin that prevent it from becoming one of the primary cryptocurrencies of the world and do you in fact fear the doge i definitely feel obligated to correct the record i definitely do not fear the doge okay no i love the doge um i actually visited the doge in japan a few years back It's a, she's an amazing dog She's still alive Wait, the original Doge?

[1133] Yeah.

[1134] Oh, wow.

[1135] So, you know, we accept Doge every year for our annual DAFCon conferences.

[1136] So, I mean, I definitely, you know, don't think Ethereum is opposed to dock coins.

[1137] I mean, I kind of wants to feel like, you know, Ethereum is at least a little bit in spirit itself, a dog coin.

[1138] And then, you know, as I mentioned, you know, I love Doge.

[1139] I bought a bunch of doge.

[1140] I still hold a bunch of doge.

[1141] On the scalability question, the challenge basically is like the limits scalability and the tradeoffs with centralization, right?

[1142] Like if you just increase the parameters without doing anything else, then it just becomes more and more difficult for people to validate the chain and it just becomes more likely that the chain becomes centralized and becomes vulnerable to all kinds of capture.

[1143] So does it need like some of the layer two technologies that we've been talking about.

[1144] I mean, I personally think that, you know, if Doge wants to somehow bridge to Ethereum and then people can trade Doge thousands of times a second inside of loop ring, then, you know, that would be amazing.

[1145] I mean, if they want to just like take ZK roll -up style technology and just have thousands of transactions a second on their own chain, then that's, you know, that would be a great outcome as well.

[1146] So what, is there ways for Ethereum and a Doge coin to work together?

[1147] So, okay, so there's a power.

[1148] behind a person like Elon Musk pushing the development of a cryptocurrency is there ways to leverage that power and that momentum to improve Ethereum to improve some of the sort of cryptocurrencies that are already technologically advanced and pushing forward that kind of technology I definitely think there's room for you know that there's that meme of Doge like taking over Yes, yes, yes, I've seen it.

[1149] Is there a way to ride that storm, that wave of the Doge is taken over?

[1150] I think if we could have a secure Doge to Ethereum bridge, then, you know, that would be amazing.

[1151] And then when Ethereum gets its scalability, any scalability thing that works for Ethereum assets, you would be able to also trade rapid Doge with extremely low transaction fees and very high speed as well.

[1152] Is there precedence for building secure bridges between cryptocurrencies?

[1153] currencies.

[1154] I mean, how difficult is this kind of task?

[1155] It's definitely something that's in its infancy.

[1156] There definitely have been some cross -chain interaction things that have been done before.

[1157] So the earliest is probably the concept of merge mining, right?

[1158] When a chain just makes its entire proof -of -work algorithm dependent on the proof -of -work algorithm of another chain.

[1159] So I think famous Doche coin actually merge mines to Lightcoin, which is, I think in retrospect, it's not looking like a very good choice because now Dogecoin is bigger than light coin.

[1160] But, you know, if there's potentially some way for Dogecoin to merge mine with an Ethereum proof of stagance of some kinds, then like that could be an interesting alternative.

[1161] So that's one type of like chain interaction.

[1162] As far as like bridges, like one chain reading another chain, early in Ethereum's history, there was this project called BTC Relay.

[1163] It's a smart contract on Ethereum that just verifies Bitcoin.

[1164] Quinn blocks.

[1165] I think people stopped really caring about and maintaining it because there just weren't enough applications that were actually interested in using it at the time, and the transaction fees got too high to actually maintain it.

[1166] So I think if we want to make a BTC Relay 2 .0, that becomes cheaper because, you know, it uses snarks or something like that than you probably could.

[1167] But maybe now is the time when you actually can do that sort of one way verification.

[1168] But the One challenge, though, is that if you wants to have a bridge that allows you to move assets between chains, then you don't just need one -way verification.

[1169] You need two -way verification.

[1170] And Ethereum can verify anything because Ethereum's smart contracts can just run arbitrary code.

[1171] But if you want Bitcoin to be able to do things based on what happens in Ethereum lands, then Bitcoin would have to basically, well, they can do everything with soft forks because that's their religion, but they'll do it that way.

[1172] And if Doge wants to make a fork where that allows for a two -way transferability with Ethereum, then, you know, they could.

[1173] I mean, I think that would be a lovely collaboration to make if there's interest.

[1174] I think there might actually even be some multi -sig funds that has some funding.

[1175] It's just a bounty for someone to make a bridge between the two.

[1176] Could you maybe try to psychoanalyze Elon Musk for a brief second?

[1177] So what are your thoughts about Tesla and Elon Musk's journey through the cryptocurrency world?

[1178] So first with Bitcoin and then with Dochecoin.

[1179] So acquiring and holding a large amount of Bitcoin.

[1180] And I believe at least considering the acquiring and holding a large amount of Dochecoin.

[1181] Positive is negatives.

[1182] What do you think the future for Tesla and SpaceX in the cryptocurrency space looks like?

[1183] Do you think they'll consider Ethereum?

[1184] I'm sure that if, you know, they stay in the cryptocurrency ecosystem at all, then they have to at some point.

[1185] You know, Bitcoin number one, dogecoin number, I mean, you know, come on, it deserves to be number three.

[1186] And then, or number two, and then Ethereum can be whatever that other number is.

[1187] But the...

[1188] Well, if Ethereum only becomes a dog coin.

[1189] somehow.

[1190] Maybe you change the logo to incorporate a dog or some sort, almost like doors like sneaking behind.

[1191] Oh, that would be fascinating.

[1192] When the merge happened.

[1193] And I think like Elon, you definitely I think you would make a mistake if you were to kind of ascribe too much like sophisticated malevolent or or any deep intentionality to the whole process.

[1194] I think like he's just a human being and he likes dogs just like I like dogs.

[1195] Yeah.

[1196] I think that is literally the reasoning behind the whole Dosh going thing.

[1197] There is some aspect to which, I mean, the guy helped launch a car into space, right?

[1198] Like, you could ask, like, what is the purpose of that?

[1199] I think the purpose of that is fun.

[1200] I think he truly is more and more, especially lately, embodying the whole idea that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, and he's fully embracing the most entertaining outcome.

[1201] And in many ways, Dogecoin is the most entertaining cryptocurrency.

[1202] As cryptocurrency becomes more and more impactful in the world, people are getting more and more serious about it.

[1203] And so he's selecting the cryptocurrency that is the least serious and the most fun.

[1204] And there's something to that, like coupling fun with technological sophistication and somehow figuring out a way to do that.

[1205] Absolutely.

[1206] to do that well.

[1207] And I want the world to be fun.

[1208] I think the world being fun is great.

[1209] Okay.

[1210] Let me ask about a couple of the technologies if it's okay.

[1211] Sure.

[1212] What are your thoughts about chain link and hybrid smart contracts that utilize off -chain external data sources?

[1213] And I think it's definitely necessary for a smart contract so that do a lot of things to use off -chain data of some kind, right?

[1214] Like if you want to have a stable coin, you need a price or a company.

[1215] so you know what price you're targeting.

[1216] If you wants to have some fancy, you know, crop insurance gadget, like I think Ether Risk has been doing a lot of good work with that in.

[1217] I think it was either Kenya or Sri Lanka or both, like, they're making a lot of good progress in some of those places.

[1218] Like, you need some kind of Oracle to tell you, you know, did it actually rain in this particular area?

[1219] If you want to have, like, assets that mirror other financial assets you need an Oracle, If you want to have a prediction market, you need an Oracle.

[1220] And so projects that provide oracles are definitely really important.

[1221] There are definitely different kinds of use cases.

[1222] Like Auger is more about, you know, events.

[1223] And the Auger Oracle is designed, like, I think differently from ChainLink, right?

[1224] Chainlink emphasizes the whole, you know, like, we have a fast automated thing that just, like, gives you data quickly.

[1225] Whereas Auger is more, you know, we don't give a crap about speed.

[1226] And look, we don't need to give a crap about speed because if you want to get your money out on a prediction market that where in reality it's resolved, you can probably just sell your coins for 99 cents anyway.

[1227] So, I mean, I think the chain link is definitely like taking a good and the important part of the Oracle design space.

[1228] And I'm definitely happy that there's that project taking the task on.

[1229] I mean, at the same time, I do think that, you know, their frog army on Twitter can get a bit intense sometimes.

[1230] The frog army?

[1231] Is there a way to incorporate sort of Oracle Network type of ideas into Ethereum?

[1232] I personally would prefer the Ethereum base layer, like, stay away from trying to provide too much functionality, because, like, once you have the Ethereum base layer making a claim about, like, say, the U .S. dollar to Ethereum price, like, and, at some sense, you're basically saying that, like, Ethereum as a base platform starts making what could be geopolitical statements, right?

[1233] Like, for example, you know, imagine if there was some, you know, civil war in the U .S. split up and you had two currencies at both claims to be the U .S. dollar.

[1234] Well, you know, Ethereum would have to pick one for the sake of everyone who is already using that oracle.

[1235] So, you know, does that mean that the blockchain would be, like, taking a position in this big, mega -political debate?

[1236] So I think, like, for just those kinds of reasons, I would personally, like, prefer Ethereum itself to be more of this sort of pure platform that just analyzes transactions and just mathematically using deterministic consensus rules.

[1237] And then if you need the oracles, that can be layer twos.

[1238] I think Ethereum benefits from not trying to do everything at layer one and having this, like, very robust layer two ecosystem.

[1239] where you have all these projects doing interesting things.

[1240] Yeah, focus on the basic technology, avoid the politics.

[1241] Gotcha.

[1242] Let me ask a bit of a human question.

[1243] Charles Hoskinson, someone you've worked with in the early days of Ethereum, there appears to my outsider view to have been a bit of a falling out.

[1244] Is there a positive, inspiring human story to be told about why you two parted ways?

[1245] I kind of want to let the various books about Ethereum speak for themselves.

[1246] But, you know, I feel like, you know, since that time, I think, you know, Charles has clearly progressed and matured in a lot of ways.

[1247] And I mean, people who follow Charles closely have definitely told me that, you know, like 2021 Charles is very different from 2014 Charles.

[1248] And I'm sure it's 2021 Vitalik is much different from 2014 Vitalik as well.

[1249] I'm kind of interested how the 2030 and 2040 Vitalik and Charles look like as well.

[1250] Oh, interesting.

[1251] Like the progression of the humans.

[1252] Is this going to be one of those things that are like everyone comes full circle and then 2030 Vitalik and Charles are best friends?

[1253] I mean, not necessarily best friends, but some kind of are able to reminisce in ways that puts some of the tension of the past behind.

[1254] I think such things are possible.

[1255] think, you know, people definitely absolutely have a right to, and they should strive to just constantly change and reinvent themselves.

[1256] Is there something you could say about your thoughts about the Cardano project that Charles Hoskinson leads?

[1257] They've worked on some interesting ideas that mirror some of the ideas in Ethereum, proof of stake, working on smart contracts and all those kinds of of things.

[1258] Is there something, again, positive, inspiring that you could say?

[1259] Are they a competitor?

[1260] Is it complementary technology?

[1261] There's definitely interesting ideas in there.

[1262] I mean, I do think Cardano takes a bit of a different approach than Ethereum and that, you know, they really emphasize having these big academic proofs for everything, whereas Ethereum tends to be more okay with heuristic arguments, and in part because it's just trying to do more faster.

[1263] But, you know, there's definitely very interesting things that come out of, you know, I -O -H -K research.

[1264] Can you comment on that kind of idea?

[1265] I, as sort of having a foot in research, enjoy Charles' kind of emphasis on papers and, like, deep academic rigor.

[1266] Is there, what's the role of deep research rigor in the world of cryptocurrency?

[1267] Interesting.

[1268] I'm actually the sort of person who thinks deep rigor is overrated.

[1269] The reason why I think deep rigor is overrated is because I think like in terms of like why protocols fail, I think the number of failures that are outside the model is even more important, is like bigger and more important than the failures that are inside the model.

[1270] Right.

[1271] So if you take selfish mining, for example, like the, that original discovery from 2013 that showed how Bitcoin does, like, even if it has a 50 % fault tolerance, assuming everyone's honest, and only has a, you know, zero to 33 % fault tolerance depending on your network model, if you assume rational actors.

[1272] And, like, to me, that was a great example of, like, an outside -the -model failure, right?

[1273] Because traditional consensus research, just up until, before the blockchain days, did not think about, like, incentivization much, right?

[1274] Like, there was a little bit of thought about incentivization.

[1275] There's, like, a couple of papers on the Byzantine altruist rational model.

[1276] but it wasn't that deep.

[1277] It was mostly operating under the assumption that, you know, this, we're going to make consensus between 15 participants and these are institutions.

[1278] And if something goes wrong, then, you know, if it was, we can figure out whether or not it was deliberate offline.

[1279] And if they did something evil, we can sue them.

[1280] Whereas, you know, in the crypto world, you can't do that, right?

[1281] And so, like, that whole discovery basically arose just because, like, you know, the model of traditional consensus research just, like, didn't cover those possibilities.

[1282] and then once you go out of the model, those other issues do exist.

[1283] But then at the same time, there definitely are protocols that do have failures inside the model.

[1284] This reminds me of the time when I think I found a bug in a proposed consensus implementation from either BitShears or EOS.

[1285] This happened around the end of 2017.

[1286] So that was definitely inside the model because they had, a very clear idea of what they were trying to achieve.

[1287] They had a very clear description, and, like, there's a very clear mathematical argument for why the description doesn't lead to what they're trying to achieve.

[1288] But, like, ultimately, what you're trying to achieve can never be fully described in formal language, right?

[1289] Like, this is the big discovery of, you know, the AI safety people, for example, right?

[1290] Like, just having a specification of what you want is an insanely hard problem.

[1291] And, like, the more powerful, the optimizer that you're giving the instructions to, the more you have to be careful.

[1292] And so, you know, I think there are kind of these two sides.

[1293] And then the other thing is that a lot of the academic approach ends up, like, basically optimizing for other people inside of the academic system.

[1294] And it doesn't really optimize for, like, curious outsiders.

[1295] Whereas, like, I personally, Matt, like, totally optimized for curious outsiders, or at least I feel like I strive to.

[1296] So I guess, like, that's my case for why I, like, tends to behave in ways that, you know, occasionally traditional academic types criticize as being reckless.

[1297] But, I mean, on the other hand, you know, there's definitely real benefits that come from, like, just taking a rigorous approach, especially when, you know, you know what the thing that exists, like, you know what the specification is of what you're trying to.

[1298] get and like you're trying to kind of improve your way or provide protocols that actually provide that and like you know exactly what you're looking for.

[1299] I feel like realistically, you probably wants to do both kinds of analysis and like sometimes even want to do both kinds of analysis in stages, right?

[1300] Like you have you want to do more quick and dirty things and even wants public feedback on the quick and dirty stuff and then later on you formalize it more and then you get more feedback.

[1301] Like in general, I guess I feel like the norms of a research in the future the internet has just changed so much there's no way that it's not going and it's even changed like collaboration structures and like the patterns in which we work with each other there's no way that the correct structure for collaborative research is the same as what it was 15 years ago but like what combination of these existing components and of new ideas it is like that's something that's you know totally legitimate to kind of fight it out And I think it's great that there's different ecosystems that have different attitudes to things.

[1302] I think there's a big possibility that, you know, things that the Ethereum, ways that the Ethereum ecosystem approaches some problems is totally wrong.

[1303] And if there's other ecosystems with different principles and they can do well, that's something that we can learn from.

[1304] In the spirit of the depth for search, can you comment on AI safety and some people are really worried about the existential risks of artificial intelligence?

[1305] Is there something you could say that's hopeful?

[1306] about how we avoid in the same kind of line of reasoning about creating former models versus kind of looking outside the model into what the real world actually is like.

[1307] Is there some lessons from that we can take and map onto the AI safety world where the potentials of the technology, whether it's in autonomous weapon systems or just the paperclip problem, that we can avoid AI destroying the world?

[1308] Hmm.

[1309] So my impression is actually that this is more of a kind of far away impression and it could be wrong, that it might even be that one of the challenges is that AI is not formal enough.

[1310] Like because AI does is very like practitioner oriented, right?

[1311] Like it's all about like, hey, I found a couple of hacks and look, I ran them and look, you know, they seem to improve classification accuracy from, you know, 0 .684 to 0 .773.

[1312] So a lot of the time, look, there just isn't actual science behind like why they're.

[1313] hack works and why this other hack doesn't work.

[1314] You just sort of like trial and error your way into it.

[1315] And I could see how that approach works, but at the same time, like, that approach is not good for eligibility, for example.

[1316] It's not good for, like, understanding what the heck is actually going on, like, how these kinds of systems conceivably might fail.

[1317] Like, there's even, you know, a debate on, like, can you take GPT3 like things and just scale them up?

[1318] and their intelligence will continue to improve or is there just like some types of reasoning that they're fundamentally bad at and like they're not going to get good at no matter how much you like scale this exact same approach and add more hardware to it.

[1319] So having, like, thinking about what's going on more explicitly, I mean, my understanding is that a big part of AI safety research is trying to do that sort of stuff, right?

[1320] Formalize.

[1321] Yeah, formalize, try to improve just AI eligibility.

[1322] trying to understand, you know, if the AI makes some classification so we can actually see like what happens and what's going on in the middle.

[1323] Whereas with crypto or with traditional cryptography, you know, it's like very much not, well, okay, I mean, I should quite say that.

[1324] It's traditional cryptography is this interesting mix of being very formal and being very informal because it's very formal with given these security assumptions, prove that the protocol works under these security assumptions.

[1325] The places where it's very informal is.

[1326] like, well, how do we even know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for factory numbers?

[1327] Yeah, we kind of tried it for 40 years, and then, you know, so far no one's found anything better than the general number field sieve and like, okay, fine, we'll just assume it's fine.

[1328] You know, how do we know you can't find the discrete log between two look to curve points?

[1329] Like, no, did it a couple of decades, and no one's found anything faster than like baby step, giant step stuff.

[1330] So that's, and like there's definitely ways in which that approach really makes sense, right?

[1331] Because at least you can concentrate your analysis on a small number of building blocks.

[1332] And like, you know, you do have some intuitive reasoning about those building blocks, but like at least there's a small number of building blocks and lots of people are looking at them.

[1333] And then everything else just sort of gets formally built on top and you actually can like mathematically reduce the security of big things to building blocks, right?

[1334] Like, you can have mathematical proofs that say, you know, if you make a ZKS an arc of a yes statement when in reality that statement is false, then you can use that to, like, extract information out of elliptic curves that, you know, it completely breaks the problem or something like that.

[1335] So ZKSanark is an example where formalism is beneficial.

[1336] Absolutely, yeah.

[1337] And so maybe you can have the same kind of stuff in the AI safety within AI systems that you can get a hold of some kind of aspect of the systems that you can control provably.

[1338] And then in blockchains and cryptocurrency, I think the one area where consensus mechanisms is still more an art than a science is that these aren't just technological systems.

[1339] They're crypto -economic systems, right?

[1340] And they make assumptions about people.

[1341] And which assumptions you can make about people is not something that you can prove with math.

[1342] Right.

[1343] Even just the basic 51 % people are on.

[1344] Can you trust the 51 %?

[1345] If you can't trust the 51%, can you trust the other 49 % to be able to coordinate on making their own fork?

[1346] What will happen to coin prices?

[1347] Like, how do people as human beings react to these events?

[1348] Like, there's all of these assumptions.

[1349] But no, at the same time, look, if you can write down the assumptions, then you can, like, do formal things with them.

[1350] I almost forgot to ask you about one of the most exciting aspects of Ethereum.

[1351] I mean, it's non -technical.

[1352] I think it's a societal, it's social, which is NFTs.

[1353] So what do you think about the explosion of NFTs in the recent months, especially in the art world and beyond, and what does the future look like?

[1354] So this is maybe the social impact on the world, on the individual creators of all kinds.

[1355] Is that something you've actually expected to see NFTs having this kind of impact?

[1356] And beyond what do you think will happen in the digital space with NFTs, in virtual reality, in gaming, all those kinds of things?

[1357] I was definitely surprised by like NFTs in particular.

[1358] Like I even actually, I think might be on record somewhere on some tech conference panel.

[1359] Like they were asking, you know, it was one of those overrated or underrated sections.

[1360] And I asked about NFTs and I thought, and I said like, hey, I had to think NFTs are overrated.

[1361] Yeah.

[1362] And, you know, in retrospect, that turned out to be quite wrong.

[1363] I think, like, I guess I just personally can't really relate to this concept of, like, spending a lot of money on a thing.

[1364] And, like, there's no, you know, there's no queer kind of understanding of why that thing would maintain its value.

[1365] Right.

[1366] Uniqueness of a thing having value.

[1367] Right.

[1368] Exactly.

[1369] That's, like, I definitely, like, cannot really understand, you know, the psychology behind, like, buying $200 ,000 for original art painting.

[1370] I'd be like, you know, if I had a mansion, just, like, give me photocopies of everything.

[1371] And you can hang three photocopies of the Mona Lisa.

[1372] Why would even have the Mona Lisa?

[1373] I think I'd probably just, like, have some Yancats or something.

[1374] That's one thing where mathematics or theoretical computer science can not formalize why the heck NFTs are valuable at all.

[1375] But the thing that makes me very happy about the space now that it has happened is that, I mean, this gets back to the conversation that we had at the beginning, right?

[1376] Like, I'm interested in this concept.

[1377] of decentralized public goods funding, right?

[1378] Like, I want things that are good and valuable to, as much as possible, also be things that can economically sustain the people who produce them, right?

[1379] Because if you don't have that, then either the public goods just don't get produced at all, or people make centralized versions that have some of the properties and try to be substitutes, but actually just, like, concentrate control in a very small group, right?

[1380] And, you know, both of those things are not very nice.

[1381] So the nice thing about NFTs would be, well, if you're an artist and you can just mint NFTs and this is a source of revenue, then like, great, that's another stream of revenue for, you know, creative work that often does still get underfunded.

[1382] And that's amazing.

[1383] Okay, let me ask you a weird question.

[1384] We talked about Craig Wright a little bit, but a lot of people write to me, one of two emails.

[1385] one email is calling any coin outside of Bitcoin a scam and then the other email is saying my favorite coin is the best coin it's going to save the world whatever that coin is and so I sit back and I look at I have no idea I trust I try to figure out like the humans that I trust in the space just basic human qualities, but do you think some coins are scams?

[1386] Do you think some coins may be another way to ask it are scamier than other coins?

[1387] How are people that are looking outside of the space where there's all these cryptocurrencies supposed to figure out what is a scam and not, or how to use the right kind of language when talking about them?

[1388] Because there's the harshness of the language from the Bitcoin maximalist that doesn't just say everything is scam including Ethereum, but they use terms like shit coin that says it's not only a scam, it's like a waste of time.

[1389] I mean, every word you can use, they say that.

[1390] That's very harsh.

[1391] And then some people are just apply the word scam much, much more conservatively and just refer to coins that are legitimately are trying to scam people out of their money as scams.

[1392] So what do we do with this word scam?

[1393] Should it ever be applied to coins?

[1394] and is it a binary thing or is it a gray area?

[1395] I think it's definitely a gray area.

[1396] Like there's definitely things that are really in actual way scams.

[1397] Like, I mean, BitConnects would be one example of something that's a way on the scam spectrum.

[1398] Did you see there 2017 promotional video, by the way?

[1399] Oh, BitConnect.

[1400] Yeah.

[1401] Hey, hey, hey, hey.

[1402] What's up, what's up?

[1403] What's up?

[1404] BickConnect.

[1405] This is, it was this three -minute, 48 -second video that was just of this guy.

[1406] making this totally crazy rant.

[1407] And it was at some conference in Vietnam where they were, of course, like, trying to convince a whole bunch of people to buy this coin and they had these claims about how it would go up in value.

[1408] That was definitely the peak of these pure, completely scammy coins.

[1409] And, you know, that was definitely really terrible.

[1410] And I actually, I feel like we have less, despite cryptocurrency as a whole being bigger, we actually have quite a bit less of that now.

[1411] But then, of course, you know, there is this spectrum of things that are not completely scams and then things that are not scams and that are technically totally fine projects, but where their community is just incredibly sketchy and then all the way to, you know, things that are, where the community is nice, but maybe the project is just fundamentally incapable of achieving what it's trying to do when the community doesn't realize and then, you know, really good projects, right?

[1412] So, like, if you want to go a step, like, I don't know, if that's 100 % scam, then, like, you know, what would I call, like, say, 80 % scam.

[1413] Well, like, Bitcoin SV is one example.

[1414] This is a Craig Wright's fork of Bitcoin.

[1415] Like, theoretically, it's a blockchain, right?

[1416] It's a fork of Bitcoin.

[1417] It has, you know, 512 megabyte blocks.

[1418] If you really wanted to, you could use the blockchain, you know, it satisfies the properties that, you know, you can send transactions onto it.

[1419] you can probably, you know, use it as a backup to store your files if you really wanted to, just because it has so, it has so much space.

[1420] You know, it might fail, but, like, it's the, but at the same time, like, you know, as we basically said, like, Craig Wright is a scammer, and, like, half the, you know, community is just totally bad shit insane.

[1421] So the humans, the humans of a particular cryptocurrency is what makes for a scam and not, like the humans at the top that have a voice guiding the community.

[1422] Yeah, like I think, you know, in the case of BSV, like the humans, they make just completely wrong and just obviously wrong claims about like what BSV is capable of accomplishing and what it concealed we could accomplish.

[1423] And like, there's just a lot of aspects of it that make it feel like a money grab.

[1424] So that's one example.

[1425] And then, you know, you got to go a bit further.

[1426] And then, you know, you have like the trons of the world.

[1427] And like, you know, that's a plus.

[1428] for, you know, you can use it, you can do stuff on it.

[1429] But at the same time, like, you know, they did plagiarize the IPFS white paper and then, you know, they have.

[1430] So there's scammy qualities.

[1431] Yeah.

[1432] See, the thing that throws me off a lot is very difficult for me is that most coins, but the ones that make me feel like are scammy have a large community of people that are super positive about it.

[1433] Like, and they'll write to me. now that said sort of on the flip side of that bitcoin people are also very positive there's some sense and the reason i was having like squinty eyes looking at bitcoin for quite a while is like why is everyone so positive i was getting total cult vibes like like the ideas are not grounded in truth but are grounded in an obsession of like when you can artificially conjure up a truth, which is why I was a little bit worried about Bitcoin.

[1434] I think I've learned a lot since then to where like, I learned to separate the community from the ideas, and I think Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea on many fronts, but still a community that's like dogmatically excited about something, whatever that is, makes me skeptical.

[1435] Maybe it's just like my upbringing.

[1436] But when everybody's really, excited about something it makes me um it makes me skeptical and it make but it also makes me difficult to decide what is this scam or not because some of the most exciting ideas in this world have a community of people who are excited about it right because it's um i don't know i think space exploration is super exciting and uh and there's people i know a lot of them that are exceptionally excited about space exploration does that mean it's a scam no no uh so I don't know what to do with that.

[1437] And so most of I just try to stay away, I suppose, but it's, it's unfortunate because I'm sure there's a lot of exciting technologies in that space.

[1438] Like, in the case of Bitcoin, like, I would definitely not call Bitcoin a scam.

[1439] That's, again, I would not, I would also not call Lightcoin a scam.

[1440] There's people who call Lightcoin a scam because they just, like, say, oh, look, you know, it has no fundamental use case.

[1441] And the concept of being silver to Bitcoin's gold is just, like, stupid.

[1442] and, you know, like, milly Bitcoin is the silver to Bitcoin's gold.

[1443] But at the same time, like, if you have these people who just, you know, they do seem to earnestly believe this.

[1444] And, like, they are trying to just, like, make Lycoin be a light coin as best as they can.

[1445] And, like, that's, to me, that's enough for it to not be a scam.

[1446] Yeah.

[1447] And then, so, you know, I think the biggest gray area is definitely between, like, projects that are earnest and but you know they have just all sorts of these like different combinations of flawed qualities to them yeah yeah i mean the ones that legitimately is the scam is when the key people that are at the head of the project are intentionally lying and um i think as long as the the intent is to try to do good in the world even if the your actual implementation of that is flawed i think that's not a scam right be flawed ideas it could be wrong ideas but it's not a scam i'm learning to navigate this space yeah it's it's definitely a very challenging space to navigate i mean you know it's uh in some ways a reflection of the world at large yeah and as we've said maybe offline that the fact that money is involved makes it a little bit more complicated that um you know lives can be ruined by um by by by the choice of technologies that are taken on.

[1448] So it makes it more real, more painful, more, like, elevated the impact of this.

[1449] Like, imagine, like, Mac versus PC wars.

[1450] If everyone who bought a MacBook had 10 Apple shares inside of it and everyone who had a PC had 10 Microsoft shares inside of it.

[1451] And then you had, you know, the elites who bought their Macs back in 1983 and that they spent $500 dead and now they have $40 million.

[1452] And they just think that they're these gurus, who understands the future of finance and geopolitics, and they make theories about why Apple is the one that's going to bring freedom to the world, and Windows is, like, you know, secretly aligned with the axis of evil.

[1453] Oh, that's brilliant.

[1454] So, yeah, this is so brilliant.

[1455] So I think the right way to think about this is we map some of the cryptocurrency battles into the space of, like, Emacs versus Vim or Apple versus PC.

[1456] see if there were some stock that came along with each implementation of, you know, each PC, each Mac.

[1457] That's fascinating.

[1458] This is 100 % correct.

[1459] 100 % correct.

[1460] Because then that really energizes the armies of people debating over this in a way that something without money does not.

[1461] Okay, let me ask you about something really fascinating that you are also excited about, which is longevity, anti -aging.

[1462] You have donated money to the Sense Foundation.

[1463] So you have an interest in this whole space of lifespan research.

[1464] What's your vision here?

[1465] What do you hope to see in anti -aging and longevity research?

[1466] I think I hope to see the concept of seeing your parents and grandparents die, just slowly disappear from the public consciousness as an experience that happens over the course of half a century, the same way that getting lost in a city slowly disappeared over the public consciousness.

[1467] over the last 50 now that we have smartphones.

[1468] The thing you have from Nick Bostrom, the essay pinned in your Twitter, argues that essentially death is almost unethical.

[1469] Like the fact that we don't do something about this thing that in the essay is a dragon that keeps like murdering everybody around us, including our parents and grandparents, is, like, the fact that we don't try to do something aggressively about that dragon doesn't make any sense.

[1470] So you think this is a battle worth fighting, a battle for immortality, or at least longevity?

[1471] I'd say absolutely, and I'd say, a battle where really have started over the last five years in particular to see the first cracks of, you know, humanity starting to make.

[1472] things that look like they'll turn into victories do you uh do you think humans can eventually live forever and maybe as a side comment to that what technology do you think will enable that as a genetic modification is it cloning is it uploading your mind define forever like are we talking a thousand years a million 10 to the 14 10 to the 45 well let's start as i tweeted today eventually everything uh the universe will be filled with super massive black holes so that that forever maybe like backtracking to where we'll have we'll have 10 the 16 years to figure it out yes yeah maybe travel between um between the multiverse between the different universes the multiverse i mean but forever meaning like you know millennia hmm um i definitely think that we can get there um I definitely think that it's the sort of thing that's going to take an insanely huge amount of work.

[1473] And I definitely think it's the sort of thing where, you know, once we figure out the first crop of problems and, like, people start living to 150, we'll just realize that there's like 10 other problems that kill you half a slowly and we'll have to do more work.

[1474] But, you know, the good news is that this is, you know, Aubrey's one job to escape velocity argument that if you get everyone to live to 150 now, then, you know, you have half a century to fix to all those other problems as well.

[1475] So I'm optimistic for that reason.

[1476] I think you definitely do not want to underestimate human ingenuity, especially over the long term.

[1477] Just to look at what happens to computers between the ENIAC in 1950 and where we're around in 2020, right?

[1478] Like that's a span of 70 years.

[1479] So, like, you know, both of us, I think, with, you know, just present -day technology, you know, I have at least 70 more years to left.

[1480] So just like imagine what kind of sea change will happen in biomedicine during that time.

[1481] And the other thing that made me optimistic is that I actually think COVID has been this kind of event that's really a kind of pushed biomedicine and especially like activist approaches to biomedicine really into the public consciousness, right?

[1482] Like it basically it's put people into this mindset that, you know, wait, but like, you know, it's not just like, you know, the bits and tweets that are going to save.

[1483] the world, you know, the bio was actually, like, super important and huge.

[1484] And, you know, ultimately what's ending the, ending COVID, basically, you know, is the vaccines and the vaccines have just been, you know, amazing.

[1485] And if you can take that energy and start, and also like this, I think, philosophical attitude that I've noticed.

[1486] Like, I think the way that I would describe the philosophical attitude here, this is going more depth first, is that I think the way that I kind of interpret part of what I would call late 20th century ideology is that there is this mentality that, you know, nature is good and disruptions from nature are bad and generally you want to minimize disruptions from nature.

[1487] And like, this exists everywhere in the political spectrum, right?

[1488] So there's nature as in literal nature, and my view is that like the right -wing version of that is markets as nature, right?

[1489] Markets as nature.

[1490] Yeah, like, you know, the way that, that, like, that kind of philosophy talks about, you know, markets and, like, the goal of not interfering with them.

[1491] Like, you know, it is very, like, nature styled.

[1492] And then, of course, you know, the conservative one, which is, like, traditional culture that existed before the activists started controlling everything as also being a kind of nature.

[1493] But the 21st century attitude and, like, really COVID.

[1494] you know, has flipped a lot of minds because with COVID, what's happened is that, well, no, like, it's not, nature is not safe, right?

[1495] The default is, like, you know, untold misery and suffering and tens of millions of people dying.

[1496] The only way out for us is through, like, basically, human ingenuity.

[1497] And that frame of mind is one that's, like, much more friendly to one, the, this other change of, um, minds that I want to see, which is like basically treating aging as an engineering problem, right?

[1498] Like, the default is all 7 .8 billion human beings that are currently on this earth are going to die and they're going to live their last decade of life in debilitating pain.

[1499] And the only way to stop that is human ingenuity.

[1500] And, you know, we don't have that solution yet, but, you know, if we work hard, we will.

[1501] And more and more people on the biology side, computational biology, are basically converting the mess of the human biology into an engineering problem.

[1502] And once that conversion is happening, looking at the genetic code, the proteins, all those kinds of things.

[1503] Once that conversion happens, you can now apply the tools that we know how to solve engineering problems to solving it that way.

[1504] And then there's also the other version, which is, you know, why do we romanticize this meat vehicle that ultimately is just a thing that carries the brain?

[1505] Maybe we can more and more convert ourselves into the digital realm.

[1506] this is more like Neuralink, have the brain computer interfaces, and then achieve immortality in the space of information in the digital space versus the biology space.

[1507] That stuff's interesting, too.

[1508] I agree.

[1509] I mean, I think, you know, we have enough resources and we should just try all the parallel tracks.

[1510] You know, it's great that we have people just trying to make our bodies work.

[1511] It's great that we have people trying to upload or improve brain scanning.

[1512] It's also great that we have just like people improving cryonics.

[1513] So, like, we could just like, you know, go to sleep and a freezer and eventually, hopefully sometime in the future, you know, Hal Phiney's going to be able to wake up, all of this, you know, anyone who gets chronically frozen today will be able to wake up.

[1514] But, you know, that's a bet, right?

[1515] That's the last resort.

[1516] And then the other interesting thing about the extreme uploading approach, right, is we're excited about space.

[1517] And one of the points that a lot of science or like hard science fiction types make is that you know if you want to explore space that's a lot easier if you're not a human right like one example of this is that you know in the context of humans we're talking about like oh we're going to be able to go to the moon oh we're going to be able to go to mars but there's this project called starshot i believe right that's basically trying to send spacecrafts to mini spacecrafts to alpha centauri and they literally believe that they're going to be able to get spacecraft over to alpha centauri like four light years away by the 2060s.

[1518] No, I mean...

[1519] By traveling close to the speed of light, yeah.

[1520] Like, so the way it works is, you know, you have these light sails.

[1521] Like, you basically take these as a spacecraft and you shine a laser at it.

[1522] And the laser is insanely strong and quickly accelerated at 100 Gs for...

[1523] No, I think it was 10 ,000 Gs until it gets to 20 % the speed of light.

[1524] And then, you know, it goes on your merry way, right?

[1525] So if you want to be in, like, personally explore the Alpha Centauri system within like two centuries or one century, then, you know, being a robot is like by far the most practical way to do it, because there's no way that a human being can survive 10 ,000 Gs.

[1526] So it's definitely interesting long term, but at the same time, there's definitely a lot of like psychological hangups and a lot of like deep philosophy that we'll just have to grapple with to get there.

[1527] I think it hangs on the topic of whether we can convert consciousness into an engineering problems.

[1528] Is consciousness tied to our biology?

[1529] Because the moment we can convert consciousness into a digital form, then we can send it with that light sale to all the Centauri.

[1530] Until then, a robot is not carrying anything except maybe some basic knowledge like Wikipedia.

[1531] It's not carrying the flame of human consciousness.

[1532] I have high hopes for converting consciousness into engineering problem.

[1533] In fact, I think it's not as difficult as people think.

[1534] I agree with that.

[1535] I'm definitely in the camp that consciousness is a property of the algorithm and not a property of brain structure.

[1536] The other fun, like, the kinds of philosophical things we'd have to grapple with is, like, once you upload yourself, like, you can hit Control C, you know, like, it wouldn't be lovely to have, like, 10 copies of LX Friedman, and then, like, we could just interview everyone.

[1537] So this is, I mean, this is, I have to ask this question, it's a difficult one, which I don't I don't think it would be wonderful, first of all.

[1538] Sure.

[1539] So in the following way, and this has to do with immortality as well, there's something about scarcity that creates value.

[1540] Or there's a bunch of philosophers, Victor Frankel, Bernard Williams, Ernest Becker.

[1541] They argue that death or the scarcity of life creates meaning.

[1542] The reason life is beautiful, the reason so many moments of the experience of of love or delicious food, all those things are made delicious because they're finite, because they end and because we don't have that many of them.

[1543] And there's a kind of worry that if we extend the human lifespan, if we achieve immortality, or if we, God forbid, clone me multiple times, then you lose the richness of what it means to have this life, to have this experience.

[1544] Is that worry you at all?

[1545] Do you think there's some aspect to which death does, in fact, give meaning to life?

[1546] I guess, like, the one historical parallel, and this might be a bit unfair, is that, you know, there have been philosophers that have said things like, you know, war gives, like, meaning to human collectives and the struggle for supremacy between, you know, nations and races as this, like, big driver of progress that, like, that ensures that everyone strives to be their best.

[1547] and, you know, of course, this viewpoint got into the head of a crazy Austrian guy in 20 years later his soldiers were shooting at my grandparents.

[1548] So, you know, these days we don't really have that, but yet life still feels meaningful.

[1549] We've still found other ways to, or the, like, there's still a striving for technological progress.

[1550] There's still, you know, a striving for self -improvements in general.

[1551] And it turns out that, you know, you don't actually.

[1552] You know, actually we need to have existential conflicts in order to have that.

[1553] Now, maybe you need conflict, but we have other kinds of conflicts, right?

[1554] Like, we have, you know, competition between businesses, competition between political ideologies, competition between projects.

[1555] And so, you know, these are, like, whatever the psychological needs are, like, they're just our substitutes for it.

[1556] So I guess, like, yeah, so if we're trying to say, I feel like once we start living to to the age of 200, then, like, I'm just intuitively expecting that we'll see substitutes emerge in the same way.

[1557] Yeah, we'll create conflicts of other sorts that lead to less human suffering than wars do.

[1558] Like, we'll just start playing Diablo four, five, six, because you die in video games, so maybe we'll get some of the inkling of scarcity through the activities we partake in as opposed to our own body dying.

[1559] I mean, I feel shitty when I, like, you can, I remember in Diablo 3, you can play in hardcore mode, where if you die in the game, your character's dead.

[1560] Maybe we'll get the richness of, like, what we currently get from life by having, like, little artificial versions of ourselves that die.

[1561] Interesting enough, as I've just, like, personally spent more time in this world, I've started realizing that, you know, there is a concept of, like, real finiteness that still exist and it might even still be a thing that provides meaning that doesn't require anyone to actually die.

[1562] Like, for example, like, how many people from middle school or even high school of yours, like, do you still talk to regularly?

[1563] I happen to be close friends with, like, four or five of them.

[1564] Okay, well, like, in my case, the answer is zero for middle school and two for high school.

[1565] But you're right.

[1566] Right.

[1567] It dropped...

[1568] Exactly, it drops a lot, right?

[1569] And so, like, there's a lot of these as just, like, relationships that end up being very finite.

[1570] A person changes their, I feel like a person changes enough of their worldview after 25 years.

[1571] Was there even a study about this?

[1572] Something like a person and themselves 25 years later about as different as like two different people or something like this.

[1573] So, you know, like, I mean, just like you can have conflict without bloodshed, I think, you know, you can have finiteness and even, you know, the necessary sorrows of a finiteness that give meaning without literally anyone having to end their life.

[1574] And hopefully if we do extend our life, we'll figure out ways to extend the period of time where there's neuroplasticity to where we could change our worldviews continually throughout that time so you can have these different phases of life.

[1575] I thought it would be fun to hear you speak a little Russian.

[1576] You per Russian?

[1577] Do you per How do you Russian?

[1578] How do you It's interesting a question.

[1579] What can say, by Russian, about it?

[1580] What can say, about my Russian corny?

[1581] I, when I, when I, look at other projects, other people in the blockchain industry, sometimes, when I look at the, what I'm the Russian people do, the other people do, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm sometimes that these, like, these people who are Russian, there are something that feels like to me. But I don't know how to explain it.

[1582] You think there's, so for people who don't speak Russian, that Vittag said that there is something to the spirit of the people that are Russian that are working in the cryptocurrency world, that is a little bit different, and it's something that connects to some kind of aspect of your own self, some kind of roots there.

[1583] It's kind of interesting.

[1584] Do you think that there's, does it make you sad that there's these two different worlds that are sort of in part disconnected by language?

[1585] And I'm sure the same could be the case with China and other parts of the world.

[1586] Or the language slows the transmission of the beauty of the culture in a certain kind of way where you can't truly collaborate like you can all speak English you're collaborating on maybe a technical level but you're not collaborating on the level of like some deep human connection.

[1587] Do you see that being able to speak both languages?

[1588] There's definitely benefits I think to be able to like speak multiple languages and like once you can right like you discover that like even your mindset changes while you're in speaking in one language versus the other.

[1589] Like, people have told me this.

[1590] Like, when I speak Russian, I sound more like, I guess, like, to the point in pragmatic.

[1591] When I speak Chinese, I sound more cute when I speak English.

[1592] I'm something else.

[1593] I guess there's definitely, like, a richness that you're missing if you're only, like, in one of these language bubbles.

[1594] But, you know, I guess the arguments on the other side would be that, you know, if everyone spoke the same.

[1595] language, then, like, there would just be one bubble, right?

[1596] This is the challenge, I think.

[1597] Like, there are actually benefits to having cultural diversity, and you definitely don't want the entire world to be too conformist.

[1598] And, well, one of the interesting things about crypto is that it's just a culture that actually, like, manages to, like, somehow, you know, have its uniqueness and even preserve its independence from all of these surrounding countries, despite being embedded in all of them.

[1599] So it spans outside of the geographic boundaries and language in some way does as well.

[1600] And the way these cultures, these bubbles are created.

[1601] I mean, they overlap in interesting ways.

[1602] It's almost like a hierarchy.

[1603] And the same is the case of the crypto world.

[1604] There's communities associated with each cryptocurrencies.

[1605] There's communities within those communities.

[1606] And it's, yeah.

[1607] I mean, I think, like, you know, it's definitely sad whenever these groups are fighting each other.

[1608] and it's definitely good for them if people can cooperate more but at the same time just having groups of people that have different kinds of life experiences there's definitely something benefit from that so let me ask one last question I don't think I asked you last time the ridiculous question about the meaning of life you know Dostoevsky said beauty will save the world some people believe money is a big part of happiness and you've turned first of all you've made a lot of money you turned away a lot of money you turned away a lot of power so you're a fascinating person to ask what do you think is meaning to life the thing that I've realized with money as I have experienced both having a little of it and having a lot of it is that the benefit of, like, you can get the most out of money if you think of it, not as something that lets you do and have more things, but as something that lets you worry about fewer things, right?

[1609] Like, you know, if you have, you know, if your savings are just, you know, non -zero at all, then, like, you don't have to worry as much about losing your job.

[1610] And, you know, if you feel like you're, you have a job that just, like, really conflicts with your values, then, like, if you have even.

[1611] six months saved up.

[1612] That just makes it easier for you to say, bye, bye, I'm going to do something else.

[1613] If you have more money, then you can, you know, not worry about, like, even what you're doing, needing to be profitable at all.

[1614] Once you get more money, then, like, you can, you know, choose transportation options and food options that just, like, have less hassle in your life and allow you to be lazier.

[1615] So if you, like, the, you know, the, This aspect of just, like, reducing troubles and, like, opening up room for other things, I think is a big part of it.

[1616] Like, if you just, if you instead think of money as being, like, this positive or this thing that, like, gives you stuff and you try to derive meaning from the stuff, I think that's much more likely to be, like, a road to, like, basically squandering that opportunity.

[1617] So, yeah, and I guess my, my philosophy is on that is definitely more subtractive than additive there.

[1618] But once you have enough money that you don't have to worry about the money, you're burdened with another question, which is of meaning.

[1619] Do you think there's meaning to it all?

[1620] Or it seems like your own life, you're trying to build cool stuff that alleviates some level of suffering in the world.

[1621] Well, I mean, one way to think about it is like think back to like how you thought about life when you were in school, right?

[1622] In school, this is interesting to think about, right?

[1623] Because in a lot of ways, like, it's just totally outside of bounds of the kinds of systems that are, like, social systems that we live in as adults.

[1624] Or maybe not.

[1625] Like, maybe things like academia are intended to replicate parts of school.

[1626] Like, first of all, school is very totalitarian, right?

[1627] Like, you know, you have to follow the teacher's instructions.

[1628] The bulk of your schedule is, like, forced to be in particular areas.

[1629] You know, you can control.

[1630] you know, the real view from, you know, leaving the grounds during this period, this period of time, you know, assign a lot of homework.

[1631] But at the same time, also, you know, school is a bit of a bit of a bit of a post -scarcity utopia in that you just don't have to worry about getting resources for yourself.

[1632] And, you know, we've both, like, lived through 12 years of that, right?

[1633] So, you know, like, what does that say about us?

[1634] And I think, like, in one thing of aspect, obviously, is that it does, like, there's definitely, like, an easiness to living life if all of your decisions are made for you.

[1635] And one of the challenges of adulthood, I guess, is moving to this world where, like, all your choices are much more self -directed, and you just have to, like, learn to live and deal with that.

[1636] Yeah, dealing with the burden of freedom.

[1637] in some sense.

[1638] It's actually interesting because in some ways I feel like even my first like five years of doing Ethereum things my life was not even all that self -directed because a lot of it was just, you know, responding to obligations, right?

[1639] Like someone said, oh, you know, come to speak at this event in Korea, okay, you know, come to speak at this thing in Taiwan.

[1640] Okay.

[1641] Oh, like we need, for Ethereum to launch, we need you know, this particular piece to be done and tested, okay, work on that, right?

[1642] We know we need some, a proof of stake algorithm, work on that.

[1643] And the last year of COVID life, like basically I was like hold up in Singapore for much of it, right?

[1644] And it gave me a lot more alone time, you know, I had much less travel.

[1645] And that was definitely a very new and interesting experience for me. Would you characterize it by sadness, melancholy, hope?

[1646] dreaming, like, innovative period?

[1647] How would you characterize that a long time?

[1648] Some of all five, definitely some self -discovery.

[1649] I definitely did, like, make this very deliberate decision that, like, okay, I have this time and I'm going to actually make something meaningful out of it.

[1650] So, like, one example of the things I did is I just, like, actually started listening to your audiobooks and podcasts much more.

[1651] just this year I basically kind of discovered that the podcast space is real for the first time I guess like before that there would be things that I would get interviewed for but I was not really kind of like mentally incorporated I did not mentally incorporate this idea that like podcasts are a thing that you can go listen to and this year I did like I and I'm my friend Carl LaFlorche one of the optimism people recommended hardcore history to me and so I went ahead and just to listen to all the hardcore histories.

[1652] And then after that, they're like, listen to like 10 lux freed bids and then a bunch of others.

[1653] And after that, I also got into audio books.

[1654] Oh, I listened to the entire, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the whole thing, 45 hours.

[1655] That was fascinating.

[1656] So what, let me ask about debt, because Dan is going to love hearing this.

[1657] I'm going to tell it to.

[1658] Do you have a period of history, whether it's Dan or in general, that you draw for your, own life, like kind of thinking about the world, about human nature that you go to.

[1659] Is it World War II?

[1660] Is it wrath of the cons, the Jenkins Khan?

[1661] Is it some other more ancient history?

[1662] Is it World War I?

[1663] Is there something that kind of echoes with you in the voice of Dan or anyone else that you connect to?

[1664] I feel like the 1930s and 40s are fascinating because they force you to really grapple with the question of like, you know, where does evil come from?

[1665] Right.

[1666] the sort of mental puzzle that I've always had in my head is, like, on the one hand, you know, things like the Holocaust happened.

[1667] But on the other hand, if you just go and, like, have a coffee with people, then, like, a hundred times out of a hundred, everyone just seems so nice.

[1668] Yeah.

[1669] So, like, how do you kind of reconcile the macro and the micro there, right?

[1670] And that's the sort of thing that's very difficult if you don't have, um, a lot of, I guess, the right kind of personal experience.

[1671] Like, especially if your personal experience starts off being sheltered.

[1672] Like, it was for me, right?

[1673] Like, I know the stereotype is that the nerds get bullied in school, but, like, actually, for me, in my school experience, was just being treated with kindness by everyone.

[1674] And so that definitely made it harder to understand things.

[1675] I remember actually being pretty blindsided when I started Ethereum.

[1676] And then within six months, there started being fights over, like, who would get more shares if Ethereum turned out to be a company and then I suggested we should just make it to be a non -profit and somehow that ended up upsetting people.

[1677] So the fascinating thing for me is that I've been obviously reading and listening to the history and then at the same time just like observing things happening in the crypto space.

[1678] And so one of my interesting mental intuitions that I've gotten is that I think most evil doesn't come out of greed.

[1679] It comes out of fear.

[1680] And, like, one example of this in Ethereum lands, right, is, like, I think the part of Ethereum history where I thought that the Ethereum community was at its lowest, and even when I personally was at my lowest, if you go back to the Dow fork in 2016, right?

[1681] So, you know, the Dow hack happened, and then we made this controversial decision to change the Ethereum protocol.

[1682] And we, um, Then there was that Ethereum Classic split, and as soon as that Ethereum Classic split happened, you know, there was like a lot of anger everywhere.

[1683] And there started, there started especially being anger when the price of ETC started like taking up, right?

[1684] So this was the time when Ether started off being $13 and then Ethereum Classic started at zero.

[1685] But then suddenly there was this one day when like ETH dropped to 12 .5, ETC went up to 0 .5.

[1686] And then they dropped more.

[1687] and people were saying things like, you know, oh, this whole thing, Ethereum Classic is just like a sci -up by, you know, the Bitcoin community and just a wealthy Bitcoiners trying to destroy Ethereum.

[1688] And like in the back of my mind, I knew that that wasn't entirely true.

[1689] Like, there were definitely were Bitcoiners, but at the same time, like, I think blaming political, like internal disagreement or blaming disagreements on foreign interference, right?

[1690] Like, this is a sort of thing that, you know, like, countries, like, a government.

[1691] governments do all the time.

[1692] Like, it's a very convenient excuse, right?

[1693] Because it allows you to just, like, blame these things that are happening on the foreigners and avoid, like, actually grappling with the facts that, like, well, no, actually, you have people in your very own community who just disagree with you and have a different belief.

[1694] And I think, you know, I feel like the Ethereum community, like, during that time did not do a very good job of grappling with that.

[1695] And I feel like, I during that time did not do a very good job of grappling with that.

[1696] And so there was a lot of like blaming the Bitcoiners.

[1697] There were also even a lot of people calling for us to use trademark law and like basically sue exchanges and like try to prevent them from a listing Ethereum classic.

[1698] And like to me that was very unethical, right?

[1699] Like these are using like basically using the government as a weapon to try to attack the other cryptocurrency and like destroy it as like goes completely against them, you know, the ideals of freedom and, you know, like things that at least.

[1700] in theory we're supposed to stand for.

[1701] But, you know, like, in that particular time, like, basically, what was happening was that, you know, the ETC price was rising, and at the same time, the ETH price was dropping in lockstep, and it really, and there are a lot of Bitcoin people basically saying, and this is the end of Ethereum.

[1702] And I think a lot of people really were afraid that Ethereum would be just, like, completely destroyed out as a result of this.

[1703] And so, like...

[1704] That's where the anger came from.

[1705] Exactly.

[1706] Yeah, exactly.

[1707] It came from the fear, and, like, that's what, like, allowed people to rationalize, like, in abandonment of principles that I think they would not have accepted in other circumstances.

[1708] And I definitely, like, to some extent, played along with this myself, right?

[1709] And I do definitely regret that to some extent.

[1710] Well, and I definitely regret, like, the excesses completely.

[1711] But so that, and then obviously, you know, Bitcoin in block size war, similar sort of stuff happened.

[1712] So, like, that insight was interesting because, like, it does mentally make a lot of sense, right?

[1713] Like, when you're actually afraid that, you know, unless you act in some way that, you know, your entire world is going to collapse.

[1714] Like, it's much easier to just rationalize, you know, forgetting your principles and doing whatever you have to, to just save the specific thing that you care about.

[1715] It feels like the right thing to do, the brave thing.

[1716] to do is in the face of fear to still have compassion, to still have love, as opposed to hate.

[1717] So the darkest moments, the toughest moments of human history are those where fear is everywhere.

[1718] And despite that, like, the way to get out of that is through love, not giving into the fear.

[1719] And again, that's the lesson that you draw from all those moments of history.

[1720] Yeah.

[1721] Well, I like you have, in terms of those coffee and the kindness that people have, it does seem that everybody has the capacity for evil and everybody has the capacity for love, and you just have to create mechanisms and incentives that prioritize the latter over the former.

[1722] Batelik, you're one of the most interesting people.

[1723] I've gotten a chance to talk to.

[1724] Thank you so much for talking.

[1725] I hope we get a chance to talk again.

[1726] I hope I can at least be some small part.

[1727] This would be awesome on a podcast with you and Dan Carlin.

[1728] That would be an awesome conversation.

[1729] Thank you so much for doing so much incredible technical innovation that inspires the computer scientists, the economists, inspires the world and what technology can do.

[1730] And now with longevity, I do hope we live a very long time and play Diablo.

[1731] make that long time fun.

[1732] Thank you so much for talking today.

[1733] Thank you to Alexis.

[1734] This was great.

[1735] Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vidaluddin and thank you to Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, For Sigma, and BetterHelp.

[1736] Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

[1737] And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela.

[1738] When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become a and outlaw.

[1739] Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.