Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
vitalik buterin
his second time on the podcast vitalik
is the co-founder of ethereum
and one of the most influential people
in cryptocurrency
and technology broadly defined quick
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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 to me
the prices were never
as important as the ideas both technical
and philosophical
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
also
with smart contracts layer 2
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 this
is the lex friedman podcast and here is
my conversation
with vitalik buterin let's first talk
about
shiba ino if we can also known as sheba
token
code shib for contact shiba unu was
created in august 2020
modeled off of doshcoin by the anonymous
founder
known as ryoshi on may 10th
this year it had a market capitalization
of over 13 billion
and uh maybe you can explain this but in
a crazy move
you were given half of shibs uh
total supply you
uh burned aka destroyed 90
of it that's worth 6.7
billion dollars and you donated 10
that's worth 1.2 billion
at the time to an uh india covet 19
relief fund
saying you don't want to be the locus of
this much power
this is uh fascinating
why and how were you able to walk away
from this much money
and this much power so i i should
probably start by
yeah giving some of the backstory around
you know these coins and this concept of
giving me coins
uh so you know first of all you know
shiba inu as you said
is this kind of knockoff of dogecoin
right and deutsche coin was this
initial kind of fun coin that was
created back i think around 2014 or so
and it was just created by jackson
palmer and like put it out as a joke for
a couple of hours and a community formed
around it
and at the beginning people didn't take
it very seriously i actually remember
putting about 25 000
into doge sometime around 2016 and i
just remember
uh just thinking to myself like okay how
am i going to explain my to my mom
that i just invested 25 000 into dog
coins
and like what even are dog coins like
the only interesting thing about this
coin is that there's
you know a logo of a dog somewhere um
but you know of course that ended up
being one of the best investments i've
ever made
and it did really well and then at the
end of 2020
elon musk of course you know started
talking about dogecoin
and the market cap just like shot up to
about 50
billion dollars actually and it shot up
multiple times right like the first time
it went up from about
0.8 cents to about like seven cents
and this just happened all in one day
and i remember um this was when
i was still in singapore in the middle
of uh
kovid and you know i saw that the price
just went up by a thousand percent
and i was like oh my god my doge is
worth like a lot
and so i immediately called up some of
my friends and told them to like
drop everything in scramble and i just
sold half the dosh and
i got 4.3 million dollars donated the
proceeds to give directly
and a few hours after i did this the
price dropped back down from about seven
cents to four cents right so i managed
to sell the doge at the top and i
remember just uh
feeling like i was such an amazing
trader but then of course
you know the price went up from 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 those that have not heard
of ethereum is just like something
even i wasn't predicting right 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
dollars then surely
the second largest dog token deserves
you know at least seven or eight billion
right
because i feel like that's the kind of
what the mindset of these
shiba people is um so that of course
they did this other gimmick right where
they gave me half the shiba
token supply um they were actually not
the first projects to do this uh so
around the end of 2020 there was this
weird project called teller
it's like t-e-l-l-o-r i think they're a
chain-link competitor or something like
this
but i remember they just like dumped
fifty thousand dollars worth of their
token into my wallet
and then they had their twitter arbi
just like basically run around saying
look look at vitalik's wallet vitalik
holds
towers he's one of us he's a supporter
and as soon as i discovered this i just
like
publicly sold the tower tokens on you to
swap and
this created a bit of a twitter splat
now the shiva people were more clever
the shiva people instead of dumping to
that wallet they dumped to my cold
wallet
right so in a cryptocurrency right
there's this concept of like cold
wallets and hot wallets basically
like the thing that actually owns euro
money is like this
80 digit number called a private key
right and a hot wallet is when that
private key is just stored in memory on
your computer on your phone really easy
to access cold wallet means it's either
on written down on a piece of paper or
it's uh
on a computer that's just never accessed
the internet right so cold is very
inconvenient but
cold is also much more secure right
because even if that computer has some
like viruses on it like it's it's like
air gap that's not actually going to be
able to upload it
so this cold wallet and like all the
money's out of the cold wallet so it's
safe for me to talk about my setup now
right but it was
a laptop that was sitting in canada and
i also had
um two pieces of paper where i wrote
down two numbers on those two pieces of
paper one was with me one was in canada
and if you add those two numbers
together you get the private key
so because of covid travel restrictions
and you know this is in this
cold wallets in canada like it's very
difficult for me to
actually access it right and i'm not
sure if they knew this maybe they just
got lucky but basically they
you know sent a lot of uh these dog
tokens
into this wallet where i it was very
difficult for me to access it but then i
saw these dot co
tokens i saw more and more people
talking about them and then at some
point i realized i
realized that like hey these things are
worth billions of dollars
and like you know there's lots of really
good things that you could do with that
amount of money and it would actually be
a waste to just like see it go so i made
the decision that like i would actually
power through and
figure out how to like safely like
basically get my private key
um i actually had to call up my family
tell them to read out
their number off of their piece of paper
i uh
entered that into a fresh laptop that i
bought from target then i
put in my other number on my piece of
paper added the two numbers together on
the computer there's the key
and at the same time like just scrambled
for two days
setting up a new wallet for to where i
could move my youth 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 so you're doing
this
all by yourself i essentially most of it
by myself so
you have to keep it secret right and i
needed my family to
um actually like go and read the the
number on their piece of paper
and then i am in my new multisig wallet
like there's
other people that are signatories um but
you know
i'm obviously not going to reveal any
details beyond that about
so i did this right and i actually
managed to
make get the private key make the first
transaction that would just move all my
ether to the multisig wallet so it's
safe
and then second transact put the private
key on my main computer then started
you know like going in and just selling
some of the dark tokens and then just
like giving them to these
different charities now at the time i
actually
did not even like have any idea of how
much you would be able to get right
because like
on paper the dog tokens are seven
billion dollars but like in reality it's
a very liquid market you know
are you going to crash it by yeah and
after you sell 1 million worth you're
going to crash it after 10 million
are you might you actually be able to
get like an entire
200 million i had no idea um
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 yeast to give well donated
some to other groups and then
okay have some dog tokens like i don't
have an easy ability to sell more myself
but then i'll just
like give them to these groups and like
you know hopefully they'll do good
things with them
um it was actually um i actually donated
at 20
and dumped 80 percent um yeah so the
cove
the coved um india group got one batch
and then there's
another group that got another batch and
i don't want to say who they are because
i think that
they want to announce themselves at some
point sure yeah but it's uh
you know you you can see the fact that
these transactions were made on the
blockchain
um but it was uh just
very intriguing interesting and
unexpected and just an insanely crazy
situation it's been a couple weeks
first of all thank you for uh helping me
uh hang up some curtains this is
this is a first for the podcast and uh
shows
uh that you're truly a special person um
to be willing to help but now a couple
weeks later do you
regret any aspect of that decision um
i'm sure there are some things that i
probably could have done better like
i i was actually 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
so i i probably could have done better
by just like
talking more with the traders and
actually ensuring that
you know that they can do a better job
of maximizing the
the value of uh of
uh all of them but like you know it was
a
very stressful time and i did have to
act quickly like i yeah
i did manage to you know make a lot of
the donations before
like a few a few days before the great
crypto crash happened
uh so it was and
it's difficult to like obviously there's
parallel universes 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 uh
so you know on that it's like a luck of
the draw and i'm just
you know happy that uh it was
everything was able to turn out as well
as it did but psychologically
you mentioned stress how hard was it
uh it was stressful right 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 um and you know maybe
the multisig wallet had a bug in it
maybe
there's like some mistake i'll make in
the middle that causes the the funds to
get lost like you know that's
that part was stressful and i i was
definitely stressing out for two days
i'm you know triple checking the new
wallet i even did a bit of an audit of
the code myself
i wrote my own javascript to adapt to
make confirmations
because gnosis safe didn't work with the
status wallet well
um so there was definite
that whole thing was definitely a bit of
a marathon um 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
um but i was actually impressed like i
yeah for every poster that was saying
like no
you know why yeah why did vitalik like
rugby on ice he was simple
his wallet was supposed to be a burn
address you know there's like 10 people
that are like
oh you know i thought i was just in this
because it's a
it's a fun pyramid gambling thing but
instead i ended up being part of this
you know great public good thing for
humanity and that's like even more
amazing
uh so the i the amount of that that i
got was
very impressive so you know all in all
let me know i think
the dog people did great the dog people
is there something you can extend
to the bigger picture of it in the
principles you apply to making this
decision
is there some principles philosophies
that you apply
also to uh the decisions you make around
ethereum um um i think uh
a big one for me is just this idea that
crypto you know isn't just an
opportunity
to give people like slightly better ways
to sit to
save value and all these things like
it's also an opportunity
to like basically create these like new
digital institutions that could
serve the public good in new ways and
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 know you
would have coins that represent causes
and like people would just like
buy and accept those coins because they
support those causes
so i think it's called markets
institutions and currencies a new form
of social incentivization or something
like that oh my god
and i'm sure you can find it and throw
it in the links um yeah
the so that was interesting to kind of
see becoming real and like in general i
mean i think
you know public goods are very important
and on the internet public goods are
even more important right like every
single lex friedman podcast is just
on youtube and you know anyone can go
and see it like there's no way for you
to like
you know sell it and so that some people
can see it but other people can't see it
like you know you could do that but then
you'd obviously be you know reducing
your impact so thank you for making the
uh the amazing lex freeman podcast still
freely available
well that's actually a tense thing is uh
how do you do it in a way that's not uh
controlled in a centralized fashion
because actually
youtube feels free and open but it
nevertheless is one company making
centralized decisions and
the first time i realized youtube was
not forever
is when a lot of the joe rogan
experience library was pulled from
youtube as part of the spotify deal
and he made me realize we need to uh
it's like the realization that fiat
money is centralized
is uh realizing that you know they
this is not forever and you might want
to come up with schemes to distribute it
to uh decentralize the control of it in
a way that audio for podcasters was just
an rss feed
exactly yeah and i think 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 the idea that there nick
is there can be one central organization
that represents the public and
like perfectly unders uh understands and
can impose their idea of what is the
good
right like it's when people talk about
public goods
it just often comes with this baggage of
uh you know either centralization or
conformism
and i think like it doesn't have to
right like uh often
the most important public goods are the
ones that are created by
you know the crazy individual that's
that disagree with everyone else
so trying to make this kind of
synthesis where you combine the values
of decentralization and the values of
open source
but you're not naive about it and like
you know you realize
um that for these things to be produced
there needs to be a way for it to be
sustainable there needs to be
some way of supporting people who are
working these projects 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
to me that's a yeah a big part of
sort of what my grand experiment in
crypto is about and and
like we are doing things in different
kinds of things for this right like
there's
the the git coin grants quadratic
funding in the ethereum ecosystem
um there's i mean obviously these uh dog
coins that just happens
like i guess accidentally um there's
other projects
um that like for example you know
uniswap has um
their uniswap dao that just has a huge
amount of funding
and like we haven't seen yet how that's
going to be deployed but
you know it could be potentially
deployed to do lots of really good and
amazing things
do you see ethereum as essentially a
mechanism
to uh fight for social causes
um i definitely see ethereum as
being a mechanism to
fight for definitely some some specific
things that are
um that are social causes um 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
i'm just you know giving people the
ability to
organize and create projects even if
it's five people in five different
countries i think
that kind of inclusiveness i think
that's a social cause
and it's a core a core crypto value
um 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 you know
the thing that go
the things that are on ethereum is just
the things that the community makes of
it
well you kind of briefly open the door
so let's go there
when it comes to uh government
regulation of crypto
uh what's the best case scenario what's
the worst case scenario
in terms of uh you know as you've kind
of mentioned
ethereum challenges the the the power
centers of the world
and uh how do you see the interplay
between govern
governments and this new technology that
resists centralized power
best case and worst case the
the best case is um that um
you know blockchains continue to prosper
and we figure out scalability is so that
people can actually start
doing things on block all 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
five to ten dollars
and then we see a lot of different um
amazing applications happening on
blockchains you know it could be
like dao is creating new ways for people
to
inter interact and organize with each
other new ways for artists to get funded
and
just all sorts of these amazing things
and
there's just enough public
um public support and just enough people
that see that you know look crypto is
clearly
doing a lot of good things and and you
know there are definitely areas where
there's tensions
but in those areas where there's
tensions like there could be some kind
of
creative and interesting approaches that
get figured out right like
you know the concept of corporate taxes
for example right like
you know it does it that would disappear
as a revenue stream if theoretically
corporations just all get replaced by
taos but
i know like maybe there's some other
creative
way by which dao
like dao's themselves can kind of be co
you know have some kind of encoded
governance that ensures that they
have at least some of us some kind of
bias towards serving the global public
good
and you know maybe it does enough of the
daos can do enough of that that people
are happy with it and and
you know there are going to be things
that people are unhappy about there's
always going to be the people that
you know wants to surveil everyone but
if
on the 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 and we'll just
like become incorpor kind of
incorporated and accepted the same way
as happened uh with the internet um
but the work in the worst case scenario
would of course be
just like people like 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 and then i
don't think governments have the ability
to
ban crypto to the extent of just
complete like preventing
blockchains from existing but they
definitely have the ability to really
marginalize it right
like if you just ban all exchanges i can
ban all links from the fiat ecosystem to
crypto
and you know you ban all kind of
mainstream employers from
accepting or paying in cryptocurrency
then like you could
you can successfully like turn it into a
like you know a fairly kind of niche
counterculture thing that
has much less impact than otherwise
would so it's
somewhere between the good scenario in
the bad scenario i'm obviously hoping
for the good
well that's interesting also the tension
between governments and
uh 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 uh rich quote unquote respectable
people
embrace uh cryptocurrencies bitcoin
ethereum
so on even the dot coins uh it's
almost sends a signal to everybody else
that this is
this is a revolution that's here to stay
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 is there some sense
that worries you that if
uh if cryptocurrency if ethereum runs
the world
then crime making money from crime will
be easier
there's always that possibility like 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 yeah like the if you commit a
crime in you know meat space it's
getting harder and harder to get away
with it
so like you know if he wants to do
something
and 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
um so i the world
where like things go dark to such an ex
you know as the the one the police hawks
sometimes like to say um to such an
extent
that like you know oh my god the
criminals are committing crimes with
impunity and we can't
see anything like that just seems
unlikely um but you know on the other
hand like
the world uh where there just
you know is no privacy for example or
um the world where there just like is
no no ability to uh kind of act
outside of the the confines of you know
mainstream institutions like
it's uh some that's something that's
more realistic and that seems like
something that uh could lead to a lot of
kind of
a lot of scary things right and like
even from a government's point of view
right like i think
governments over the last few years a
lot of them they're very worried about
sovereignty you know they're worried
about like if
their um country is economies and you
know social
environments they're just completely
dependent on basically foreign tech
companies
controlled by foreign governments like
you know governments are not on team
government right that's like you know
the indian government is on you know
team india
you know the russian government is on
team russia and so forth right so
like you know they don't want the us to
be able to like have this big backdoor
into everything
uh so i mean i do think that a balance
is needed but
at the same time i uh
do and think um i guess
i i definitely like worry more
about the messiah the possibility that
just like without things like crypto
uh kind of acting outside of
institutions becomes too impossible
and i don't even necessarily mean
outside of governments even just you
know outside of corporations like
becomes too impossible and there's just
like terrible things that come as a
result
um and if things going in the other
direction like
it obviously is a a risk but
you know at the same time i think in the
long term like a crypto can
potentially even like offer defenses as
much as attacks against that sort of
thing
yeah many throughout history many of the
most destructive things came from
centralized institutions versus
sort of from the people operating in the
shadows
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
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 it almost
accelerates the policy
it forces the policy to catch up to
where the people stand
right 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 to uh
in a safe way be able to participate in
this gray area
yeah i mean the other thing to keep in
mind of course is that the
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
right like part of that is because they
want to be super conservative and like
the more layers you have the more
they're like
kids conservative because they're scared
of what what the layer below them will
do to them
sometimes they have their own you know
moral opinions of various kinds
you know they go after lots of people
right like they make life really hard
for
you know like sex workers for example
and like you know psychedelics as you
mentioned
there's uh 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
governments or whatever you want to call
it and
no 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 all right let's
talk about one of the most exciting uh
technologies like technically
philosophically
like socially financially in every way
which is ethereum
2.0 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 sure
so i think recently we've actually been
kind of de-emphasizing the
eth 2.0 branding i guess so the reason
behind that was that
originally we envisioned something more
like a big grand event
where you know all the good things would
happen at the same time and it would be
a new blockchain
and it would be a new protocol and
people would have to take a lot of
effort to migrate over
but later we've slowly changed the
roadmap over to something that's much
more incremental
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
ethereum user
still feels 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
like
not by that much right uh so like
the big two things that are happening
right these are
what used to be considered the two
flagship features of use 2.0 and now
they're just you know
the flagship features of the you know
the next uh
evolution of ethereum yeah as uh proof
of stake
and sharding right so proof of stake is
a consensus algorithm
it's the or it's not just mechanism i
should say um it's
the difference is that like an algorithm
is something that you run by yourself a
mechanism
is like it involves interactions between
people and it could even include
incentives and all of that
uh so the consensus mechanism
uh so by which nodes in
the network agree on you know which
blocks came in which transactions came
in in what order
uh make sure that once a block gets
accepted it can't get reverted and all
of these
things that we expect from a blockchain
um so existing blockchains you know
including bitcoin including the ethereum
of today and including
a lot of them they use proof of work
right uh so
the reason why we need proof of anything
is be it is because like they serve this
function that i call kind of economic
civil resistance
so that's obviously you know a big word
for
especially if you've never heard of
sybil's before but like the basic idea
is right that you have a network and you
have lots of computers that
agree on like which block to accept and
sometimes you get you know two blocks
that get published at the same time and
you just have to agree on an order so
there has to be some kind of voting game
yeah but then the question is well in
this voting game you know who get who
gets a vote who gets to participate
now the pro you can't say one person one
vote right 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
the humans are like 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 i should control everything
uh 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
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 by just
running them 24 7 using
these hash algorithms right so this does
solve the problem right 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 puts
together and that's extremely expensive
in proof-of-stake instead of relying on
people with computers that are
just constantly cranking out hashes 24 7
you
as you're like a unit of economic
resources you just use
like holdings of coins inside the system
right so all of these blockchains they
have some kind of coin in them
bitcoin has bitcoin ethereum has ether
um you know they all have a coin
so why not just use that as the economic
the economic resource that you're using
to like measure participation
um so that's like the quarry
distinction between proof of work and
proof of stake um
i like proof of stake and i've liked
proof of stake for many years
basically because like it just requires
much
less ongoing resource consumption right
like with proof-of-work
um you know you have to like actually go
and buy these physical computers
and these days um you know yeah they
have specialized hardware asics um
application specific integrated circuits
you have to go produce them you have to
go buy them and unless you have millions
of dollars you know you have to buy them
from one of these other people who
creates them
and those other people often end up
taking a huge cut of the profits
themselves
uh and then you know you have to plug
them in you have to just
burn all of this electricity that's just
um running 24 7. so
it consumes a huge amount of energy
right and it gets not just energy it
also
you know just to create the hardware
right 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
um so hardware is a very big deal too um
and you know you need
this like these this really big and
powerful with very specialized hardware
another kind that fills up these big
warehouses
so proof of stake you don't you don't
really need that much electricity you
just need just a little bit to run right
to run a regular computer
um you can run proof-of-stake validators
on computers that you already have
um so it's just much
less resource intensive and like this is
good for a few reasons right like one is
you know the kind of environmental
rationale that
you know you're not breaking the
environment um the second
is that you're not taking away
electricity
and like other resources from other
people i mean like right now there's
i think just today i saw a story about
like iran wanting to shut down some
bitcoin mining because
it was just grabbing up so much
electricity that it was you know
outbidding the nearby towns and they
just
didn't have enough um and then there was
like chia that was the one that's doing
proof of like hard disk mining basically
it's just like grabbing up so many hard
disks
there's a there's a shortage right so
that's the second reason 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 so like bitcoin and ethereum they
both issue
somewhere around four percent of the
total supply every year right now
to miners so ethereum is about 4.7
million ether
and the current supply is about 115
million but with proof of stake like we
expect it'll be somewhere between
500 000 and one and one million per year
um so so that means you know this
the supply doesn't have to you know
increase so quickly
um so one of the pros that uh
that people sort of argue for the proof
of work is that uh it is secure because
it's much more difficult
to sort of as you've highlighted is
difficult to participate
is there um is what are your thoughts
about the security
of the proof-of-stake mechanism
is is there ways to make it secure so i
think proof of stake is very secure uh
because
in order to be able to attack the system
you need to have like
basically as much stake as the rest of
the network right
so that means like right now for example
we have five million each staking so you
have to come up with five million each
and then join the network
and then the the other so five million
ethers a lot right it's like um
how much is it now like 15 billion
dollars so that's actually more than
i i believe the cost of attacking the
bitcoin network
and then the second thing is that
recovering from attacks is much easier
in proof-of-stake than proof-of-work
right 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 which basically means
that
in order to like revert a finalized
block 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
validator
like a big portion of your validators
signed to conflicting messages
and this is something that like once
these messages are on the network you
can go and prove like
look these people did it 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 and you don't burn anyone else's
coins now there are other cases like for
example
if instead of reverting blocks the
attack just tries to censor everyone
right then what you do everyone who got
censored would just like basically
create the minority chain
um and then the community would
basically have to do a soft fork right
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
and then what happens is that on that
new chain the attackers also lose a lot
of coins
right yeah so the difference between
proof of stake and proof of work
is that in a proof-of-stake 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 i don't like you
this is like automated right
you can so the slashing process is
automated yes
is there ways it can go wrong so that's
a painful process where the coins are
burned
um it is painful yes i think uh
i mean the one big unknown of course is
like if
an attack actually happens and like if
an attack happens that requires the
community to actually choose one of
these minority forks
then like what would the the community
actually successfully coordinating on
this look like right 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 and how difficult it is
what are the channels of communication
for the community if you can
enlighten me a little bit like what you
know uh in many ways in the political
realm
twitter is often used as a way to kind
of have these emerging phenomena of
large groups of people coming to a
consensus right about a particular idea
and then there's battle for consensus
what's uh
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
or is it all through money is it all
through trading that the communication
happens
there's definitely talking as well um i
mean like we have to agree on protocol
changes somehow right like there's
twitter there's reddit
there's um github there's uh
all of the various ethereum forums
ethereum magicians ethereum research
there's just in-person communication
then there's just kind of like the
hidden web of everyone talking to
everyone on telegram
um or signal uh so it's like some of
everything
right 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 some everyone just for example
is like
you everyone who's running a node is
going to see
almost the same thing right like they're
going to be off by a few seconds and
like maybe they'll be off by a few
they'll disagree by a few minutes but
like if it's a serious attack you know
people are gonna know right it's not
like one of those things where you know
oh
it we're trying to agree on like i don't
know did epstein kill himself or like
some you know
read the political facts for like in
reality no one knows a single thing
about what's actually going on and
they're all speculating
like it is much more visible right so we
do have that
but you know at the same time i'm happy
to admit that like
these are fairly untested mechanisms but
like at the same time they're also
untested mechanisms and proof of work
right
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 my um
these miners in these miners do not
attack so we're going to keep them in
like you have to pretty much you know
either take out none of the miners or
you do a fork that changes the proof of
work algorithm which takes out all of
the miners right so
the the economics of like recovering
from attacks and proof of work at least
to me
actually do seem more unfavorable
but you know i'm sure the proof of work
people you talk to will give a very
different and contradictory opinions and
that's
totally fine and amazing some people
describe mev
minor extractable value as an
existential risk to ethereum
what is mev how important is it to solve
an mvv
if it's important what ideas do you have
sure how about after this one we'll also
talk about sharding because that's
amazing and it's part of the return back
to sharding and
which is no no return to the big picture
of the scaling problem as you mentioned
i love this conversation you know depth
first search instead of brett first
so uh basically okay ebbyv
minor extractable value um it is not
different in proof of work and proof of
stake right so like if you want to call
it
you know block proposal extractable
value like it sounds a lot sexy but you
know we can call it bpef instead of math
who cares
um but so this is a problem in both
proof of work and proof of stake
yes 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 like take
advantage of that position for economic
gain
in a lot more ways than just collecting
transaction fees right
like for example there's decentralized
exchanges on chain like uniswap
and like let's say the price of eth
versus usdc was 2700
the previous block but then there was a
bit of a market drop and now it's 26.80
where you can go on unit swap and you
can just like gobble up the entire part
of
um you know the automated order book
that's like between 2700 and 26.80 right
and that's
and then at the same time you like run a
bot and uh
you know you buy some yeast back at
26.80 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 um little things like
that there's also things um that involve
like front running other people's
transactions so one example of this
would be
that if someone sends a transaction that
says
buy me five eth for um
whatever price that you can get um then
but with a maximum of
let's say yeah uh 15 000 then you can go
and like
you can send each put a transaction
right in front of that transaction
and you can like buy up that east first
and then you resell it to him at you
know fifteen thousand dollars minus one
yeah so there's then you get to make a
little bit of money though exactly so
there's a lot of these different like
arbitrage front running back running
these different tricks
that allow block proposers to to get
some percentage
on top like overhead exactly and the
reason why this is um
a challenge is because um
it's like first of all it's some it
sometimes degrades
user experience because users get you
know less favorable uh
trades but there are sometimes ways to
like mitigate that for applications
sometimes it's not that bad
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 how to extract all this
revenue i mean because if you're just
collecting transaction fees
there aren't really economies of scale
there aren't really benefits to
centralizing right because it's a very
simple formula you just like grab up the
transactions that pay you the most
but with mev you know you ha there's all
these sophisticated algorithms
and if you have lots of money then you
can hire really smart people to make
amazing algorithms and then you can use
the other half of your money
to get a lot of mining power a lot of
stake and you get a lot of opportunities
to use your even better algorithms
so there's this risk that like as a
result of this
mining is basically or or even
validating proof of stake is going to
centralize
um so i think the ecosystems 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 and the way that you
fire wallet 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
like are very profitable right and then
at the other side of the market you just
have like block proposes reminders that
are just dumb nodes
and they go and ask the what are called
searchers the bundle creators
and they just ask like hey like how much
can you give me if i put in your bundle
and then they just take the highest
offer
right 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 like 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 miners and
validators they kind of
just talk to all the different people
doing the searching and they just you
know accept the highest bidder right
so and this is also just like
interesting uh an interesting example of
like economic design philosophy
right like sometimes you can't just like
make centralization go away sometimes
it's inevitable but
you know at least you can try to kind of
contain it 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
so but you don't see it as an
existential risk it's just incredible
it's a bit of a problem that it has to
be constantly dealt with
it's a i mean it's a risk like there's
obviously a risk that you know there it
it's a very severe problem and that even
this flashbots approach has some fatal
flaw or whatever
um but i'm definitely like
we're definitely approaching it with the
mindset of you know this is a problem
and like yes we do have to do some work
to solve it but we're doing it and uh
so far it's being solved okay let's talk
about the other
really really fascinating part of uh
the future of ethereum let's not call it
ethereum 2.0
but the future of ethereum that also may
require a hard fork i don't know you can
correct me on this
is well broadly
ideas for scaling yes and more
specifically
sort of uh layer two or uh
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 paradigms for
scaling blockchains right as
you said layer one and layer two and
layer one basically means
make the blockchain itself like capable
of processing more transactions by
having you know 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
and then layer two says well we're gonna
keep the blockchain as is
but we're gonna 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 um so
in ethereum the most popular paradigm
failure too is rollups and the most
popular paradigm for
one is sharding so one way to achieve
layer one scaling is to increase the
block size
yes hence the block size wars quote
unquote and uh you actually tweeted
something about
uh people are saying that vitalik
changed his mind about the in it
he went from being a small i went from
being big to small
big small of them 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 you even
get the sharding of where you stand on
this block
size debate sure so the way that i think
about the trade-off is i think about it
as a trade-off between
making it easy to write to the
blockchain and making it easy to read
the blockchain
right 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
and then by right i mean send
transactions so like
i think for decentralization it's
important for both of these tasks to be
accessible
and i think that they're like about
equally important right if you have a
chain that's too expensive to read then
everyone will just trust a few people to
like read for them and then those people
can change the rules without anyone
else's permission
but if on the other hand it becomes
really expensive to write
then everyone will move on to basically
second layer systems that are incredibly
centralized and like that takes away
from
you know decentralization and
self-sovereignty as well so
this has been my viewpoints like pretty
much the whole time right it's that like
you know you need this balance and going
in one direction or the other direction
is very unhealthy
in the bitcoin case um basically what
happens was that
bitcoin originally like at the very
beginning it didn't really have a block
size 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
um but that's interesting i didn't even
know that part yeah but then
um satoshi back in 2010 was worried that
even 32 megabyte blocks would be too
hard to process so he
uh put the limit down to one megabyte
and you know i think
the i put you mean sneaked in there yeah
just like made an update to the bitcoin
software that made blocks bigger than
one i think it's
a million bytes um invalid and
i think the impression that most people
had at the time is that you know this is
just
a temporary safety measure and over time
you know though as we become more
confident in the software that limit
would be
and like raised some uh somewhat
um but ba then
of 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
um you know they're started kind of
coming out of the woodworks this opinion
that like no that limit should just not
be increased
and and you know then there are all of
these attempts at compromising right
um you know first there's like a
proposal for 20 megabyte blocks then
there was the 248 proposal
which is um a bit ironic because the 248
proposal started off being
like a small block negotiating position
but then when the big black people came
back and said like hey where are we are
we gonna do this they're like oh no no
no we don't want them we don't want the
block size increases anymore
uh so you know there were these two
different positions right the small
blockers
i think they valued one megabyte blocks
for two reasons
one is that they just like really really
believe in the importance of
being able to read the chain but two is
that a lot of them
really believe in in maintaining this
norm of never hard forking
right right so the difference between a
hard fork and a soft fork is basically
that
in a soft fork um blocks that were
any block that's valid under the new
rules was still valid under the old
rules
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 whereas with
a hard fork like you have to
update your code in order to stay on the
chain
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
um i actually think soft forks are more
coercive because like basically they
force everyone who disagrees to sort of
go along by default
um but or they have this um
opinion that um there's like
it's more difficult to abuse soft forks
to do really mean things like or
that like completely violate people's
expectations like increasing the supply
which is again there i think there is
some truth to that um
so because of you know these reasons
they just say we're only going to do
soft forks and we
don't we wants to just not do any hard
forks 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 it's 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 doesn't even know about
so it's a hack that that seemed to work
to do
in a small way extend exactly but so
you know small block side was like happy
with these very low levels of block size
and the big block side wanted to
expand to you know at the very least go
to four megabytes then you know maybe go
maybe eight twenty there are there's
disagreements within there as well
um i definitely was uh favoring the big
side um
the whole way through as you can
probably tell
um but even though so the argument
against the big
is that uh it uh makes things more
centralized
yes because fewer people can run and
know that verifies the chain
and also because any of these things
would require a hard fork and
you know hard forks or inherently risky
do you think there's truth to that
um i'm pro hard fork i think hard forks
are actually like
in a yeah you know political economic
sense they're better than soft forks
well let's okay okay i think it's a
beautiful
principle as stated that soft
forks may be more coarse coercive than
hard forks
this this is not just about
cryptocurrency this is about
politics and life that's fascinating so
you're okay with hard forks in fact you
think hard forks
is the right way to make changes because
then everybody's forced to make a
decision
right do you accept this change or not
as opposed to ideas being sneaked
in behind the door and you're and the
decisions forced on you
exactly yeah okay so but you know
hard fork some people say this is when
they talk about sort of ethereum
is there's some aspect to a hard fork
where you're trying to
upgrade a what is it airplane while it's
flying
and uh i think softworks are also
upgrading an airplane while it's flying
but it's just smaller upgrades
that's like there's some truth to that
like
there's definitely um there's definitely
a bit more risk of like a split as a
result of a hard fork then as a result
of a soft
fork um and this split is highly
undesirable right
well it depends like if it's a split
because of a bug then that's horrible
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
well there's also political connections
throughout the history of the united
states 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
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
like often enough like fighting out the
new rules requires
you know a civil war it requires
everyone to move and so forth but no no
on a blockchain like you know
the costs are lower and so so if you
were to look at the way things worked
out with the block size wars
and there was a split what is the
bitcoin cash and bitcoin
yeah um would you like you
looking putting on your historian hat
you mentioned offline you like dan
carlin
so if dan carlin went to do an episode
on the
on the block size wars uh do you think
uh it could have turned out better or do
you
um are you okay with the way it turned
out
i'm definitely disappointed with what
happened with the block with the the big
block side
um 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 and then there's some
opposition party
and the opposition often has like very
legitimate grievances
but at the same time the thing you
notice is that often enough the
opposition just sucks right like it just
doesn't have
you know political capacity it doesn't
have like the ability to
come up with policy because its
entire culture is like designed around
resisting much more and then it's
designed around like you know
actually debating serious policy
trade-offs and
i i worry or i guess not so much worry
because it's already happened
i uh unfortunately think that bitcoin
cash ended up being a victim of this
right like um first no there was a split
with bitcoin cash and then of course
craig wright came in
and you know craig wright was uh this
basically scammer who just keeps on
pretending that he is satoshi nakamoto
the inventor of uh bitcoin hey craig
wright's legal team do you hear me yes i
still think your client is a scammer
so sue me this is definitely gonna be
depth first search because i gotta ask
you about craigslist
because these people have been
contacting me and i'm trying to figure
out like
what is up with this human being 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 is anonymous
and actually most really big people in
the cryptocurrency space
do not like like yourself and others
do not dare claim that they are even for
fun satoshi nakamoto
in fact if satoshi nakamoto is still
alive and is like if say you were
satisfied it seems like
the thing he would do is probably or she
is uh
trying to remain anonymous 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 so uh
on on him if we could just linger on him
what do you make of this character
uh what what are we supposed to make of
this character
should he be ignored is there any
possible truth to his claims
um what do you make of him the the
analogy that's at the side at the top of
my head will get a bit political but
um that's fine you've had michael ballas
um so
um i guess i view craig wright as being
kind of like a donald trump figure
yes and that like he's not very
intellectual um but i think he gets a
big audience
because he says he he says things
that like play to the resentments that
people have and he says things that
uh people wants to hear right like in
the in the wake of this block size war
no the big blockers did feel very
disenchanted like they felt that
you know bitcoin always had this vision
that we were supposed to just keep
increasing the block size and bitcoin is
pewter pure cash it says so in the white
paper
and then this gr this elitist clique of
core devs just like
came in and said you know no no we're
going to impose this totally different
vision
and if you ever want your scalability
you'll have to wait for us to create
this
this totally unproven fancy technology
called the lightning network that works
on your completely different principles
and you know they were very angry at
this and i mean i think like i think a
lot of that anger is justified
um 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
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
but that extra part about where he
satoshi
i think that's um he could have done it
without that but that
i mean that just it's a marketing
strategy like it sort of gives him more
salience like
there's other big block personalities
right but what's the difference between
with greg wright he's not just a big a
big block personality he's
potentially satoshi um and he did say
all the big block things right like he
talked about how oh the concept of a fee
market is fundamentally
like economically wrong and it should be
it should be a free market and you
should be able to have walks as big as
you want like he repeated all the
talking points and so
a lot of people were kind of sucked into
that right
and so he unfortunately was able to
basically dominate
a big part of the bitcoin cash community
for a long time and then
eventually if of course um you know more
and more people started to catch on
um he would just say technical things
that are completely wrong right
like one example of this that i
remember is that he mixed up
the concept of 256 bits and 2 to the
power of 256 bits
right um so you know the difference is
it's like the difference between you
know 80 and the concept of 80 digit
numbers
right um and because of this like he
made this made this argument that said
that
bitcoin that bitcoin's elliptic curve is
friendly to cryptographic pairings like
you don't have to
understand what that is but if you want
to know i have articles on both at
vitalik.ca
um but basically he made this like
technical argument that really hedged on
this point and then when people when
people pressed him on it's like
yes what no no like what look exactly
the the height is like what two and two
to the 256 bits that's uh
a very uh a very tiny amount of
information no no no 2256 bits is more
than the
amount of information in the universe
and like yeah you know equivocated and
kind of like
preyed on people's inability to and you
know understands that mathematical
nuance and i called him out
and eventually i even called him out in
person at this
conference and soul 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
and i remember even some big blockers at
the time getting angry at me
um but you know eventually they i did
get rid of him and then craig well
basically craig wright
um was forced to split off because the
rest of the community refused to accept
some network change that he wanted
and so then there was the bch and bsv
and then in the bitcoin cash community
there was this drama of
are they going to add a developer fund
where they redirect 12 and a half
percent of the revenue from the miners
to the devs
and according to the libertarian not
aggression principle is this technically
theft
um like his um understanding of the
technical depths of cryptocurrency
was lacking in a way that you uh satoshi
nakamoto certainly would not
yes exactly but the point is that even
after craig wright got expunged
the bitcoin cash community kept having
these disagreements right and now
after this uh development funds dispute
there's there's a further split between
bitcoin cash and abc
um so you know the the the brand check
three continues to extend right
so so in that way it's disappointing to
see those kinds of splitting
there was never a result it is i would
have definitely like
wanted to see more of a kind of
like v principled coin with a
like tries to be bitcoin but but you
know follows consistent big block values
but yeah i know maybe i should just like
stop expecting projects that i have no
involvement and to
uh care at all about what my values are
and you know like maybe ethereum just
like is
is never i think you have a powerful
voice and you can inspire other projects
to do
to to to live up to their best possible
cells
okay so that's the level
that's the layer one uh approach
the other layer one within the ethereum
is the idea of sharding yes
what the heck is sharding okay what does
the future of shining look like right so
to summarize that big
long tangent that we just uh once it's a
beautiful tangent button
it's tangent and i think like crypto is
just
uh 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
and
yeah and i'm sure dan carl would have
fun exploring the space at some point
but like 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 um so
shorting 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
a small portion of the data and only
needs to process a small portion of the
transactions
so you can think about it as being like
inspired by bitsword right like on
bittorrent there's no such thing as a
bittorrent full node that has every
movie
right you know the work is like split up
among a huge number of computers and
like that makes sense that's uh you know
the only sane way to scale a system like
that
um and if they actually tried making a
version bit of bits or that required
full nodes
that store every movie then you know it
would have like zero censorship
resistance and it would just like
you know be dead in an instant uh so
the challenge with taking that model and
applying it to blockchains right is that
blockchains aren't just about like
spreading data around they're about
agreeing on exactly what data was spread
around and ensuring that
everything that you agree on actually is
correct 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 a second so how can
each computer
get a guarantee about the other 900
without actually going and verifying
them themselves yep
and it turns out that there are some um
like a bundle of different tricks that
can do that right so like one of them is
uh just random sampling
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 validators
like
you know the stakers and like for
simplicity we'll assume they all have
the same number of coins right if
someone has more coins we'll just kind
of split them up and pretends they're
tense takers
then you you you do like some random
shuffling and you basically say
these random hundred validators are
assigned to validate this
block these random hundred validators
are assigned to validate this block
these random hundred validators are
assigned to validate this block
and so each individual computer only
gets assigned to validate like a small
piece
but then the way that the information
about like what's evaluated 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 and
then like they combine that signature
into one
and then they broadcast that signature
and then everyone else
instead of verifying the blocks directly
just verifies that signature
right 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 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 and so if i trust that
you know 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
and and so you know the attacker is
going to be even at least
evenly spread out too 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 so that's like
one simple form of sharding there's also
other more clever things that you can do
so for example there's this concept of
zk snarks right now called as your
knowledge proofs 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
and so if you make these kinds of proofs
then like if you see a zika snark that
says some block is valid
then you're convinced that that block is
valid and
even if you know everyone in that
committee is evil like they have no way
of making a a valid proof for a bad
block
right 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
and you know
the there's once again you know super
awesome
mathematical cryptographic magic behind
making zk snarks work
um so it gives you a little bit of a leg
up over the 51
honest exact assumption so it's a little
hack that improves upon the random
sampling thing
exactly and like there's other hacks
right like there is another hack called
data availability sampling that allows
you to make sure that the data in the
blocks was actually published
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 charting that's starting but
but the
as i understand maybe correct me on this
is uh in the space of ethereum
the the sharding happens on some fixed
number
like th the split is on some fixed
number i think it's 64.
is the currently sort of proposed number
so
um how does that help scaling is it just
to fix
constant scaling by 64 and is that a way
to achieve those
crazy the crazy amount of scaling that
seems to be required
to use cryptocurrency for uh for
purchasing so doing like competing with
credit cards
and visa and so on right so first i
think like the 64 can be hard forked up
over time
um so we have uh set it so that like
there's theoretically
space in the data structure for 1024
shards it's just that 64 of them are
turned on
um like there are challenges with having
more shards because like you have to
have logic that just like checks and
manages all
of those shards and if there's too many
of them then that becomes too expensive
um but you know even still you can
improve quite a bit
and then the other thing that we're
doing is if
what we're getting maximum scalability
by combining
roll-ups and sharding right so this
might be a good time to talk about
roll-ups
what are roll-ups okay and now we're
moving into layer two ideas yes
so the idea behind a roll-up
is basically that so
instead of um just publishing
transactions directly on chain
and having everyone you know do all of
the checking of those transactions
and what you do is you create a system
where
users send their transactions to some
part like
central party called an aggregator and
like well theoretically you can have a
system where like the aggregator
switches around or anyone can be an
aggregator so
you know it's still like permissionless
to send things um
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 so when i say the state
this is like this is a very important
kind of technical term for blockchains i
mean like
account balances code um
like things that are like memory
internal memory of smart contracts like
basically everything the blockchain
actually has to keep track of and
remember right so
you just put in
you take all these transactions strip
out all the data that's not relevant to
telling people how to update the state
and then you take the data that's needed
to update the state and then you like
really compress it right so like for
example
if we say you know i vitalik have an
account
that's 0x eight blah blah blah blah and
it's 20 bytes
well instead we can say well i have an
account that is
number one eight seven four two two four
in the tree
right and that goes down from 20 bytes
to just like an index and a position
which is three bytes right so you use
all sorts of these fancy compression
tracks then you basically just
instead of publishing all these
transactions you publish this like tiny
compressed blob
right so the amount of data that goes on
chain goes down by maybe about a factor
of ten
right and then the second thing is that
you don't do the computation on chin
instead you do the computation off-chain
and
there's one of two ways to do this right
one is called a zk roll up which is
you just provide a zika snark that
basically says hey look
i did this computation and uh and i have
this proof that here's the
here's the you know some hash of the
result and it's correct and then you
stick it on chain
and everyone verifies this one proof
instead of verifying all these
transactions
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 the
of applying these transactions is and
then someone else can say i disagree the
result is different
and only if two people disagree do you
actually do it on like
do you actually just like publish all of
the data and run the whole
that whole blog on chain so if there's
disagreements then you just
like run everything on chain and whoever
was wrong like loses a lot of money
right so disagreements are very rare and
they're very expensive
and in a ck roll up you don't even rely
on this like challenging
game at all you just rely on a proof so
you know the core principle is basically
that
instead of lots of transactions and all
the trends that everyone verifies every
transaction
it is you take the transactions you
strip strip them down and compress them
as much as possible
then stick that on the blockchain you do
need to stick something on the
blockchain just so that everyone
everyone else can like keep keep up to
date with the states so they know
you know what all the contracts are what
all the balances are and all of this but
it's a very small amount of data and
then you use some 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 compensation
and the result is correct
right so you're pushing like 90 of the
work off chain and then
you know well 90 of the data ends 99 of
the computation option
and then you still have 10 of the data
and 1 of the computation on chin
and so you know your scalability goes up
by a factor of about a hundred
so these systems are already alive for
for some applications right so there's
something called loopering which is just
a
zk roll up for payments right so you can
have
you know assets inside of us inside of
the loopering system
and you can go around and transfer them
but
uh what you um and
you get like much lower transaction fees
right like instead of five dollars you'd
have to pay like less than five cents
um but the only problem is that this
only supports a couple of applications
right now like making one that
supports anything that you can do on
ethereum just takes a bit more work but
that's being done as well right so like
within a few months i'm expecting
you know fully ethereum um capable
um roll ups to um be available as well
so then so roll ups 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 100 times 100
factor of 10 000
you know hundreds of thousands of
transactions a second and like you know
there's your scalability
okay so you choose scalability you can
do a large number of transactions very
quickly and uh the cost of doing those
transactions much lower
you wrote that uh in the long term zka
roll-ups are going to win
in terms of layer 2 technology
specifically you wrote
in general my own view is that the in
the short term optimistic roll ups as
you were saying
are likely to win out of general purpose
evm computation and
zk roll ups are likely to win
out for simple payments uh exchange in
other application specific use cases
just as you were saying but in the
medium to long term zk roll ups will win
out in all use cases as
zk snark technology improves
why do you think uh zk roll ups are
going to win
the big picture battle over layer 2
technologies
so i think zk roll ups like once you
accept that the technology works are
just like conceptually simpler and they
have nicer properties
the reason is that they do not have this
concept of a challenge game right 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 and like they just
submit with no proof they just say
here's what i think the result is
and then if someone else disagrees they
make their own submission and then if
you have two disagreeing submissions
then you actually publish it on chain
and you see who's right
but for this to work like you need to
actually wait for someone to disagree
right 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 uh a block that contains my
withdrawal turns out to be invalid then
there needs to be space for someone to
disagree with it
right whereas with a ck roll up like you
don't need time for disagreement because
you just have a proof right as soon as
the block is submitted there's a proof
and you know it's correct so
disagreements
especially in the long term or sparse uh
then uh
then then you don't want to do the
optimistic
the the game theoretic thing you know
you want to do the zk stock right the z
case
stuff is just like you can in a ck roll
up you can withdraw immediately
um you don't have to like worry about
the economics of proving as much
there's just like fewer issues um the
reason why ck roll-ups are not winning
everywhere today is because you know
zeke's darks is still a crazy new
technology right like this is something
that
10 years ago you know it existed only in
theory and there was none in practice
um then you know eight years ago people
were just getting excited about it in
bitcoin conferences for the first time
um 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 zika snark based anything on
ethereum
and then people started making them and
zk technology has only really become
efficient enough to do a lot of things
within the past maybe
one and a half years so it's
it's new technology it's crazy
technology it's admittedly scary
technology
if you want to learn more i also have an
article about this on vitality.ca
it's actually really really good
most of your writing uh it's it goes
it's
technical but it's accessible i highly
highly recommend
to check out vitalik's articles and
blogs whatever whatever you call them
yeah it's brilliant summary of the work
actually uh ethereum documentation
period is really good i think that's
somewhat crowdsourced that documentation
is really really accessible and
brilliant
uh but let me ask about sort of
other approaches to layer two
like side chains so the one popular one
is polygon
what are your thoughts about polygon
which is a layer two
network is it positive is it negative
for ethereum is it both does it have a
future
which is its own chain but it's using
a theory it's like based on ethereum
essentially
or maybe you can describe what it is um
so i think there is a really big and
important difference in security models
between roll-ups and side-chains
which is basically that roll-ups inherit
from the security of ethereum right so
like if
i have coins inside of bloopering or
optimism or arbitrarium um or zk sync
um then even if everyone else in the
world who is participating in these
ecosystems so like hates me and though
and wants to steal my money i can still
personally
make sure that you know no matter what
happens i get them i get my money out
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 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
um a proof of state consensus with its
own token 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 pro
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 coming together and
stealing everything like it's
it's not impossible right uh where does
the scaling of polygon come from like
why is it
able to process much more transactions
than
the ethereum main chain what's the idea
there i think
in part like i imagine i'm not sure
exactly what its capacity level is but
like i imagine it has a higher capacity
because
it's a bit more willing to take
centralization trade-offs
and then another thing is that like 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 and you know they would each
have their own tokens they would each
have their own chins
and so even if each one of those chains
was only as scalable as ethereum
you know you know you could still like
the total sum of them would still be 100
times more than ethereum
okay um the now the thing that i want to
say in polygons favor just to be very
fair to them like i i i really you know
i i definitely really you know respect
the work that they're doing so you know
start with the um
a bit with that word of uh not criticism
caution right like it's
um that they made this
kind of deliberate trade-off for very
pragmatic reasons which is that
the ethereum ecosystem needs to scale
now and there are applications that want
to do something now
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
you know 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
um but whereas you know with paul with
polygon like
the best thing that you can say in
polygons favor and against optimism is
that you know optimism is not live and
polygonal is life
right like it just takes more work to
create a system that has
these extra roll-ups uh security
features
and so polygon just said we're gonna be
the system that makes the pragmatic
tradeoff we're gonna go
you know functionality first and then
you know we can talk about adding back
the security later
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
more security and at least becoming more
uh
becoming a roll up or at least you know
adding
a polygon chain let's say roll up at
some point in the future
which is definitely something i think
they yeah you know absolutely should
follow through one
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
it's security isn't perfect at least it
exists and people can go use it um and
then
over time you know the chain matures as
the applications mature like units
i think of a very reasonable strategy
and i'm definitely
really happy that they're part of the
ecosystem
yeah it's kind of interesting the
history of cryptocurrency
has this um 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 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
i i don't know what to make of that sort
of from an engineering perspective
i'm more and more becoming comfortable
and 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
what do you make of that tension 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 like when you build the the quick
and dirty thing like you
you would still already have ideas in
your head about
you know what the the more complete
thing with all the security features
added on would look like right even if
it requires a hard fork
um yes like even so you know like for
example we're sharding right like well
yeah i think
it's likely that the first version of
chardonnay that comes out like is not
going to have you know zk snarks and
data availability sampling for example
but we know what these technologies are
we feel like we
you know have wrapped our heads around
them 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
uh 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
but then over time like it's designed in
such a way that it has this easy on
on-ramp to adding those things
right and if you don't think explicitly
about like being future compatible then
you do often end up with a a quick and
dirty solution that backs you into a
corner
and then there are definitely cases
where like i think the ethereum
ecosystem has suffered from that and we
have had to
like expand pretty significant effort
on for example removing features that we
didn't realize
that we actually can't sustain like one
big example is just increasing the yeah
the gas costs so like making some
operations more expensive when they uh
because they should be expensive because
they actually take a lot of time in the
process
and um so that's you know making a thing
some things more expensive kind of like
taking some functionality away
um so if you can like 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 road
map and coming up with a road map where
you know that like if you wants to do
either of those things then you have a
clean path toward it
that's probably the best kind of
practical way to get the best of both
worlds that we have
okay let's talk about this uh wonderful
process of
merging
okay so there's the main net
which is the ethereum 1.0 chain or the
ch
what should we say the chain that uses
proof of work as a consensus mechanism
and then there is uh what is it called
the the beacon chain
that uses the uh the
proof of stake mechanism and i believe
the
beacon has been deployed successfully is
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
um
it's about merging those two when do
the two chains one that's proof of work
one that's proof of stake
merge and what are the most difficult
parts of this process right so i guess
you've said right the way that we if i
set up this proof of stake transition is
that at first
the proof of stake chain just launches
on its own right and this is the thing
that happened
in december and the proof of stake chain
has been
running for close to six months uh
now um i mean by the time people watch
this it might actually be six months
um and but it isn't actually coming to
consensus on anything except for itself
right
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
um and just like prove to the community
that you know proof of stake actually is
real and it's
and a full transition is realistic
because you know the thing that you're
transitioning to
already exists and already works and
then at some point 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
uh so the way that the merge
will work is um and it's definitely gone
through a few different iterations like
the the earlier versions of this
actually required more work for users
and more work for clients 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
chin
the new version is designed to be
much more seamless for users right so
basically what actually happens
is that the old chain basically becomes
embedded
inside the new chain right so at
starting from the merge transition block
every proof of stake chain block is
going to contain a block of
the what what we consider now to what we
consider to be the ethereum chain today
but we'll call it the execution chain
and then at the same time
to create one of these blocks you're not
going to need proof of work anymore
right 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 so
you basically have like a chain inside a
chain
and this is you know from an
architecture perspective it's you know
you might think it's a little bit
sub-optimal 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 um and
it also just means that the upgrade
process is extremely seamless right
because
from the point of view of a client
that's following the chain you basically
have to
up update nothing right 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 statute
so there'll be this merge block that
will mark this transition
and over time i guess the the new chain
will contain the full
record of all the transactions that's
ever happened on the previous chain
on the old chain so like maybe i'm
asking a dumb question here but
in in this process is the new chain
going to have
all the information of the past
transactions
the new chain is not going to hold
information from what happened in the
ethereum chain before the merge
right so like ethereum clients of the um
that um people are going to use like
around the time of the merchants soon
after the merge
they're probably just going to sync you
know like and check the proof of work
chain
up to the merge and then they're going
to check the proof of stake chain but at
some point in the future i think people
will just stop bothering checking the
proof of work before the merge
got it so that old history information
is not important
for the future or like if you're
operating actively on the
on the new chain that history is not
important to you
it's not impo let's see so it's not
strictly important for
um app for just like in any
like smart contract or just like
applications that run on the blockchain
it can be important to users and it can
be important for some applications
but we're basically saying that like
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
and like these other protocols actually
exist right like there's something
called the graph
which is doing some history retrieval
potentially you can just take that
entire chain and stick it on bit torrent
like
there's lots of ways to like archive it
and create kind of customized search
protocols for it
so what's your sense why so there's a
python 2 in python 3 and it took 4
ever for people to switch what's your
sense why this
merge has been taking longer than
perhaps was expected
i think the biggest reason is just you
know we've been
underestimating the technical complexity
there's a lot of technical complexity in
making a successful proof of stake chain
there's a lot of technical complexity in
actually figuring out the transition
process
there's so that's bigger than social
complexity so it's uh the technical
complexity you would say is the bigger
reason for the
any delays than the social complexity i
i actually think so i and i
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 in 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 does
from january 2014 which was you know um
two months after the project started and
like maybe even a day after the
announcement
um so you know it was proof of stake was
not something that we uh kind of put on
any on anybody by surprise
and then when the dow fork happened and
you know the people on the edc 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 the more bitcoiny types and
the more bitcoiny types do also tends to
like like proof of work more
and so like that also sort of ended up
you know sort of
like purifying the communities on both
sides i guess
so ethereum classic is not switching to
proof of stake and
you know they're happy with their setup
and
by the time that uh you know it came
through the beacon chain launching ends
and now i think the community is
there's very strongly in favor of the
proof of stake switch
but let me ask the question that no
engineer wants to hear which is uh the
question of timeline when do you think
the merge
will happen do you have a sense it might
happen this year
dear sense it might be pushed towards
next year 2022
um or uh or even beyond
um i think early 2022 was like the most
realistic
there's i think there's definitely still
like an optimistic case of it happening
this year but like
the realistic thing to count on is
definitely the early part of
very early part of next year is there
specific things that stand out to you
that are
like do they'll make you feel good about
progress
if you see it happening um so the thing
that we
had last month is that we had this
online hackathon called rayonism where
basically a bunch of uh
the different uh client developers that
are going to be part of the transition
like hacks together some test nets of
the post-merge ethereum chain
so these were only test nets of what
would happen after the merge they were
not test nets of the transition itself
so the thing that people are working on
now actually is the transition
um so having a
full specification of both the
transition and post transition
i mean we have specifications now but
like in a realistic way
though probably needs to have a couple
of changes and have things that continue
to be ironed out
and then have a yet test net that does
both the transition
and the post transition and then like
once you have a test network then
you just have to do a lot of testing and
audit it um and then
you know do some runs on not just a
specialized test network but on say an
existing test network like a rob center
rinkeby that
ethereum people already significantly
use and if it works then
you can deploy the transition on mainnet
just as a quick comment
because this is fascinating in august of
last year
there was this uh medalla
i believe it's pronounced madasha it's a
south american
subway station i forget where but spell
with two l's
yeah yeah because that's you know that's
how spanish works right like the two
else have uh
dasha yeah okay cool anyway but i read
about it
in uh middle of august august 14th there
was an incident
on that test net um what how does this
process work like what do you learn from
those kinds of incidents when stuff goes
wrong
in the test process um i think uh that
incidence was that
there was a consensus failure of some
kindness i remember um
basically just different clients
interpreting things in different ways
and then one of them getting kicked off
the network
and then it ended up taking a while to
actually like
get everyone to get back online like a
big part of the reason why it took weeks
to resolve right is because
it's on a test network like the coins
are valueless and so there's
not really this big push of any kind for
people to actually
you know going down with a new client so
they can start participating again
and so you know it definitely took a
while until the chain started finalizing
again um
but and then also like there was i think
another
round of just not finalizing in october
as i remember
um that i mean there were definitely
things that we learned like there were
a lot of things especially that client
developers just learned about like
optimization
and how to build their clients in a way
that they can process things
efficiently um there's a lot that we
learned from just like seeing the full
life cycle of what happens when
more than a third of the validators go
offline and then finalization stops
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 like we don't
use the word swash we use the word weak
for this but like basically also burned
um until you know the people who are
participating go back up to two thirds
and then the chain goes back to
finalizing
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 midnight i
mean there's also an incident
just recently in april 24th
of 2021 where uh
this was on beacon i guess there was a
bug discovered in the software client
prism
that prevented roughly 70 percent of
validators on the network
from producing blocks 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
we're talking about small bugs i were
talking about
like emergent social unexpected
social bugs 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
so one of the lucky things there was
that this particular bug only prevented
proposals of blocks it did not prevent
attestations
right so at the stations is just a
mechanism for voting on blocks
and it's the attestations that are
actually responsible for the chain
finalizing so like coming to this
more permanent agreement on blocks right
so the chain was actually quite stable
all the way through
um the i think the thing that we
generally
learned from these experience
experiences
is just how valuable it is to have the
some multi-client network
right 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 that everyone
um just runs right there's multiple
implementations of
the protocol and these multiple
implementations they're they all
process and verify the blocks that each
other can
you know verify right so they all speak
the same language
now sometimes when there's a bug they
disagree right and
when two clients disagree because of a
bug we call this a consensus failure
and consensus failures are pretty
serious right and when
you have um clients monoculture like
bitcoin does
then like it's more rare to have
consensus failures do you still have
them actually bitcoin had a consensus
failure between two different versions
of the same client back in 2013
um but they're less likely to happen but
the interesting thing is that the
multi-client architecture has actually
i think saved ethereum much more than
it's heard it
so even in this most recent incidents
right like prism was not producing
blocks but all the other clients were
still producing blocks
um there's four others right yes it's a
prism
nimbus teku and the white house um
and then also ethereum back in 2016 had
this fun
event that we call the shanghai dos
attacks uh they're called that because
uh
the attacks started like right on the
first day of a
of our annual conference at defcon that
happens to be in shanghai that year
so what happened like basically was that
someone came up with a way to create
blocks
that were very slow for one clients to
process but not the other client
so at that time there were basically two
ethereum clients there were they were
called geth and parity
um right now i think the top three ones
are
gath nethermind and baso um 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
like uh completely failing at processing
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 and that
actually really helped the
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
there aren't any of those uh dust blocks
or uh
and dust bugs remaining um so that was
another example
and then like as a counterpoint as a
counter example so
like something that also shows the point
from the other side
um bitcoin had this bug in 2010 right
the
balance overflow bug basically someone
created a transaction that had two
outputs and those
outputs had were both of a few billion
bitcoin so like about two to the power
of 63 satoshis
and then if you add those numbers
together you you go above to the power
of 64.
and of course you know computers like
once you go above to the power of 64 you
wrap around
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 satoshis or
something but actually it was asking for
to the power of 64 plus a billion and so
you know the attacker just managed to
create like
billions of bitcoin out of thin air and
this was not only discovered and fixed
after something like 12 hours
um but you know if there had been like
if bitcoin had been a multiple
implementation system
then what would have 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 and so
there would have been a consensus
failure but at least that would have
um like alerted everyone that there is a
problem very
quickly and it also would have given
everyone just like obvious social
permission to go and
you know pick which whichever one of the
chains is correct and solve the problem
um 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 you
know to be fair it's a model that we get
criticized for a lot right like
bitcoin people talk about you know the
risk of consensus failures that this
creates
um vc types are like well you know isn't
it expensive and wasteful to funds three
software teams where you could just be
making you know one
quote focused effort you know they love
the word focused and like you know
ethereum is not that but it's amazing
despite not being that
yeah um the
basically yes so that was interesting
and and then you know there have
definitely been other
learnings as well just from like seeing
the chain live and
you know seeing what actually is the
staking experience
like what are the actual incentives for
all the different participants um
so i definitely feel like we're gaining
a lot from this sort of one year of uh
trial running the chain before we
actually make all of ethereum depend on
it
let me ask uh perhaps a strange question
but uh you know proponents of bitcoin
will say
uh things like bitcoin fixes everything
so why do we need ethereum
uh versus like bitcoin
plus lightning network for scalability
uh and then using bitcoin for
with this proof of work for security so
in this kind of um
it is perhaps sort of a strange question
but it's a high-level question
why do we need another technology
yes there's a bunch of nice features but
like
doesn't bitcoin fix everything already
so
and the thing that 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 no
that are resistance to like whoever runs
them breaking the rules and all of these
things right and
i think that pretty strongly that these
principles are
like really valid in importance to much
more things than just money right like
bitcoin is
uh the blockchain for money and ethereum
is uh
built from the start as a general
purpose blockchain right 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 d5 today
um you know you can make like ens the
decentralized domain name system
um you can put make prediction markets
on it
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
there's this big long list of like just
interesting things that you could use
about blockchains to do
right like basically they are sort of
the missing piece
that um where without them the kinds of
things that a decentralized computer
network can do is very limited
and once you have them you know a lot of
those limitations end up going away
uh and so
ethereum was like always from the
beginning about that right it's about
like hey
this isn't just money this is 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 dao
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 um and
you don't need to
like just constantly keep trusting
centralized actors
and hence the smart contracts exactly
as being a sort of a core technology as
part of ethereum
yes exactly smart contracts the computer
programs that are running on ethereum
they are like the core of what makes
ethereum general purpose
yeah um so i think like i do think that
you know there's a lot more that wrong
with the world than
just money right 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
then suddenly wars are going to go away
right because
like first of all um you know like
senoraj revenue is only a small portion
of government revenue right it's like
what
five ten percent something like that
second of all like if
you are the sort of um this is one of
the things i don't even get about their
philosophy like
let's say you're the sort of person who
is a like an extreme and very
distrusting libertarian and you think
that these governments are terrible
right like we 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 and
the so the question you have to ask is
like okay you
um with your new um you know
magic newfangled cyber currency that
takes over the world
take away the government's ability to
have seniors revenue and so you reduce
the government's revenue by 10
if the government is that evil which
portion of its um
expenses is it going to take that 10
from is it gonna stop the bombing people
in afghanistan or is it going to cut
welfare
if you think it's the first you have a
very optimistic view of the government
right so that's
i guess my perspective on like why the
whole um you know
we're going to save the world and create
and
uh create peace by like denying
governments the right to stealth
taxation kind of perspective doesn't
really make much sense for me
and i do think that there is real value
that comes from a
decentralized and open currency like
just the fact that there is a financial
infrastructure that anyone in the world
can
you know go ahead and use right like
it's
and that's something that can easily be
a big boon for people right there's a
lot of places
where the uh currency and
is much less stable than the dollar and
you know these people like they don't
like well if they use bitcoin
their only option is to get big ones
right which you know are also pretty
volatile
um if they use ethereum then you know
they can get ether but then they can
also get stable coins right
and you might think that you know oh
you're not being ideologically pure
now you're giving them stable coins
which are mirroring dollars and
obviously dollars are going to collapse
too
but the reality is that delvers are
vastly more stable than the venezuelan
bolivar
so like there are
really like meaningful and beneficial
things that you can
give to people by create having a global
and open financial system
but i think if you want to actually do
that like you have to have much more
than just a currency right
and then if you want to go beyond
financial things then you know you have
to
obviously have much more than a currency
and then
you know you also have to actually
actually take scalability seriously
because the non-financial applications
like nobody's going to pay five dollars
a transaction for them
can we return to dogs sure
no no no no no no no no the other one's
categorically forbidden get categorical
is there any cryptocurrency based on
cats actually i i think there are like
was
there was cat coin there was neon 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
elon said that quote ideally
doge speeds up block time 10x
increases block size 10x and drops
fee 100x then it wins
hands down end quote you said
in the blog post partially responding to
that
that there are subtle technical reasons
why this is not possible
to this elon said that you quote
fear the doge uh so let's talk about
this
what are the technical uh hurdles for
dogecoin 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 dosh okay no i love the
dosh um i actually
visited the doge in japan a few years
back it's uh
she's an amazing dog he's still alive
wait the original doge yeah
oh wow um
so you know we accept doge every
every year for our annual def con
conferences
um so and i definitely you know don't
think ethereum is opposed to dot coins i
mean
like i kind of wants to feel like you
know ethereum is at least a little bit
in spirit itself a dog coin and then you
know as i'm as i mentioned you know i
love doge i bought
i bought a bunch of doughs i still hold
some a bunch of dosh
the on the scalability question like the
challenge basically is like
the limits uh scalability as a and the
trade-offs with centralization right
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 uh
just becomes more likely that the chain
becomes centralized and
becomes vulnerable to all kinds of
capture so does it need like
some of the layer two technologies that
we've been talking about
um 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
loopering then you know that would be
amazing i mean if they want to just like
take zika roll up style technology and
just have thousands of transactions a
second on their own chain then that's um
you know that would be a great outcome
as well so what is there ways for
ethereum
and uh dogecoin to work together so
okay so there's a power 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 uh cryptocurrencies that are
already technologically advanced and
pushing forward that kind of technology
i i definitely think there is room
for you know that uh there's that meme
of doge like
taking over that's the door i've seen it
is there a way to ride that
uh that storm that wave of the doge
has taken over i think if we could have
a secure doshu ethereum bridge then
you know that would be amazing and then
when ethereum gets its scalability
any scalability thing that works for
ethereum assets you would be able to
also like
trade wrapped doors with extremely low
transaction fees and very high speed as
well
is there uh is there precedence for
building secure bridges between
cryptocurrencies
is that i mean how difficult is this
kind of task that's it's definitely
something that's in its infancy infancy
there definitely have been some
cross-chain interaction things that have
been done before
um so one the earliest is probably the
concept of merge mining right when
a chain just makes its entire
proof-of-work algorithm dependent on
the proof-of-work algorithm of another
chain and so i think
famous doshcoin actually merged mines
the litecoin which is
i think in retrospect it's not looking
like a very good choice because now
deutsche coin is bigger than litecoin um
but
um you know if there's potentially some
way for
dogecoin to merge mine within ethereum
proof of stake ins of some kinds then
like that could be an interesting
alternative um
if so that's one type of like chain
interaction
as far as like bridges like one chain
reading another chain
early in ethereum's history there was
this project called btc relay
it's a smart contract on ethereum that
just verifies bitcoin blocks
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
so i i think if we want to make a btc
relay 2.0
and that becomes cheaper because you
know it uses snarks or something like
that then you probably could
but and maybe now is the time when you
actually
like can do that sort of one-way
verification but the one challenge
though is that
if he wants to have a bridge that allows
you to move assets between chins
then you don't just need one-way
verification you need two-way
verification
right and ethereum can verify anything
because ethereum smart contracts can
just run arbitrary code
but if you want bitcoin to be able to do
things based on what happens in ethereum
lands then like bitcoin would have to
basically
well they can do everything with soft
forks because like you know that that's
their religion
but no they'll they'll do it that way
and if doge wants to
make a fork where that allow allows for
like
two-way transferability with the
ethereum then you know
they could i mean i i think that would
be a lovely collaboration to make if
there's interest i think there might
actually even be
some multi-sig funds that have some um
some funding it's just a bounty for
someone to make a bridge between the two
yeah could you maybe try to
psychoanalyze elon musk for a brief
second
so what are your thoughts about tesla
and elon musk's journey through the
cryptocurrency world
so first with bitcoin and then with
doshcoin
so acquiring a large acquiring holding a
large amount of bitcoin
and i believe at least considering the
acquiring and holding a large amount of
doshcoin positives
negatives what do you think the future
for tesla and spacex
in the cryptocurrency space looks like
do you think they'll consider ethereum
um i'm i'm sure that if you know that
they stay in
the the cryptocurrency ecosystem at all
then they have to at some point
yeah you know bitcoin number one
dogecoin number i mean you know come on
it deserves to be number three
and then or number two and then ethereum
can be whatever that uh
whatever that other number is um but um
the if ethereum only becomes a dot
coin somehow maybe change the logo to
incorporate
a dog of some sort almost like doors
like
uh sneaking behind oh that would be that
would be fascinating before the emerge
happened
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 ins or or
any intel like deep intentionality to
the whole process
i think like he's just a human being and
he likes dogs just like i like dogs yeah
right
that is i think that is literally the
reasoning behind the whole dose dogecoin
thing
there is some aspect to which i mean the
guy
helped launch a car into space
right like you could you could ask like
what is the purpose of that
i think the purpose of that is uh fun
there i think he truly is more and more
especially
lately embodying the whole idea that the
most
the most entertaining outcome is the
most likely and he's fully embracing the
most entertaining outcome
and in many ways dogecoin is the most
entertaining cryptocurrency
as cryptocurrency becomes more and more
impactful in the world
people are getting more and more serious
about it and so he's selecting the
cryptocurrency that is the most the
least serious and the most fun
and there's something to that uh like
coupling
fun with uh technological sophistication
um and somehow figuring out a way to do
that absolutely you do that well you
know i
i i want the world to be fun i think the
world being fun is great
okay let me ask about a couple other
technologies if it's okay
sure what are your thoughts about chain
link and hybrid smart contracts that
utilize off-chain external data sources
and i think it's definitely necessary
for smart contracts so that
you do a lot of things to use off chain
data of some kind right like
if you want to have a stable coin you
need a price oracle so you know what
price you're targeting
um if he wants to have some fancy you
know crop insurance gadget like i always
you know
i think ether risk has been doing a lot
of uh good work with that in
i think it was either kenya or sri lanka
or both like they're they're making a
lot of
good progress and some in some of those
places
like you need some kind of oracle to
tell you you know did it actually rain
in this particular area
um if he wants 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 and
so projects that provide oracles are
definitely really important and there
are definitely different kinds of use
cases like augur is more about you know
events
and the auger oracle is designed like i
think differently from chain link right
like chain link
emphasizes the whole you know like we
have a fast automated
thing that just like gives you data
quickly um whereas auger
is more you know we don't give a crap
about speed um
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
um so i mean i i think i mean the chain
link is definitely like
taking a yeah good and the important
part of the oracle design space and i'm
definitely happy that there is like
that project taking the task on and at
the same time i do think
that you know their their frog army on
twitter can get a bit intense sometimes
but like frog
army is there is there a way to
incorporate sort of oracle network type
of
ideas into ethereum i personally
would prefer the ethereum base layer
like
stay away from trying to provide too
much functionality because
i think once you have the ethereum base
layer
making a claim about like say the us
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 right like for example you know
imagine if there was some
you know civil war in the us split up
and you had two currencies that both
claims to be the us dollar well
you know ethereum would would have to
pick one for the sake of everyone who's
already using that oracle so you know
does that mean that the blockchain would
be
like taking a position in this big
megapolitical debate
so i think like for the just those kinds
of reasons
i would personally like prefer um
ethereum itself to be more of this sort
of
pure platform that just analyzes the
transactions and just
mathematically using uh deterministic
consensus rules and then if you need the
oracles that can be all your tears
i think ethereum benefits from
not trying to do everything at layer one
and having this like very robust way or
two ecosystem where you have all these
projects doing interesting things
yeah focus on the basic technology avoid
the politics gotcha
let me ask a bit of a human question
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 is
there a positive
inspiring human story to be told about
why you two parted ways
i kind of wants to let the various books
about ethereum speak for themselves
um but you know you know if i feel like
you know since that time i think you
know charles has
clearly progressed and then he
matured in a lot of ways and i mean
people who follow charles
closely have definitely told me that you
know like 2021 charles is very different
from
2014 charles and i'm sure 2021 vitalik
is much
different from 2014 metallic as well i'm
kind of interested
how the 2030 and 2040 vitalik and
charles look like as well
oh interesting like the progression of
the humans
is this going to be one of those things
where like everyone comes full circle
and then 2030 vitalik and charles are
best friends
yeah i mean not necessarily best friends
but some kind of
uh um are able to reminisce in ways that
is um
that puts some of the tension of the
past behind i think
such things are possible um i think
you know people definitely absolutely
have a right to
and uh and they should strive to just
constantly change and reinvent
themselves
um is there something you could say
about your thoughts about the cardano
project
that charles hoskinson leads 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 things
is there something again positive
inspiring that you could say
are they a competitor is it
complementary technology
it's uh and there's definitely
interesting ideas in there 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
um but you know there's definitely very
interesting things that come out of
you know iohk research and so is there
can you comment on that kind of idea i
as sort of uh
having a foot in research enjoy
charles's kind of emphasis on papers
and like deep academic rigor is there
what's the role
of deep research rigor in the world of
cryptocurrency
interesting i'm actually the sort of
person who thinks deep rigor is
overrated
um the reason why i think deep rigor is
overrated is because i think like
the the in terms of like why protocols
fail
i think the number of failures or that
are outside the model is even more
important
is like bigger and more important than
the failures that are inside the model
right so if you take selfish mining for
example like the
the that original discovery from 2013
that showed how
um bitcoin does
like even if it has a 50 uh fault
tolerance assuming everyone's honest it
only has a
yeah you know zero to 33 percent fault
tolerance depending on your network
model
if you assume uh rational actors and
like to me that wasn't that was a great
example of like an outside the model
failure right because
traditional consensus research just up
until
or before the blockchain days did not
think about
like incentivization much right like
there was a little bit of thought about
incentivization there's like
a couple of papers on the byzantine
altruist rational model but
it wasn't that deep it was mostly
operating under the assumption that
you know this we're going to make
consensus between 15 participants and
these are institutions
and if something goes wrong then you
know if it was we can figure out
whether or not it was deliberate offline
and if they did something evil we
consume them
whereas in the crypto world you can't do
that right and so
like that whole discovery basically
arose just because
like you know the model of uh
traditional uh consensus research just
like didn't cover those possibilities
and then
like once you go out of the model those
other issues do exist
right um so but then at the same time
like
there definitely are um protocols that
turn out to be
insecu that do have failures inside the
model like this reminds me of at the
time when
i think i found a bug in a proposed uh
consensus implementation from either
bitshares or eos
this happened around the end of 2017. um
so that was definitely inside the model
because like they had
a very clear idea of what they were
trying to achieve they had a very clear
description
and like there's a very clear
mathematical um argument for why the
description doesn't lead to what they're
trying to achieve but ultimately
what you're trying to achieve can never
be fully like described in formal
language right like
i think this is the big discovery of you
know the ai safety people for example
right like
just having a a specification of what
you want is an insanely hard problem
and like the more powerful the optimizer
that you're giving the instructions to
the more you have to be careful
and and so you know i think
there are kind of these two sides
and then the other thing is that
a lot like a lot of the academic
approach ends up
like basically optimizing for other
people inside of the academic system
and it doesn't really optimize for like
curious outsiders whereas like i
personally met like totally optimized
for curious outsiders or at least i feel
like i strive to
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 um
but i you know on the other hand you
know there's
i mean there's definitely real benefits
that come from
like just taking us
a rigorous approach especially when you
know you know what the thing that
ex like you know what the specification
is of what you're trying to get
and like you're trying to kind of
improve your way
or provide protocols that actually
provide that like you know exactly what
you're
looking for i feel like realistically
you probably wants to do both kinds of
analysis
and like sometimes even want to do both
kinds of analysis and stages right like
you have
you want to do more quick and dirty
things and even want public feedback on
the quick and dirty stuff
and then later on you formalize it more
and then you get more feedback
um like in general i guess i feel like
the norms of research in
the future like the internet has just
changed so much there's no way that it's
not going
and you know it's 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
club 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
like you know i think
you know there's a big possibility that
you know things that the ethereum
ways that the ethereum ecosystem
approaches some problems is totally
wrong and if there's other ecosystems or
different principles and they can
do well that's something that we can
learn from in the spirit of the depth
first search
can you comment on ai safety and some
people are really worried about the
existential risks of artificial
intelligence
is there something you could say that's
uh
hopeful about how we avoid in the same
kind of line of uh reasoning about
creating formal models versus kind of
looking outside the model into
what the real world actually is like 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
uh weapon systems or just the paperclip
problem
uh that we can avoid ai destroying the
world
so my impression is actually that like
this is
more of a kind of faraway impression and
it could be wrong that it might even be
that one of the challenges that ai is
not formal enough
like because ai does is very like
practitioner oriented right 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
uh so a lot of the time like there just
isn't
actual science behind like why this hack
works and why this uh
other hack doesn't work you just sort of
like trial and error your way into it
um but and i could see how that approach
works but at the same time like that
approach is
not good for legibility for example it's
not good for like understanding what the
heck is actually going on
like how these kinds of systems
conceivably might fail
like there's even you know a debate on
like can you take gpt3 like things and
just scale them up and
their intelligence will continue to
improve or is there just like
some types of reasoning that they're
fundamentally bad at and like
yeah they're not gonna get good at it no
matter how much you like scale this
exact same approach and add more
hardware to it
so having like
thinking about what's going on more
explicitly i mean my understanding is
that a big part of
a ai safety research is trying to do
that sort of stuff
right and formalize yeah formalize
try to improve just ai legibility
like 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 right
whereas with crypto or with traditional
cryptography
you know it's like very much not well
okay i mean
i shouldn't quite say that 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
the places where it's very informal is
like well how do we even know that there
isn't an efficient algorithm for
factoring numbers
yeah we kind of tried it for 40 years
and then
you know so far no one's found anything
better than the gen general number field
sieve and like okay fine we'll just
assume it's fine
you know how do we know you can't i'm
gonna find uh the the discrete log
between two elliptic curve points like
no did it a couple of decades no one's
found anything
faster than like baby step giant step
stuff uh so
that's and like
there's there's a there's definitely uh
ways in which that approach really makes
sense right because at least you can
concentrate your analysis
on a small number of building blocks 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
and then everything else just sort of
gets formally built on top and you
actually can
like mathematically reduce the security
of big thanks to building blocks right
like you can have mathematical proofs
that say
you know if you make a zk snark 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
uh so so zika is an example where
formalism is
is beneficial absolutely yeah and so
maybe you can have the same kind of
stuff in the ai safety within
within ai systems that you can get get a
hold of some kind of
aspect of the systems that you can
control right provably
and then in blockchains and
cryptocurrency i
think the one area where consensus like
mechanisms is still more an art than a
science
is that these aren't just like
technological systems they're crypto
economic systems right and they make
assumptions about people
and which assumptions you can make about
people is not something that you can
prove with math
right the even just the basic 51 percent
exact people are honest can you trust
the 51 percent
um if you can't trust the 51 can you
trust the other 49
to be able to coordinate on like making
their own fork
what will happen to coin prices like how
do people as
human beings react to these events like
there's all of these assumptions
yeah but you know at the same time look
if you can write down the assumptions
then you can like do
formal things with them i almost forgot
to ask you
about one of the most exciting aspects
of ethereum i mean it's non-technical i
think it's a
it's a societal it's social which is
nfts so what do you think
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 so this is maybe
the social impact on the world on on the
individual creators of all kinds
like is that something you've actually
expected to see
and ft's having this kind of impact and
beyond
what do you think will happen in the uh
in the digital space with nfts
in virtual reality and gaming all those
kinds of things
i was definitely surprised by like nfts
in particular
like i even actually i think might be on
record somewhere on some tech conference
panel like they were asking you know
um it was one of those overrated or
underrated sections and asked about nfts
and i thought
and i said like hey i think nfts are
overrated yeah and you know in
retrospect that turned out to be quite
wrong
i might think like i guess i just
personally
can't really relate to this concept of
like spending a lot of money on a thing
like there's nothing you know there's no
queer
kind of understanding of why that thing
would uh
maintain its value right um uniqueness
of a thing
having value right exactly like that's
like i definitely am like cannot really
understand you know the psychology
behind
like buying you know paying two hundred
thousand dollars for original art
painting i'd be like you know
if i had a mansion just like give me
photocopies of everything
you can hang three photocopies of the
the mona lisa section
well i would even have the mona lisa i
think i'd probably just like have some
nyan cats or something
that's one thing where mathematics or
theoretical computer science cannot
formalize why the heck nfts are valuable
exactly
but the thing that uh 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 like i'm interested in
this concept of
decentralized public goods funding right
like i want
things that are good and valuable to as
much as possible also be
things that can't you know economically
sustain the people who produce them
right because if you don't have that
then either the public goods just don't
get produced at all
or people make like 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
and you know both of those things are
not very nice uh 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 it's like great that's another
stream of revenue for
you know creative work that often does
still get get underfunded and that's
amazing
okay let me ask you a weird question we
talk about craig wright a little bit but
a lot of people write to me one of two
emails
one email uh is uh
calling any coin outside of bitcoin a uh
a scam and then the other email is
saying
my my favorite coin is the best coin
it's going to save the world whatever
that coin is
uh and so i sit back and i look at i
have no idea
i i trust i tried to figure out like the
humans that i trust in this space
just but basic human qualities but do
you think
some coins are scams uh
do you think some coins maybe another
way to ask it are scammier than other
coins
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
because there's the harshness of the
language from the bitcoin maximalist
that
doesn't just say everything is a scam
including ethereum
uh but they use terms like coin
that says it's not only a scam it's like
a waste of time i mean
every word you can use they say that
that's very harsh
and then some people are just apply the
word scam a lit much much
more conservatively and just refer to
coins that legitimately are trying to
scam
people out of their money as scams so
what do we do with this word scam should
it ever be applied to coins
and uh is it a a binary thing or is it
the gray area
hmm it's i think it's definitely a gray
area like there's definitely
things that are really in actual scams
like i mean bit connects would be one
example of uh something that's away on
the scam
spectrum did you see their 2017
promotional video by the way
big connect yeah hey what's up what's up
what's up
piconic this is it was this three minute
48 second video that was just of this
guy
making this totally crazy rant 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 this claims about
how it would go to go up in value
yeah that was definitely like the peak
of these pure
completely scammy coins and you know
that was definitely really terrible 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 but then of
course you know there's this bit this
spectrum
of things that are not completely scams
um and then things that are
not scams and that are technically
totally fine projects but where
the 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 or
in the community doesn't realize and
then
you know a really good project right so
like
if you want to go a step like
well if that's 100 scam then like you
know what would i call
like say 80 scam well like bitcoin sv is
one example this is a craig wright's
fork of bitcoin
like theoretically it's a blockchain
right it's a fork of bitcoin
it has some you know 500 12 megabyte
blocks
if you really wanted to you could use
the blockchain you know it's uh
it satisfies the property is that you
know you can send transactions
onto it you can probably um you know use
it as
as a backup to store your files if you
really wanted to just because it has
it has so much space you know it might
fail but
like it's the but at the same time
like you know as they basically said
like craig wright is
a scammer and like half the you know
community is just totally bad
insane 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
right guiding the community yeah like i
think you know in the case of bsv like
the humans they yeah
make just completely wrong and just
obviously
wrong claims about like what bsv is
capable of accomplishing and
like what it concealed we could
accomplish and like there's just
a lot of aspects of it that make it feel
like a money grab so that's one example
and then you know you gotta go a bit
further and then you know you have like
the trons of the world
and like you know that's a platform you
know you can use it you can do
you can do stuff on it but at the same
time like you know
they did plagiarize the ipfs white paper
and then
you know they had so the scammy
qualities yeah see the thing that throws
me off a lot this makes it 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
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 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 like worried about bitcoin
i think i've learned a lot since then to
where like
um i i learned to separate the community
from the ideas
and i think bitcoin is a revolutionary
idea on on many fronts
but still a community that's like
dogmatically excited about something
whatever that is makes me skeptical
maybe it's just like my upbringing
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 cam 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 and
so mostly 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 i mean like in the case of
bitcoin like i would definitely not call
bitcoin as cam right
right i would not i would i would also
not call litecoin a scam
there's people who call litecoin scam
because they just like say oh look you
know
it has no fundamental use case and the
concept of being silver to bitcoin
bitcoin's gold is just like stupid and
you know it's a bit like
millie bitcoin is the silver to
bitcoin's gold um but
the at the same time like if you have
these people who are just
you know they do seem to earnestly
believe this and
uh like they are trying to just like
make like one be a litecoin as as best
as they can then like that's
to me that's enough for it to not be a
scam yeah um
that's and then so
yeah i think the 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 the ones that legitimately is
a scam is when
the key people that are at the head of
the project are intentionally lying
and i think as long as their 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
it could be flawed ideas it could be
wrong ideas but it's not a scam
i'm learning to navigate this space yeah
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 evolved makes it
a little bit more complicated
that um you know lives can be ruined
by um by by the choice of technologies
that are taking on so
it makes it more real more painful more
like
elevated the impact of this like imagine
like mac versus pc wars 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
and then you had you know the the elites
who bought
their macs back in 1983 and that they
spent 500
dead and now they have 40 million
dollars and they just think that they're
these gurus who understands the future
of finance and geopolitics and
they make theories about why you know
apple is the one that's going to bring
freedom to the world
and uh window is like you know secretly
allied with the access of evil
oh that's brilliant so yes this is so
brilliant so i think the right way to
think about this is we map
the some of the cryptocurrency battles
into the space of like emacs versus vim
or apple versus pc if
there was some stock that came along
with each each implementation of the you
know
uh each pc each mac that's fascinating
this is 100 correct
100 correct because then that really
energizes the armies of people debating
over this in a way that
something without money does not okay
let me ask you about something
really fascinating that you are also
excited about which is longevity
anti-aging you have donated money to the
sense foundation so you have an interest
in this whole space of lifespan research
what's your vision here or what do you
hope to see in
anti-aging and longevity research
i think i hope to see the concept of
what of us seeing your parents and
grandparents die just slowly disappear
from the public consciousness as an
experience that happens
over the course of uh half a century the
same way that getting lost in
a city slowly disappeared over the
public consciousness over the last 50
now that we have smartphones
the thing you have from nick bostrom the
essay
uh pinned in your twitter is argues that
essentially that you know death is
almost unethical like the fact that we
don't do something about this thing that
um
this in the essays is a dragon that
keeps
like murdering everybody around us
including our parents and grandparents
is uh
like the fact that we don't try to do
something aggressively about that dragon
is uh doesn't make any sense um
so you think this is a battle worth
fighting a battle for immortality or at
least longevity
i'd say absolutely and i'd say it's a
battle where
we're really have started over the last
five years in particular to see
the first cracks of uh no humanities
and me starting to make 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
is 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
supermassive black holes
so that that forever maybe like
backtracking to work we'll have we'll
have 10 the
16 years to figure it out yes
uh yeah maybe travel between um
between the multiverse between the
different universes the multiverse
i mean but forever meaning like
you know uh millennia um um
i guess i definitely think that we can
get there i definitely think that it's
the sort of thing that's
going to take an insanely huge amount of
work 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
will have to do more work
but you know the good news is that this
this is you know aubry's longevity
escape velocity argument that
if you get everyone to lift 250 now then
you know you have half a century to fix
all those other problems as well so yeah
i'm optimistic for that reason i think
um
it you definitely do not want to
underestimate
uh human ingenuity especially over the
long term but just to look at what
happens to computers between you know
the eniac in 1950 and where we are in
2020 right like that's
a span of 70 years um so like you know
both of us i think
with uh you know even just present-day
technology and
we have at least 70 more years to left
so just like imagine what kind of sea
change will happen in biomedicine
during that time and the other thing
that made me optimistic is that i
actually
think covet has been this kind of
event that's really a kind of pushed
um biomedicine and especially like
activist approaches to biomedicine
really into the public consciousness
right 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 the world you know the bio
is actually like
super important and huge and um
you know ultimately what's uh ending the
ending covid basically you know is that
the vaccines and the vaccines have just
been you know amazing
and uh if you can take that energy and
start and also like this uh
i think philosophical attitude that i've
noticed 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
and like this exists everywhere in the
political spectrum right so there's
nature as in literal nature
and my view is that like the right wing
version of that is market sas nature
right um markets as nature yeah like you
know they
the way that that like that kind of
philosophy talks about you know
markets and like the goal of not
interfering with them like you know it's
it is very kind of like nature styled
and then of course you know the the
conservative one which is like
traditional culture that existed before
the activists
started controlling everything as also
being a kind of nature
um but the 21st century attitude and
like really covet you know
has flipped a lot of minds because
with kovid what's happened is that well
no like it's not nature is not safe
right the default is like
you know untold and misery and suffering
and tens of millions of people dying
the only way out for us is through like
basically um human ingenuity
and that frame of mind is one that's
like much more friendly
to one uh the this other
um change of minds that i want to see
which is like basically treating aging
as an engineering problem
right 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 a
debilitating pain
and the only way to stop that is human
ingenuity
and you know we don't we don't have that
solution yet but you know if we work
hard we will
and more and more people on the biology
side computational biology
are basically converting the mess of the
the human biology into an engineering
problem
and once that conversion is happening
looking at the
the genetical the proteins all those
kinds of things once that conversion
happens
you can now apply the tools that we know
how to solve engineering problems
to solving it that way and then there's
also the other version which is
you know why do we romanticize this meat
vehicle
that ultimately is just the thing that
carries the brain maybe we can
more and more convert ourselves into the
digital realm
this is where like neural link yeah i
have the brain computer interfaces and
then achieve
immortality in the space of information
in the digital space versus the
biology space that stuff's interesting
too i agree again i think
you know we we have enough resources and
we should just try all the parallel
tracks you know it's great that we have
people just trying to make our bodies
work it's great that we have people
trying to
upload like or improve brain scanning
it's also great that we have
just like people improving cryonics so
like we could just like
you know go to sleep in the freezer and
um eventually
hopefully sometime in the future you
know healthy is going to be able to wake
up um all of this uh um you know you
know anyone who
gets chronically frozen today will be
able to wake up but you know
that's all that's a bad right that's the
last resort and then
the other interesting thing about um the
like
extreme uploading approach right is um
like
we're excited about space and one of the
points that uh 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 spacecraft 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
like the 2060s no i mean by traveling
close to the speed of light yeah exactly
like
so based the way it works is you know
you have these light sails like you
basically take the as a spacecraft and
you shine a laser at it
and the laser is insanely strong and
quickly accelerated at
100 g's no i think it was 10 000 gs
um until it gets to 20 the speed of
light and then you know it goes on your
merry way
right so if you wants to be in
um like personally explore the alpha
centauri system
within like two centuries or once 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 years
so it's it's definitely interesting long
term but at the same time
like there's definitely a lot of like
psychological hang-ups and a lot of like
deep philosophy that we'll just have to
grapple with
well i think to get there i think what
it hangs on the
topic of whether we can convert
consciousness into an engineering
problem so like
is consciousness tied to our biology
because the moment we can
convert consciousness into a digital
form then we can
send it with that light sale to office
centauri until then
a robot is not carrying anything except
maybe some basic knowledge like
wikipedia it's not carrying
the flame of human consciousness i have
high hopes
for converting consciousness into
engineering problem
in fact i think it's not as difficult as
people think i'm i
agree with that i'm definitely in the
camp that consciousness is
a property of the algorithm and not a
property of brain structure
um the other fun like the kinds of
philosophical things we'd have to grab
with grapple with is like
once you upload yourself like you can
hit control c you know like
it would be wouldn't be lovely to have
like 10 copies of fellow experience
like we could just interview everyone so
this is i mean this is
i i have to ask this question it's a
difficult one which
i don't think he'll be wonderful first
of all um
sure so in the following way and this
has to do with immortality as well
there's something about scarcity that
creates
value or um there's a bunch of
philosophers victor franco
bernard williams ernest becker they
argue that
death or the scarcity of life creates
meaning
and the reason we life is beautiful
the reason so many moments of 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
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
does that worry you at all do you think
there's some aspect to which
death does in fact give meaning to life
i guess like
the one historical parallel and like
this might be a bit unfair is that you
know
there have been philosophers that said
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 ever that everyone
strives to be their best
and um you know of course uh this
viewpoint got into the head of a crazy
austrian guy and 20 years later his
soldiers were shooting at my
grandparents
um so you know these days we don't
really
have that but yet life still feels
meaningful there's we've still found
other ways to
uh or them like they're still
uh striving for technological progress
there's still
um you know uh striving for
self-improvement in general
and it turns out that you know you don't
actually need to have existential
conflicts in order to
in order to have that now maybe you need
conflict but we have other kinds of
conflicts right look we have you know
competition between businesses
competition between political ideologies
competition between projects
and so you know these are like whatever
what
whatever the psychological needs are
like they're just our substitutes for it
so i guess like yeah so if we uh
i'm trying to say i i feel like once we
start
living to to the age of uh 200 then
like i'm just intuitively expecting that
we'll see some like
substitutes emerge in the same way yeah
that
will will create conflicts of other
sorts that lead to less human suffering
than wars do like we'll just start
playing diablo four five six and
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
i mean i feel shitty when i uh like you
can
i remember in diablo three you can play
in hardcore mode
where if you die in the game your
character is dead maybe you will
get the the richness of
like what that we currently get from
life by having like
little artificial versions of ourselves
that die interestingly 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 fight finiteness that still like
exists and it might even still be a
thing that provides meaning that doesn't
require anyone to actually die
like for example like how many people
from
middle school or even high school or
yours like do you still talk to
regularly
i'm happy to be close friends with like
four or five of them okay well like in
my case the answer is zero for middle
school and two for high school
you're right right it dropped exactly it
dropped
right and so like there's a lot of these
just like relationships that end up
being very finite
um a person changes their i feel like a
person changes enough of their worldview
after 25 years wasn't there even a study
about this something like
a person and themselves 25 years later
about as different
as like two different people or
something like this
um so you know like i mean just like you
can have conflict without bloodshed i
think um you know you can
you can have finiteness and even you
know the the necessary
sorrows of uh finiteness that give
meaning without
like literally any anyone having to end
their life
and hopefully if we do extend our life
we'll figure out ways to extend
the period of time where there's newer
neuroplasticity yes to where we could
change
our world views continually throughout
that time so
have some of these different phases of
life
uh i thought it would be fun to hear you
speak a little russian
[Music]
do you think there's uh so for people
who don't speak russian
that uh vitalik said that there is um
that there is something to the spirit of
the people that are russian that are
working
in the cryptocurrency world that uh is a
little bit different and
it and it's something that uh that
connects to some kind of aspect of your
own
self some kind of roots there it it it's
it's kind of interesting do you think
that there's um
does it make you sad that there's these
two different worlds
that are uh sort of in part disconnected
by
language and i'm sure the same could be
the case with china and other parts of
the world
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 do you see
that being able to speak both languages
there's definitely benefits i think to
be able to like
speak multiple languages and like once
you can right like you it you discover
that like even your mindset changes
while you're in speaking in one language
versus the other like people have told
me this like
when i speak russian i sound more like i
guess like to the point in pragmatic
when i speak chinese i sound more cute
when i
speak english i'm something else um
i guess
there's definitely like a richness that
you're missing if you're only
like in one of these language bubbles
but
you know i guess the arguments on the
other side would be that you know if
everyone spoke the same language then
like
there would just be one bubble right
this is the challenge i think like
there are actually benefits to having
cultural diversity and you definitely
don't want the entire world to be too
conformist
yeah 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
brazil and even preserve its
independence from
all of all of these surrounding
countries despite being embedded in all
of them
so it uh spans outside the geographical
boundaries
and language in some ways does as well
and then in the way these cultures
these bubbles are created i mean they
overlap in interesting ways it's almost
like a hierarchy and the same is the
case with the crypto world
there's uh you know there's communities
associated with these cryptocurrencies
there's communities within those
communities
and it's yeah i mean i think like you
know it's definitely sad whenever these
groups are
are fighting each other um and like it's
definitely good for them to
like if people can cooperate more um
but you know at the same time like just
having
like groups of people that have you know
different kinds of life experiences like
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 uh
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 he 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 uh
have experienced both having a little of
it and i'm having a lot of it
is that um the benefit
of like you can get the most out of um
money if you think of it not as
something that like lets you do and have
more things but as
something that lets you worry about
fewer things right like
you know if you have you know if the
your savings are just you know non-zero
at all then
you don't have to worry as much about
losing your job 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 six months saved
up that just makes it easier for you to
say bye-bye i'm going to do something
else
if you have more money then you can
[Music]
you know not worry about like even what
you're doing the am
needing to be profitable at all um 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 uh
so if you like
this aspect of just like reducing
troubles
and like opening up room for um other
things i think is
a big part of it 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 uh
much more likely to be like a road to
like basically squandering that
opportunity
so yeah and i guess my philosophy is on
that is definitely
more subtractive than added over there
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 and
do you think there's meaning to it all
or
it seems like your own life you're
trying to build cool stuff that
alleviates some level of suffering in
the world
well i mean one way to think about it is
like
think of think back to like how you
thought about life when you were in
school
right well in school this is interesting
to think about right because
in a lot of ways like it's just totally
outside of bounds of
you know the kinds of systems that are
like social systems that we live in as
um as adults or maybe not like maybe
things like academia are intended to
replicate parts of school
like first of all school is very
totalitarian right like
you know you have to follow the teacher
the the teacher's instructions the bulk
of your schedule is like forced to be in
particular areas and you know you can
control um
and they're real for you from you know
leaving the grounds during this period
this period of time um you know assign a
lot of homework
but at the same time also you know
school is a bit of
a bit of a post-scarcity utopia in that
you just don't have to worry about
getting resources for yourself
and you know we've both like lived
through 12 years of that
right so you know like what does that
say about us and i think
like in one thing of aspect obviously is
that
in it does like there's definitely like
an
easiness to living life if all of your
decisions are made for you
and one of the challenges of
adulthood i guess is moving to this uh
world where like all your choices are
much more self-directed and you just
have to
like learn to live and deal with that um
yeah dealing with the burden of freedom
in some sense actually interesting and
because uh i in some ways i feel like
even my first
like five years of doing ethereum things
uh yeah
my life was not even all that
self-directed because for a lot of it
was just
you know responding to obligations right
like someone said oh you know come to
speak at this event
in korea okay you know come to speak of
this thing in taiwan okay
um oh like we need up for ethereum to
launch we need
um you know this particular piece to be
done and tested okay work on that
right we know we need some uh um a proof
of stake algorithm work on that
and the last year of uh coved
life um like basically i was like
holed up in singapore for much of it
right and it gave me a lot more alone
time you know i had much less travel
and that was definitely a very new and
interesting experience for me
would you characterize it by sadness
melancholy hope uh
dreaming like innovative period like how
would you characterize that alone time
sum of all five um definitely some
self-discovery
um i definitely did like take this uh
make this very deliberate decision that
like okay i have this time and
i'm going to like actually make
something meaningful out of it
um so like one example of the things i
did is i just like actually
started really listening to our um
audiobooks and podcasts much more
like just this year i basically kind of
discovered that the podcast space is
real for the first time i guess
like before that you know there would be
things that i would get interviewed for
but yeah i
was not really kind of like mentally
incorporated i
did not mentally incorporate this um
idea that like podcasts are a thing that
you can go listen to
and this year i did okay you know my
friend uh
um carl lafourche one of the the
optimism people
uh recommended hardcore history to me
and so i went ahead and just
listens to all the hardcore histories uh
but then after that
like yeah listen to like 10 lux
speedmans and then a bunch of others
says and
after that i also got into um audiobooks
um oh i listened to the entire um
the rise and fall of the third reich the
whole thing 45 hours
that that was fascinating so what else
did you ask about because dana's gonna
love hearing this i'm gonna tell you
do you have uh 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
is it world war ii is it uh wrath of the
cons the
injengus is it some other more ancient
history
is it world war one is there something
that kind of echoes with you
in the voice of dan or or anyone else
that you connect to
i feel like the 1930s and 40s are
fascinating because they force you to
like really grapple with uh
the question of like you know where does
evil come from right like the
sort of mental puzzle that i've always
had in my head
is like on the one hand um you know
things like the holocaust happened
but on the other hand if you just go and
like have a coffee with
with uh people then like a hundred times
out of a hundred everyone just seems so
nice
yeah yeah so yeah exactly yeah like how
do you
kind of reconcile the macro in the micro
there right
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 like especially if
your personal experience
starts off being sheltered like it was
for me right like i you know this
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 yeah
and so that definitely made it harder to
understand things
i remember actually being pretty
blindsided when i started ethereum 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
be a non-profit and somehow that ended
up upsetting people
um so
so the fascinating thing for me is that
like i've been you know
obviously reading and listening to the
history and then at the same time just
like
observing things happening in the crypto
space
and so one of my interesting
um like mental intuitions that i've
gotten is that i think
like most evil doesn't come out of greed
it comes out of fear
and like one example
of this in ethereum lands right is um
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
and if you go back to the dow fork in
2016 right
so you know the dow hack happens and
then we made this controversial decision
to change the ethereum protocol
uh and we um
you know then there was that ethereum
classic split and
as soon as that ethereum classic split
um happened
you know there was like a lot of anger
everywhere and
there started there started especially
being anger when
the price of etc started like taking up
right so this was the time when
ether started off being 13 dollars and
then ethereum classic started at zero
but then
suddenly there was this one day when
like eath dropped to 12.5 etc went up to
0.5
and then they dropped more and people
were saying things like
um you know oh this whole thing ethereum
classic is just as like a psyop by
you know the bitcoin community and just
the wealthy bitcoiners trying to destroy
ethereum
and like in the back of my mind i knew
that that wasn't entirely true
like there were definitely were
bitcoiners but at the same time like i
think
blaming political like internal disa or
blaming disagreements on foreign
interference right like this is the sort
of thing that you know like
countries governments do all the time
like it's
a very convenient excuse right 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 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 and i feel like like i during
that time
did not do a very good job of grappling
with that and so
there was a lot of like blaming the
bitcoiners there were also even
a lot of people calling for us to use
trademark one like basically sue
exchanges
and like try to prevent them from
listing ethereum classic
and like to me that was very unethical
right like this uh
using like basically using the
government as
a weapon to uh 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
in theory were supposed to stand for um
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 th price was dropping in
lockstep
and it really and there are a lot of
bitcoin people basically saying this is
the end of ethereum and i think a lot of
people really were afraid that
ethereum would be just like completely
destroyed as a result of this
and so like that's where the anger came
from exactly that's
yeah exactly it came from the fear and
like that's what i like
allowed people to rationalize like in
abandonment of principles that i think
they would not have um
accepted in other circumstances and
i i definitely like to to some extent
played along with this myself right and
i do definitely
regret that to some extent uh well and i
i definitely regret like the
the excesses completely um but
so that and then obviously you know
bitcoin block size war similar sort of
stuff happened uh
so like that that insight
was interesting um because like
it does mentally make a lot of sense
right 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 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 it feels like the right thing to
do
the the brave thing to do is in the face
of fear
to still have compassion to still have
love
as opposed to hate so the the darkest
moments
the the toughest moments of human
history are those where fear
is everywhere and despite that
like the way to get out of that
is uh is through love not giving into
the fear and
again that's the lesson that you draw
from all those moments of history
yeah well i 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 uh prioritize the latter over the
former
vitalik you're one of the most
interesting people i've gotten a chance
to talk to
um thank you so much for talking i i
hope we get a chance to talk again
i hope but i can at least be at some
small part this would be awesome on a
podcast with you and dan carlin
that would be an awesome conversation uh
like thank you so much for doing
so much incredible technical innovation
that inspires the computer scientists uh
the economist
inspires the world and what technology
can do and now with longevity
i do hope we live a a very long time
and play diablo to make
that long time fun thank you so much for
talking today thank you to alex this was
great
thanks for listening to this
conversation with vitalik buterin and
thank you to
athletic greens magic spoon indeed
four sigmatic and better help check them
out in the description to support this
podcast
and now let me leave you with some words
from nelson mandela
when a man is denied the right to live
the life he believes in
he has no choice but to become an outlaw
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time