Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
sylvia mccauley a computer scientist at
mit
winner of the touring award and one of
the leading minds in the fields of
cryptography
information security game theory and
most recently
cryptocurrency and the theoretical
foundations
of a fully decentralized secure and
scalable blockchain and
algorand a company of cryptographers
engineers and mathematicians
that he founded in 2017.
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at lex friedman
and now here's my conversation with
silvio
mccauley let's start with the big
and the basic question what is a
blockchain
and why is it interesting why is it
fascinating why is it powerful
all right so a blockchain think of it is
a
is really a common database distributed
think about is a ledger
in which everybody can write an entry in
a page
you can write i can write and everybody
can read
and you have a guarantee that everybody
has the same
copy of the ledger that is in front of
you so if
whatever you see on page seven anyone
else is on page seven
so what is uh extraordinary about this
is this a common knowledge thing that i
think is a really
a first for humanity i mean if you look
at communication
like right now you can communicate very
quickly
images of thoughts or photos but do you
have a
certainty that whatever you have
received has been received by everybody
else
and not really and so there's a
commonality of knowledge
and the certainty that everybody can
write nobody
has been prevented for having whatever
they want nobody can erase
nobody can tear a page of a ledger
nobody can swap
page nobody can change anything and uh
that is an immutable coma record is uh
extremely powerful and uh there's
something
fundamental that is decentralized about
it so at least in spirit
uh some degree against maybe a
resistance to centralization
absolutely if it is not decentralized
how can it be common knowledge if only
one person or a few people are villager
the only way you don't have villager you
have to ask you know what is on page
seven
and how do you know that whatever they
tell you is on page seven
they tell the same thing to everybody
else and so
that is this commandant is like
extremely
powerful just uh um just to give you an
example a sumo beta
you do an auction okay you have uh work
very hard you build a building and now
you want to auction off
make sense because uh you want to
auction
worldwide better yet you want to
tokenize the building and sell it you
know
in parcels now
everybody sees the bids and you know
that everybody sees the bids you and i
see the same and so does everybody
else
so you know that the fair price has
reached and you know
who owns what and who has spent how much
and if you do it instead of advising on
a centralized system
i put a bid say oh congratulations alex
you won
and your prize is 12 570 dollars
how do you know so if instead there is a
common knowledge is a very powerful uh
tool for humanity so we'll return to it
from
a bunch of different perspectives
including like a technical perspective
but
you often talk about blockchain
and some of these concepts of
decentralization
scalability security all those kinds of
things
but one of the most maybe impactful
exciting things that leverage
the blockchain this kind of ledger idea
of common knowledge is cryptocurrency
so the fight in the financial space so
is there
can you say in the same kind of basic
way what is cryptocurrency in the
context of this common knowledge and
context of the blockchain
great cryptocurrency that is a currency
that is on such a ledger so imagine that
on vallejo right initially you know that
somehow
say you and i are the only owner each
one
let's give it our ourselves a billion uh
each or whatever this unit then i start
up
writing on the ledger i give a hundred
of these units to my sister
you give i give this match to my end and
then
and then now because it's written on
belgium and everybody can see
my sister can give 57 of his units that
she received from me
to somebody else and so and and that is
money and that is money because
you can see that somebody who
tenders your payment has really the
money there right you don't have any
more of a doubt when you want to sell an
item
if i got your check is the check covered
if
right or um do i have the money at the
moment of a transaction
you really see because the ledger is
always operated what you see
is what i see what the merchant sees you
know where the money so is
the most powerful money system there is
because it is totally transparent and so
you know that you have been paid
and and you know that the money is there
you have not to second guess anything
else
so the the common knowledge applied
there is
you're basically mimicking the same kind
of thing you would get in the physical
space which is
uh if you give a hundred bucks or a
hundred of that thing whatever
of that cryptocurrency to your sister
the actual
transfer is as real as you giving like
a a a basket of apples to your sister
because that uh so in the case in the
physical space
the the common knowledge is in the
physics
right of the atoms and then it's digital
space the common knowledge is in this
ledger
and so that transfer holds
um the same kind of power but now it's
operating in the digital space
correct again i apologize for a set of
ridiculous questions but
uh you mentioned cryptocurrencies of
money
what what is money why do we have money
do you think about this kind of from
this high philosophical level
at times of this uh
tool this idea that we humans have all
kind of
came up with and seem to be using
effectively to do stuff
money is a social construct okay in
my opinion and this has been somehow
people always felt that somehow money
is a way to allow us to transact
even though we want to different things
so i have
two sheep and then you have
one cow and i want the cow but uh you
are looking for blankets instead you
know
so to have money it's really simplifies
this but at the end of and that's why
a bit was invented and you started with
gold you started when the
corny edge when you started with czech
but at the end of the day
money is essentially a social construct
because
you know that what you receive you can
actually spend with somebody else
and so there is a kind of a social pact
and social belief
that that you have at the end of the day
even a barter is of requires
um beliefs that other people are going
to accept
the quote-unquote currency you offer
them
because if i'm amazing and you asked me
to build a wall
in your field then i did and you
in exchange you give me a thousand ship
what am i going to do eat them all
now i to feed them and if i don't feed
them they die and i
my value is zero so in receiving visa
livestock i must believe that somebody
else
will accept them in return for something
else
yeah so money is a social belief
social shared belief system that makes
people transact
that's fascinating i didn't even i
didn't even think about that that you
you're actually
uh you have a deep like
network of beliefs about how society
operates
so the value is assigned even to sheep
based on that everyone will continue
operating how they were previously
operating yeah somebody will feed the
sheep
i didn't even i didn't even think about
that that's that's fascinating so
that directly transfers to uh
to the space of money and then to the
space of digital money cryptocurrency
okay
does it bother you sort of
intellectually
when this money that is a social
construct is
not directly tied to physical goods like
uh
gold for example not at all because
after all gold has some
industrial value nobody delights it it's
a it's a metal
it doesn't oxidate he has some good
things about it
but uh does this industrial value really
represent
the value at which it now is trading no
so
gold is another way to express our
belief i give you an ounce of gold
you treat her like oh somebody else will
want to miss
for doing uh something else so it is a
really
this notion of this money is a mental
construct
it's really uh and is a shared is a
social construct i really
believe and so some people feel that
it's physical so therefore gold
exists then as you know now
we countries more sophisticated
countries right now they print their own
money
and you believe that they are not going
to exaggerate it with inflation
not everybody believes in what i'm
saying there is at least
not we are not going to exaggerate it
bludently
and uh and therefore you receive it
because you know that uh
somebody else will accept it will have
faith in the currency and so on so forth
but the weather is gold whether it is
livestock or whether whatever it is
money is really a shared belief so there
is something
you know and i've been reading more and
more about different cryptocurrencies
there is a kind of uh belief that
the scarcity of a particular resource
like bitcoin has a
limited amount uh in its tied to
physical
you know uh to to proof of work so it's
tied to physical
reality in terms of how much you can
mine effectively
and so on that that's an important
feature of money
do you think that's an important feature
to be a part of whatever the money is
that is certainly a very useful part so
um at some point in time you know assume
a veteran or
money something that all of a sudden we
say this is money i have a currency
then uh you know i offer you 10 days is
in payment of
whatever goods and services you want to
provide but but
at the end of the day if you know that
uh you can cultivate it and generate
them um
at will then perhaps you know you should
not accept
my payment in uh here is a
a bouquet of basis so you need some kind
of a scarcity the inability to create a
sudden layout or nothing is uh is uh is
unimportant
and uh um it's not an
intrinsic necessity but it's much easier
to accept once you know that there is a
fixed number of units or whatever
currency there is and therefore you can
mentally
understand i'm getting you know this
much of this piece of a pie
and therefore i consider myself paid i
understand what i'm receiving
you describe the goals of a blockchain
you have a nice presentation on this
as scalability security and
decentralization
and you challenge the blockchain
trilemma
that claims you can only have two of the
three so
let's talk about each what is
scalability in the context
of blockchain and cryptocurrency what
does scalability mean
so remember if we said that the
blockchain
is a ledger and each page receives that
gets transaction and everybody can write
in this
in these pages of a ledger nobody can be
stopped for writing and everybody can
read them
okay scalability means how fast can you
write just
imagine that you can write an entry in
this uh
special shared ledger once every hour
well you know what you're going to do if
you ever know one transaction per hour
the world that doesn't go around so you
need to have scalability means here that
you can somehow write a lot of
transaction
and then you can read them and everybody
can validate them
and that is the speed and and this
and the number of transactions are per
second and the fact that they are shared
so you want to have this
this uh the speed not only in writing
but in in
sharing and uh and uh an inspection for
validity
this is scalability the world is big
the world wants to interact with the
people want to interact with each other
and you better be prepared to have a
ledger in which you can write lots and
lots and lots of
transactions in this special way very
very very quickly
so maybe from a more mathematical
perspective or
can we say something about how much
scalability is needed
for a world that is big well it really
depends
how many transactions so you want but
remember
veteran um i i think you know i'm right
now yet to go into
at least thousands of transactions are
per second even if you look at the norm
credit cards right you know we are going
to go from
an average of 1600 to peaks over 20 000
or
40 000 something like this but
but remember it's not only a question of
the transaction per se but
the value is that the transaction
is actually been shared and visible to
everybody and the certainty that that is
the case
i can print them on my own printer
way more transactions but nobody has the
time to see or
to inspect that doesn't count right so
you want
scalability at this common knowledge
level that is the challenge
i also meant from a perspective of like
uh like a complexity analysis
so does it you know when you get more
and more people involved
doesn't need to scale in some kind of
way that uh
like do you do you like to see certain
kind of properties in order to say
something is scalable
oh absolutely i took a little bit
implicitly that
the people transacting are actually very
different
so if there is a two people who can do
uh
fast and satisfaction per second with
each other this is not so interesting
what do we really need is to save
billions of people and at any point in
time you know thousands and thousands of
them
want to transact with each other and you
want to support
that so algorand uh
it solves so that's the the the company
the team
of cryptographers mathematicians
engineers so on that challenge the
blockchain trilemma
so let's break it down in terms of
achieving scalability
how do we achieve scalability in the
space of blockchain in the space of
cryptocurrency
okay so uh scalability security remember
and the decentralization nice so
that's what they want what's the best
way to approach can we break it down
let's start with scalability
and think about how do we achieve it
well to achieve it
one at a time is perhaps elise even
security if nobody transacts
nobody loses money so beta is secure but
it's not scalable so let me tell you i'm
a cryptographer
so i try to fight the bad guys
and what what you want is that a vessel
ledger that we discussed before
uh cannot be tampered with so you must
think of it avetta
is a special link that nobody can erase
okay then
it has to be everybody should be able
uh to read and not to
alter the pages or the content of the
pages
that's okay but you know what that is
actually
easy cryptographically easy
cryptographical means you can use
tools invented 50 years ago which in
cryptographic time is prehistory okay we
are
cavemen working around and solve their
problem in cryptography land
but you know but there is really a
fundamental problem which is really
almost a social seems a political
problem is to say
who the hell chooses
or publishes the next page of villager
i mean that is really the challenge this
ledger
you can always add a page because more
transactions to be
written on there and somebody has to
assemble with
this transaction put them on a page and
under the next page
who is the somebody who chooses the page
and adds it on who can be trusted to do
it
exactly assume it is me for what i'm
being not that i want to volunteer for a
job but
then i would have more power than any
absolute monarch in history
because i would have a tremendous power
to say these are the transactions that
the entire
world should see and whatever i don't
write
this transaction will never see the
light of day
i mean no one had any such a power in
history
so it's very important to uh to do that
and that is the quintessential problem
in a blockchain
and uh people have thought about it to
say it's not me it's not you but
for instance in uh proof of work
what people say is to say okay it's not
me it's not you you know what it is
we make a very difficult we invent an
a cryptographic puzzle very hard to
solve the first one to solve that
as the right to add one page to the
ledger
on behalf of everybody else and that's
now is
seems okay because you know sometimes i
solve a puzzle before you do sometimes
you solve
before i do or before somebody else
somebody else solves it
it's okay and presumably the effort you
put in
is somehow correlated with how much
trust
you should be given to add to the ledger
yeah so somehow you want to make sure
that you know you need to
work because you want to prevent you
want to make sure
that you know you get a one solution
every 10 minutes
say like in particular example of
bitcoin
so that is very rare but two pages are
added at the same time
because if i solve the puzzle at the
same time you do
you could happen that if it happens once
or twice we can survive
it but if it happens you know every
other page you know
is a double page of when uh which of the
two is the real page it becomes a
problem
so that's why in bitcoin it is important
that to have
substantial amount of work so that no
many how many people try
on earth to solve a puzzle you have
one solution out of how many people are
trying every 10 minutes
so that you have you distantiate this
pages
and you have the time to propagate for
the network resolution
and the page attached to it and
therefore there is one page at a time
that is added
and they say well why don't we do that
we have a solution
well first of all a page every 10
minutes
is not fast enough it's a question of
scalability
and second of all to ensure that no
matter how many people
try you get a one page generator minutes
one solution to the riddle every 10
minutes this means
that the riddle becomes very very hard
and to to have a chance to solve it
in within 10 minutes you must have such
an expensive
apparatus in terms of specialized
computers not
one not two but thousands and thousands
of them and they produce a tons of heat
okay these
they dissipate it like maniac and you
need to refrigerate them too
and so then now you have air
conditioning uh galore
to add to the thing it becomes so
expensive
that fewer and fewer and fewer people
can actually
compete in order to add to the page and
the problem becomes a so some
crucial vietnam in in in bitcoin um
depending on which day of the week you
look at it you are going to have
two or three mining pools are really
the ones are uh capable of controlling
the chain
so you're saying that uh that's almost
like uh
at least a centralization right it
started being
decentralized and uh but the expenses
become
higher and higher and higher when the
cost becomes higher and higher fewer and
fewer people can afford them
and then you know it becomes you know de
facto centralized right
yeah and uh in a different type of
approach
is instead for instance a delegated
proof of stake
which is also very easy to explain
essentially boils down to to say well
look at these 21 people say okay
don't they look honest yes they do in
fact
i believe if they're going to remain
honest for the foreseeable future so
when do we do ourselves a favor
let's entrust them to add the page
on behalf of all of us to the ledger
okay
okay but now we are going to say is this
centralized or decentralized well
21 is better than one what to say is
very little
so if you look at uh when people
rebelled to centralized power i don't
know the french revolutions okay
there was a monarch and the nobles yes
were there 21 nobles
no there were thousands of them but
there were millions and millions of
disempowered citizens so one is
centralized
21 is also centralized right so that's
delegated proof of stake
delegate kind of like a representative
democracy i guess
yes which is good working great right
there's problems there are problems yeah
and
and so we were looking for a different
uh
um when thinking about algonquin for a
different approach
and so we have a man approaching retinol
is really really decentralized because
essentially um
it works as follows so you have a bunch
of tokens right these are the tokens
and that have equal power and you have
to say 10 billions of tokens distributed
from um
to the entire world and the owners
each token has a chance to add value
equal probability driver everybody else
in fact actually if you want here is how
it works
so think about you know by some magic
cryptographic process
which is not magic it's mathematics but
think about the magic
assume that you select a thousand tokens
and so sometimes a random okay and you
have a guarantee that were handled
selected
and then this the owners of this 1000
tokens
somehow agree on the next page they all
sign it
and that's the next page okay
so it is clear that you know nobody has
the power but you know
once uh up in a while one of your tokens
is selected
and you are in charge of this committee
to select the next page but this goes
around
very quickly so and if you look at this
the question really is that is not
really centralized
and because of what for for agreeing on
the same page it is important that
the 1000 tokens that you're randomly
selected
are in honest ends the majority of them
so which if the majority of the tokens
are in honest ends that is
essentially true because if the majority
of the tokens are in honest ends
if you select say 90 percent of the
people
are 90 percent of the tokens are in
honest hands
so can you randomly select a thousand in
this thousand you find the 501
tokens in bad ends very very improbable
so
basically uh when a large fraction of
people are honest then you can use
randomness as a powerful tool to get
decentralization
so what does honesty mean and uh now
we're
into the social side of things which is
uh
how do we know that
like the fraction a large fraction of uh
people or participating parties are
honest
that is an excellent question so by the
way first of all we should
realize that the same thing is for every
other system when you look at proof of
work
you realize that the majority of the
mining power
is in honest hands yes when you look at
a delegated proof of stake
you realize that the majority of these
21 people are honest
what is the difference the difference is
veta
in these other systems you soon to say
the whole economy
is secure if the majority of this
small piece of economy are honest
and that is a big question but instead
what
in our grand in our approach we say
the whole economy is secure if the
majority of economy
is honest in other words who can subvert
all grant is not a majority of a small
group
but is a majority of the token holders
had to conspire with each other in order
to think of a very economy for which
they own the majority of yes but i think
it is a bit
harder too like a self-destructive
majority essentially
and you're also making me realize that
basically every system that we have in
the world today
assumes that the majority of
participants is honest
yes the only difference is the majority
of whom
and in in some cases the majority of a
club and in our case is the majority of
the old system
the whole the whole system okay so
that's that's fast so through that kind
of uh random
sampling you can achieve
decentralization
you can achieve so the scalability
i understand and then the security that
you're
referring to basically the security
comes from the fact that
the sample selected would uh likely
include honest people
so it's very difficult to so by the way
the security as you
as you mentioned that you're referring
to is basically
security against dishonesty right or
manipulation or whatever yes
yes so essentially when what you're
going to to do is to be following and
say say well
silvio i understood what you're saying
but somebody has to randomly selected
with tokens when i believe you so then
who does this random selection that's a
good point
and uh in uh in algorithm we do
something a little bit
unorthodox essentially is
the token choose themselves
at random and you say if you think about
it that seems to be a terrible idea
because if you want to say choose
yourself at random and whoever chooses
himself is a fuss and people committee
you choose the page for for the rest of
us
and because if i'm a bad person i'm
going to select myself
over and over again because i want to be
part of the committee every single time
but not so fast so what do we do
in algon what does it mean that i select
myself that each one of us
in the privacy of our own computer
actually a laptop
what you do is that you execute your own
individual lottery and
uh think about that you pull a lever of
a slot machine
you can only pull the lever once not
until you win
not enough times until you win and when
you pull the lever
case one either you win in such a case
you have a winning ticket
or you lose you don't get any winning
ticket so
if you don't have a winning ticket you
can say anything you want about the next
page in village nobody pays attention
but
if you ever winning ticket people say oh
wow this is one of the 1000 winning
tickets we better pay attention to what
he or she says
and that's how it works and the lottery
is a cryptographic lottery which means
that even if i am
an entire nation extremely powerful with
incredible computing powers i don't have
the ability to improve even minimally my
probability
of one talking winning the lottery and
that's how it happens so everybody pulls
the lever
the 1000 random winners say oh here is
my winning
ticket and here is my opinion up or down
above the block these are the ones that
count
and if you think about it while this is
distributed because there is
in the case of argon there is a 10
billion tokens and you select a
1000 of them more distributed than this
you cannot get
and then why is this you know scalable
because what you have to do okay yeah to
do the lottery
how long the lottery takes it takes
actually one microsecond
whether you have one token or two tokens
or a billion tokens is always one
microsecond of computation
which is very fast we don't hit the
planet with a microsecond of computation
and and finally why is this secure
because even if i were
a very evil and very very powerful
individual
i'm so powerful that i can corrupt
anybody i want
instantaneously in the world
whomever i want to corrupt the people in
the committee
so that i can choose the page of the
legion but i do have a problem
i do not know whom i should corrupt
should i corrupt this lady in shanghai
the sovereign guy in paris
because i don't know i should the
winners are random so i don't know whom
i should corrupt
but once the winner come forward and say
here is my winning ticket
and you propagate your winning ticket
across the network
together with your opinion about the
block now i know who they are
for sure i can corrupt all thousands of
them given to my
incredible powers but so what whatever
they said they already said and they're
winning tickets and their opinions
are virally propagated across the
network and i do not have the power
no more than the us government or any
government has the power
to put back in the bottle a message
virally propagated by wikileaks
so everything you've just described is
kind of it's fascinating
a set of ideas and you know online i've
been reading quite a bit and people are
really excited about a set of ideas
nevertheless it is not the
dominating technology today so bitcoin
in terms of cryptocurrency is the
most popular uh cryptocurrency and then
ethereum
and so on so it's useful to kind of
comment we already talked about proof of
work a little bit
but what in your sense does bitcoin get
right
and where is it lacking okay so the
first thing that bitcoin got right
is to understand that there was the need
of a cryptocurrency and that my opinion
of
trumps would deserve all the success
because they said the time is ripe from
this idea yes because very often
is not enough to be right here to be
right at the right time yes
and uh somebody got it right there so
hot off to bitcoin
for that and um and so what they got to
write
is they make that is make if it is hard
to subvert and change value to to cancel
a
transaction it's not impossible that is
very hard
what they did not get right is
somehow is a great story of value
currency wise
but money is not only a question that
you store it
and you put under the mattress money
wants to be transacted
and the transaction in bitcoins are very
little
so if you want to store value everybody
needs a store value might as well
use a bitcoin i mean it's the brand but
if you are don't look at that for a
moment
at least is a great store of value and
everybody needs a store
of value but most of the time we want to
transact we want to interact we don't
put the money under the markets right
so we wanted to try and bet they didn't
get it right that is
too slow to transact to too few
transactions scalability basically the
issue
is it possible to build stuff on top of
bitcoin
that's uh sort of uh fixes the
scalability
i mean this is the thing you look at
there's a bunch of technologies that
kind of
hit the right need at the right time
and they have flaws but we kind of build
infrastructures on top of them
over time to fix it as opposed to
getting it
right from the beginning or is is it
difficult to do
well that is difficult to do so you're
talking to somebody
that when i decided to throw my heart in
the arena
and i decided first of all i as i said
before i much admire
my predecessors i mean they got it right
a lot of things and i
and i i really am admired for that but
you know
i had a choice to make either high patch
something with other holes all over the
place or i start from scratch
i decided to start from scratch because
sometimes it's a better way so what
about
ethereum which looks at proof of stake
and a lot of different
innovative ideas that kind of improve or
seek to improve on some of the flaws of
bitcoin
etio made another great idea so they
figured out if it was
that money and payments are important as
they are
they are only the first level the first
stepping stone
the next level are smart contracts and
they were at the vision to say
the people will need smart contract
which allow me and you to somehow to to
transact securely without being shopped
around by a trusted third party by a
mediator
by the way because the mediators are
hard to find
and in fact maybe even impossible to
find if you live in thailand and i live
in um
in new zealand maybe we don't have a
common person that we know
and trust and even if we find them
guess what they want to be paid so much
so right that uh
six percent of the world uh gdp is
uh goes into financial friction which is
essentially third party
so the headed right of the world needed
that
but again the scalability
is not there and the system
is of smart contracts in the is slow
and expensive and and i believe
is not enough to satisfy the appetite
and the need
we have for smart contracts well what do
you make of just as a small sort of
a side in human history perhaps it's a
big one
is the nft the non-fungible tokens do
you find those interesting technically
or is it more interesting on the social
side of things
well both i think you know i think it's
um
nfts are actually great right so you
have always um
you're an artist to create a a song or
you could be
um a piece of art
he has many unique representation right
over
of unique uh uh a piece whether he's an
artifact of uh
uh something dream napa by you and uh
and as unique representation but now you
can trade and allow
in the important part is that now you
have a visa
not only the nfts themselves but the
ability
to trade them quickly fast securely
knowing that who owns which rights and
that gives a totally new opportunity for
content creators to be remunerated for
what they do
so but ultimately you still have to have
that scalability security
and decentralization to to make it you
know
to make it work for bigger and bigger
applications
correct yeah yeah i still wonder what
kind of applications are yet to be
like enabled by it because so much the
interesting thing about
nft is you know if you look outside of
art
is uh just like money you can start
playing with different social
constructs is you can start
playing with ideas you can start playing
with um
with uh even like investing somebody was
talking about almost creating an economy
out of uh
like uh creative people or influencers
like if you start a youtube channel or
something like that
you can invest in that person and you
can start trading their creations
and then almost like create a market out
of people's ideas out of people's
creations out of
the people themselves that
generate those creations and there's a
lot of interesting possibilities of what
you can do with that i mean it seems
ridiculous but
you're basically creating a hierarchy of
value
maybe artificial in the digital world
and are trading that but in so doing are
inspiring people to
create so maybe uh
as a sort of our economy gets better and
better and better
where actual work in the physical space
uh becomes less and less in terms of its
importance maybe we'll completely be
operating in a digital space where
where these kinds of economies have more
and more power
and then you have to have this kind of
blockchains
to uh the scalability security and
decentralization
and decentralization is of course the
tricky one
because uh people in power start to get
nervous
absolutely once in power you always
never
be supplanted by somebody else but this
is your job
see you congratulations you don't have a
job the top job and now everybody wants
it
well what is your sense about our our
time
and the future hope about the
decentralization
of power do you think that's something
that we can actually achieve
uh given that power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely and
it's so wonderful to be
absolutely powerful well good question
savage
so first of all i believe by the way
there is a
um it's a complex questions uh lex um
um uh and like uh all the rest of your
questions
i'm so very sorry it's okay i am
enjoying it
so but uh so there are two things first
of all
power has been um centralized for
various reasons
when you want to get it is easier for
somebody
even a single law person to grab power
but there is also
some kind of a technology lack thereof
that justified having power because
in a way in a society in which even
communication never
mind blockchain which is common
knowledge but even simple
unilateral communication is hard it is
much easier to say
you do as i say because the alternative
but as so there is a little bit of a
technology barrier but i think of it
and and now to get to this common
knowledge of it is a totally different
story
now we have finally the technology for
doing this so
that is one part but i really believe
that you know not
by having a distributed system not only
you don't have a
you have actually much more stable and
durable system
because not only for corruption but even
for things that go astray and you give
it a long enough time
by stranger version of murphy's law
whatever goes wrong goes wrong
and so and if you the power is diffused
you actually are much more stable if you
look at uh
any any living uh
complex living being is distributed i
mean um
uh i don't know if somebody is a okay
tell silvia now it's time to eat uh
right so you have millions of cells in
your body you have billions of bacteria
exactly help me in the guts everything
you know we are in a soup of it somehow
it keeps us alive yes it is uh and
so and strange enough however when we
design systems
we designed them centralized we
ourselves are distributed beings
and when we plan and say okay i want to
create
an architecture how about i i make a
pyramid
i put west on the top and
the power flows down and um and so again
it's a
little bit perhaps of a technology
problem but now the technology is there
so that is a big challenge to rethink
how we want to organize power
um in very large system and uh
and and and distribute the system in my
opinion are much more resilient
let's put this way there was a mine of
my
[Music]
italian competitors right you know
machiavelli who
looked at the time there was a big there
was a bunch of a small state
democratic republic of florence of
venison and the other thing
and there was the ottoman empire that at
the time was an empire and
assad and was very centralized and he
made a political observation
that goes roughly to say whenever you
have such a centralized thing it's very
hard
to overtake but that former government
is centralized
but if you get it it's so easy to keep
the population
one instead with other uh with other
things a much
more resilient time
when the power is distributed is much
more it's going to be
lasting for much longer time and
ultimately maybe
the human spirit wants that kind of
resilience wants that kind of
distribution
it's just that we didn't have technology
throughout history machiavelli didn't
have
the computer the internet and uh
certainly part of a reason yes you've
written an interesting blog post if we
take a step
out of the realm of bits and into this
the realm of governance you wrote a blog
post about making algorand
governance decentralized now can you
explain what that means the philosophy
behind that
you know how how do you decentralize
basically all aspects
of this kind of system well the
philosophy
and the how let's start with the
philosophy so i really believe
that uh nothing fixed
last very long and and so i really
believe
that life is about intelligent
adaptation things change and we have to
be nimble and adjust to change and
when i when i see a lot of of a
crypto project actually very proud to
say it's fixed in stone
um right you know code is law law is
called a verify of the code that will
never change
you go wow when i'm saying this is a
recipe to me of disaster not immediately
soon just imagine you take an ocean
liner and you want to go
i don't know from lisbon
to new york and you set the course
iceberg no iceberg tempest not tempest
and all
it doesn't matter you keep on going but
it's not the way you need
a teal you need to correct you need to
adjust
and um and so on um by the way we design
algorithm with the idea
that the code was evolving
as the needs and of course however is a
system
in which and every time there is an
adjustment you must have essentially a
vote
that right now is orchestrated
at 90 percent of the stake they say okay
we are ready we agree on the next
version
and we pick up this version so we are
able to evolve without
losing too many components left and
right but i think without evolving
any system essentially become aesthetic
and that is going to shrivel
and die sooner or later and and so that
is
uh is needed and what you want to do
under the blockchain you have a
perfect platform in which you can log
your wishes your votes your thing so
that you have a guarantee that
whatever vote you express is actually
seen by everybody else
so everybody sees really the outcome or
call it of a referendum
of a change and veto is uh in my opinion
a system that wants to live long as to
adapt
there is an interesting question about
leaders i've talked to vitalik buter and
i'll probably talk to him again soon
he's the
one of the leaders maybe one of the
faces of the ethereum project
and it's interesting you have uh uh
satoshi nakamoto who's
the face of bitcoin i guess but he's
faceless
he she they
it does seem like in our whatever it is
maybe it's 20th century
maybe it's machiavellian thinking but
we seek leaders leaders have value linus
torvald
the leader of uh of linux
um the open source development a lot i
mean there's no
it's not it's not that the leadership is
sort of dogmatic
but it's inspiring and it's also
powerful in that through leaders
we propagate the vision like the vision
of the project is more stable
maybe not the details but the vision and
so do you think there's value
to because we're there's a tension
between decentralization and leadership
like in visionary yes what do you make
of that attention
okay so i really believe that if it's a
another good question i think of it you
know
um i really believe in the power of
emotions i think the
emotion i have a creative impulse of
everybody else and very
very far is very easy for a leader to be
a
a physical person a real being and uh
that interprets our emotions and by the
way
this emotion has to resonate and what is
good is that
the more intimate our emotions are the
more universal they are
paradoxically more personal the more
everybody else yes somehow magically
agrees and feels a bit the same
and so and it's very important to have a
leader in the initial phase that
generates out or nothing something that
is important leadership
but then the true tested leadership is
to disappear after you led
the community so in my opinion the
quintessential leader
in my
according to my vision is george
washington he served for one term
for another term and then all of a
sudden he retired and became a private
citizen
and 200 and change years later
we still are we send the facts but we
have done a lot of things right
and we have been able to evolve that to
me is success in leadership
when instead you contrast our experiment
with a lot of experiments i've done
so much so well that i want another four
years
and why shouldn't i be only a four and i
have another eight
why should be another eight give me
sixteen and we'll fix all your problem
and now then is the type in my opinion
of failed dealership
leadership ought to be really lead
ignite
and disappear and if you don't disappear
the system is going to die
with you and it's not a good idea for of
everybody else
is there so we've been talking a little
bit about cryptocurrency but
is there spaces where this kind of
blockchain ideas that you're describing
which i find fascinating uh do you think
they can revolutionize some other
aspects of our world
that's not just money a lot of things
are going to be
revolutionized is uh is uh independent
of finance
by the way i really believe that um
finance is uh an incredible form of
freedom i mean
if i free to do anything i want to but i
don't even mean to do anything that's a
bad idea so i really think the financial
freedom
is very very important but you know but
you just i can say that you know
against you know censorship you write
something of a chain and now nobody can
take it out you can't
take it out that is a very important way
to
express you know um
our view and um and then the
transparency that uh
that you give because everybody can see
what's happening on the blockchain
so transparency is not money but i
believe
the transparency actually is a very
important
ingredient also of finance let's put it
this way
as much as i'm enthusiastic about
blockchain and
decentralized finance um
and we have actually our expression
we're trying to be creating with the
future five because
as much as we want to do we must agree
that
the first guarantee of financial growth
and prosperity are really the legal
system
the courts because we may not think
about them and say oh the courts are
kind of a bunch of boring lawyers but
without them
i'm saying there is no certainty there
is no um
notion of equality there is no notion
that you can resolve your disputes
thing that's what thrives the commerce
and things and so what i really believe
that the blockchain
actually makes a lot of this trust
essentially automatic by making it
impossible to cheat in the way you don't
even need to go to court
if nobody can change a villager right
so essentially is a way of
you cannot solve and the legal system
reduces to a blockchain
but what i'm saying a big chunk of it
can actually be
guaranteed and there is no reason why
technology should be antagonistic
to legal scholarship it could be
actually coexisting
and one should start to doing the
interesting things that the economy
alone cannot do
and then you go from there but but i
think that is uh
essentially is uh blockchain can affect
all kinds of our yes in some sense the
transparency the required transparency
ensures honesty
prevents corruption so there's a lot of
system that could use that and the legal
system is one of them
there is a little bit of attention that
i wonder if you can speak to
where this kind of transparency there's
a tension with privacy
is it possible to achieve privacy
if wanted on uh on a blockchain
do you have do you have ideas about
different technologies that can do that
people have been playing with different
ideas
so absolutely the answer is that yes
and um but by the way i'm a
cryptographer
right okay so i really believe in
privacy and i believe
in and never devoted an um
a big chunk of my life to guarantee
privacy even when it seems almost
impossible to have it
and and it is possible to everything
also in the blockchain too
and however i believe in timing
as well and i believe that the people
have
the right to understand
their system we live in and right now
um people can understand the blockchain
to be
something that is not con cannot be
altered
and is uh transparent and that is good
enough and right now
any way to add and there is a pseudo
privacy for the fact that
who knows if this keys belong publicly
belongs to me or to you
right and i can when i want to change my
money from one public key
i split it through other public keys go
on to figure out which one is silvio
all of them are sylvia or only one of
sylvia who knows so you get some vanilla
privacy no
no not the one i created and i think
it's good enough
because and it's important for now that
we absorb the best stage
because in the next stage we must
understand the privacy tool rather than
taking on faith
when the public starts saying i believe
in the scientist and whatever they say
i swear by them and therefore if they
tell me private is private
and nobody understands it very well we
need a much more
educated about the tools we are using
and so i look forward to deploying
more and more privacy on the blockchain
but we are not i i i will not
rush to it until the people understand
and are behind whatever we have right
now
so you build privacy on top of the power
of the blockchain you have to first
understand
the power of the blockchain yes so
algorand
is like one of the most exciting
technically at least
from my perspective technologies ideas
in this whole space
what's the future of algon look like uh
is it possible for it to dominate the
world
let's put the best way i certainly
working very hard with a great team
to give the best blockchain that
one can demand and enjoy
and they said i really believe that
there is going to be
it's not a winner takes them all so it's
going to be a few blockchains
and each one is going to have its own
brand and it's going to be great at
something
and sometimes is a scalability sometimes
is uh
is your views or sometimes is uh thing
and and
it's important to have a dialogue
between these things and
i'm sure and i'm working very hard to
make sure the underground is one of them
but i don't believe of it you know he's
even uh
desirable to have you know a winner
takes all because we need to express
different things but the important thing
is going to have enough interoperability
of our systems so that you can transfer
your assets
where you have the best tool to service
them whatever your needs are at the time
so there's a idea i don't know they call
themselves
bitcoin maximalists which is essentially
the bet that
uh the philosophy that bitcoin will
eat the world so you're talking about
it's good to have variety
their claim is it's good to have the
best technology
dominate the the medium of exchange the
the medium of
store value the money the digi you know
the
the digital currency space what's your
sense
of the positives and the negatives of
that
so i feel people are smart and it's
going to be very hard
for anybody and to end going a man
to win and because people want more and
more things
and there is an italian saying that goes
as
translates well i think uh it goes the
appetite
grows while eating okay i think you
don't understand
what do you mean yes so i say yeah i'm
not hungry okay food
let me try so we want more and more and
more
and when you find something like a
bitcoin which are really
very good things to say but it does
something very well
but is a static i mean store value
yes i think it's a great like
you know it would be a sad world if the
world in which we are so anchoring down
some and defensive that we want to store
value and higher than the matters
i i long for a world in which is open
people want to transact and interact
with
which way and therefore when you want to
store value
one perhaps one chain when you want to
have a transaction maybe
is another i'm not saying that you know
when chain cannot be stored of value of
everything but i really believe
i believe in the ingenuity of people in
in the
innovation that is intrinsic to the
human nature we want always different
things so how can it be something
invented whatever it is decades ago is
going to fulfill the needs of our future
generations
i'm not going to fulfill my needs let
alone
one of my kids or their kids
we are going to have a different world
and uh
things will evolve so you believe yeah
so you believe that
life intelligent life is ultimately
about adaptability
and evolving so static is
static loses in the end yes
let me ask the well first the ridiculous
question
do you have any clue who's who satoshi
nakamoto is
is that even a interesting question
well is it you your question by the way
are very interesting
so and i think so i would say first of
all
it's not me okay and i can prove it
because you know
if i was satoshi nakamoto i would have
not found that algorithm
takes totally different principle to to
approach
to the system but the other thing who is
tadashi nakamoto you know what the right
answer is
it's not him or she hair or them
satoshi nakamura is bitcoin
because to me is such a coherent proof
of work but at the end
the creator and the creation identify
themselves
so he says okay i understand the
michelangelo okay he did the resistant
chapel fine he did the way some peter's
dome
fine he did uh the the most of the pieta
started you're fine but besides this who
was
yeah that's very wrong question is his
own work vet
is michelangelo so i think that
when you look at the bitcoin is a piece
of work
that as it defects yes like anything
human but it was
captivated the imaginations of
millions of people as subverted the
status quo
and i'm saying you know whoever
this person or people are he's living
in this piece of work yeah i mean it is
bitcoin that's better
with my idea the work is is bigger
we forget that sometimes it's something
about our biology once
likes to see a face and attach a face to
the idea
when really the idea is the thing we
love the ideas the thing that
impact ideas the thing that ultimately
we you know steve jobs or something like
that we associate
with the mac with the iphone with just
everything he did at apple
apple actually the company is steve jobs
steve jobs the man is
uh is uh is appalls in comparison to the
creation
and the sense of aesthetics that has
brought to the daily lives
and very often uh aesthetic wins
in the long in veron in the long game
and these are
very elegant design product and when you
say oh elegance a very few people care
about it apparently
millions and millions and millions and
millions of people do because we are
attacked by beauty
and these are beautifully designed
products
and uh and uh and you know
and they've uh in addition to the
technological
aspect of the other thing and i think
yes that is uh
yeah as dostoyevsky said beauty will
save the world so i'm i'm with you on
that one
right it uh currently seems like
cryptocurrency all these different
technologies
are gathering a lot of excitement
not just in our discourse but in their
like
scale financial impact a lot of
companies are starting to invest in
bitcoin
do you think that the main method
of store value and exchange
of value basically money will soon or at
some point in the century will become
cryptocurrency
yes so mind you as i said that the
notion of cryptocurrency
like any other fundamental human notion
has to evolve
but yes so i think of it uh
he has a lot of momentum behind it
and he's not only static as of his
programmable money as a i think smart
consciousness
it allows a peer-to-peer interaction
among people who don't even know each
other right uh
and they don't even therefore cannot
even trust each other just because
they never saw each other so i think
it's so powerful
that uh is going to do this said
again a particular cryptocurrency
should develop and cryptocurrency they
will all develop
but the answer is yes we are going
towards a much more
uh unless we have a society a sudden
crisis
for different reasons which oh there's
nobody hopes there's always an asteroid
there's always
something uh nuclear war and all the
existential crisis that we kind of think
about including artificial intelligence
uh okay it's funny you mentioned that um
michelangelo and steve jobs you know set
of ideas represents the person's work so
we talked about
algorithm which is a super interesting
set of technologies
but you know he did also win the
touring award you have a bunch of you
have a bunch of
ideas that are you know
seminal ideas so can we talk about
cryptography for a little bit
what is the most beautiful idea in
cryptography or computer science or
mathematics in general asking somebody
who has
explored the depths of all
well a few contenders
[Laughter]
and either your work or uh or
what other words let's leave my work
aside yes
and uh and uh so but one powerful
idea and is a both an old idea
in some sense and a very very modern one
and in my opinion is this idea of a
one-way function
so a function that easy
to evaluate so given x you can compute f
of x
easily but given f of x
is very hard to go back to x okay
think like breaking a glass
easy reconstruct the glass hard
frying an egg easy for the side egg
to go back to your original leg hard
if you want to be extreme killing a
living being
unfortunately easy the other way around
very hard
and so the fact that the notion of a
function which you have a recipe that is
in front of your eyes to transform an x
into
f of x and then from f of x even though
you see the recipe to transform it
you cannot go back to x that in my
opinion is one of the most
elegant and momentous
notions that there are and is a
computational notion because of the
difficulties in a computational sense
and it's a mathematical notion because
we were talking about function
and is so fruitful because that is
actually the foundation of all the
cryptography
and let me tell you is an old notion
because very often in any mythology
that we think of the most powerful gods
or goddesses
are the ones of x and the opposite of x
the gods of love and death and when you
take
opposites they don't just you know
erase one another you create something
way more powerful
and this one-way function is extremely
powerful because essentially becomes
something that is easy for the good guys
and bad
for the but hard for the bad guys
so for reason in pseudorandom number
generation
the easy part of the function
corresponds you want to generate bits
very quickly
and hard is predicting what the next bit
is
it says geo it doesn't look the same one
is x f of x
going from x for x to x r let us do
predicting bits
by a magic of reductions in mathematical
apparatus this simple function
morphs itself into pseudogenomic
generation this is simple function
morphs in cells in digital signature
scheme
in which digitally signing should be
easy and forging should be hard
again a digital signature is not going
from x to f
x but the magic and the richness of this
notion is meant that
it is so powerful it morphs
in all kinds of incredible constructs
and uh in both these two opposites
coexist
the easy and the hard and in my opinion
is a very very elegant notion so
that simple notion ties together
cryptography
like you said pseudo-random number
generation
you have work on pseudo-random functions
what are those what
uh what's the difference in those and
the generators
should run random number generators okay
let's start how do they work
let's uh let's go back to pseudogana
number generation
yes first of all people think of the
surrogate moderation generates a random
number not true
because i don't believe that uh from
nothing you can get
you can you can get uh something
so nothing for nothing but the
randomness you cannot create out on
nothing but what you can do
is that you click it can be expanded so
in other words
if you give me somehow 300 random bits
truly random bits
then i can give you 300 300 million 300
trillions 300 quadrillions as
many as you want random beats soviet
even though i tell you the recipe by
which i produce these beats
but i don't tell you the initial 300
random numbers i keep them secret
and you see all the bits i produce so
far
if i if you were to bet given all the
bits produced so far
what is the next bit in my sequence
better than 50 50.
of course 50 50 anybody can guess right
but to be
inferring something you have to be a bit
better then
the effort to to do this extra bit
is so enormous that is the fact of
random
so that is a sort of random generator
are these expanders
of secret randomness which goes
extremely
fast okay let's say what's the standards
of secret randomness
beautifully put okay so every time every
time somebody who if you're a programmer
is using a function
that's not called pseudorandom it's
called random usually you know these
programming languages and it's
generating different
uh that's essentially expanding the
secret
randomness but they should and in the
past actually most of the library they
used
something pre-modern cryptography
unfortunately they'll be better served
to take
300 uh real seed random number
and uh and then expand them properly as
we know now
uh but met has been a very
old idea in fact one of the um best
philosophers have debated
the wave of the world was deterministic
or probabilistic
very big questions right does god play
dice
exactly einstein says it does it doesn't
but in fact now we have a language that
even
at the alberta time was not around but
it was this complexity of a modern
complexity-based cryptography and now we
know that
in the universe has 300 random beats
whether there is random or probabilistic
or
deterministic it doesn't matter because
you can expand
this initial seed of randomness forever
in which
all the experiments you could do all the
inferences you could do all the things
you could do
there you would not be able to
distinguish them from truly random
so if you are not able to distinguish
truly random
from this super duper pseudo randomness
are the really different things that's
what i say so many
to become really philosophical so for
things to be different but i don't have
in my lifetime in my lifetime of the
universe any method
to set them aside well i should be
intellectually honest to say well
pseudorandom investment satisfaction is
as good as random
do you think true randomness is
possible and what does that mean
so i practically speaking exactly as you
said if you're being honest
the the the pseudo randomness approaches
through randomness pretty quickly
but is it is it uh maybe is this a
philosophical question is there such a
thing as true randomness
well the answer is actually maybe but if
there
exists most probably is
expensive to get and uh
and uh and in any case if i give you one
of mine
um you'll never tell them apart
yeah but not any other shape no matter
how much you work on it so in some sense
if it exists or not it really is a quote
philosophical sense in the
um colloquial way to say that we cannot
uh
somehow pin it down do you ever again
just
stay on philosophical for a bit for a
brief moment
do you ever think about free will and
uh whether that exists because
ultimately
free will sort of is this experience
that we have like we're making choices
even though it appears that
you know the world is deterministic at
the core i mean
it's against the debate but if it is in
fact deterministic at the lowest
possible level
uh at the at the physics level
uh how do you make if if it is
deterministic how do you make uh
how do you make sense of the difference
between the experience of us
feeling like we're making a choice and
the whole thing being deterministic
so first of all let me give you a gut
reaction yeah to my question
and a gut reaction is that
it is important that we believe that
there exists free will and second of all
almost uh by weird logic
if we believe it exists then it does
exist okay
yeah so it's very important for our
social
apparatus for our sense sensibility of
ourselves
that it exists and the moment in which
you know we
we so want to be almost we conjure it up
in existence
but again i really feel that if you look
at some point
and the space of free will seems to
shrink
we realize how more and more how much of
our
say genetic apparatus dictates who we
are why we prefer
certain things than others right and why
we react to noises of music
we prefer poetry of everything else we
may explain even always
but uh but at the end of the day whether
it
exists in a philosophical sense or not
it's like randomness if you can
pseudorandom is as good as random
vis-a-vis
lifetime of the universe our experience
when does it really matter
yeah so you know we're talking about
randomness i wonder if i can weave in
quantum mechanics
for a brief moment there's a
you know a lot of advancements on the
quantum computing side
so leveraging quantum mechanics to
perform a new kind of computation
and there's concern of that being a
threat
to a lot of the basic assumptions that
underlie cryptography
what do you think do you think quantum
computing will challenge
a lot of cryptography will cryptography
be able to defend
all those kinds of things okay great so
first of all
foreign because i think it matters but
it's important
that there are people who continue to
contend
that quantum mechanics exist but has
nothing to do with computing is not
going to accelerate it
and at least you know
very basic and um are the computation
that is a belief that you cannot uh take
it out
i'm a little bit uh more agnostic about
it but i really believe
going back to whatever i said about the
the one-way function
so one way function what is it what is a
cryptography
so does quantum computing challenge the
one
function essentially you can boil it
down to does one computing find one way
function what is one way function
easy in one direction other than the
other
okay but if quantum computing exists
when you define what it is easy
it's not by easy by a classical computer
and art by a classical computer but is
it for for a quantum computer that's a
bad idea
but once easy means it should be easy
for a quantum
and hard for also quantum then you can
see that
you are yes is a challenge but you have
hope because you can absorb
if one computing really realizes and
becomes available
and according to the promises then you
can use them also for the easy part
and once you use it from the easy part
the
choices that you have a one-way function
they multiply so okay
so the particular candidates of one-way
function
may not be one way anymore
but quantum one-way function may
continue to exist
and so i really believe that
for uh life to be meaningful
with one way function had to exist
because
just imagine that anything that is
becomes easy to to do i mean what kind
of life is it
i mean so you need that and if something
is hard but it's so hard to generate
you'll never find something which is
hard for you you want but there is
abundance if it is easy to produce
heart problem what's in my opinion is
why life is interesting
because art form pop up another really
relatable speed so in some sense i
almost think that
i do hope they exist if they don't exist
somehow life is
way less interesting than uh it actually
is yeah it does
that's funny it does seem like the
one-way function is fundamental to all
of life which is the the emergence of
the complexity that we see around us
seem to require the one-way function
i don't know if you uh play with
cellular automata
that's just another formulation of i
know but yeah it's a
very simple it's almost a very simple
illustration of
starting out with simple rules and
one way being able to generate
incredible
amounts of complexity but then you ask
the question can i reverse that
then it's just it's just a surprising
how difficult it is to reverse that
it's surprising even in constrained
situations it's
very difficult to prove anything uh that
it almost i mean the sad thing about it
well i don't know if it's sad but it
seems like we don't even have the
mathematical tools
to reverse engineer stuff i don't know
if they exist or not
but in the space of cellular automata
where you start with something simple
and you create something incredibly
complex
can you take something a small picture
of that complex
and reverse engineer that's kind of what
we're doing as scientists
here you're seeing the result of the
complexity and you're trying to come up
with some
universal law that generate all of this
what is the
you know the theory of everything what
are the basic physics laws that
generated this whole thing
and there's a hope that you should be
able to do that but
it gets it's difficult yeah but there is
also some portrait of the fact that it's
difficult
right because he it gives us a mystery
to life
which yeah without the wheelchair i mean
uh it's not so fun uh
all right life will be less fun can we
talk about interactive proofs a little
bit and
zero knowledge proofs what are those
okay how do they work
so interactive proof actually
is um is
is a modern realization and uh
conceptualization of something
that we knew was true but you know that
is easy to go to lecture
in fact that's my motivation we invented
the schools to go to lecture right we
don't say oh i have a minister of
education i publish this book you read
it
yeah invest this book for this year this
book for version
we spend a lot of our treasury in
educating our kids
and in person educating go to class
interact with a teacher on the
blackboard and chalk on my time
now we can have you know whiteboard and
presumably you're going to have actually
this
uh magic pens and the display instead
but the the the idea is that
interactively you can convey truth much
more efficiently and we knew this
psychologically
it's better to hear the explanation than
just to be labor or some paper right
same thing so interactive proofs is a
way to
to do a following rather than doing in
some complicated very long
papers and possibly infinitely long
proofs exponentially long proofs
you say the following if this theorem is
true
there is a game that is associated to
the theorem
and if the theorem is true this game
i have a winning strategy that i can win
half of it
all the time no matter what you do
okay so then you say well is the theorem
true you believe me why should i believe
you so okay let's play
so and if i prove that i have a strategy
that
and i win the first time and i win the
second time then i lose a third time but
i win
every say more than half of a time or i
win
say all the time if the serum is true
and at least
at the most half of a time if the
theorem is false you statistically
get convinced you can verify this
quickly
and and therefore is a much when the
game
in the game typically is extremely fast
so you generate a miniature game in
which the theorem is true
i win all the time in the theorem is
false i can win at most
half of a time and if i win win win win
win win win you can deduce either the
firm is true
which most probably is the case of this
week
or i've been very very unlucky because
it's like if i had a hundred coin tosses
and i got a hundred heads
very improbable right so that is a way
and so this transformation
from the state formal statement of a
proof
into a game that can be quickly
played and you can draw statistics how
many times you win and you
is a is one of a
big conquest of a modern complex theory
and in fact actually as a highlighted
the notion of uh of a proof has really
give us a new insight to what to be true
means and
what what the truth is and what proofs
are so these are generally proofs
so what kind of
mysteries can it allow us to unlock
and prove he said truth
uh so uh what does it allow us
what kind of truth does that allow us to
arrive at
so it enlarges the real mobot is
provable because
in some sense the classical way of
proving things
was extremely inefficient
from the very fire point of view yes
right so
and and so therefore there is so much
proof that you can take and
but in this way you can actually very
quickly minutes
verify something that is
the correctness of an assertion that
otherwise would have taken our lifetime
to belabor and check all the
the passages of a very very very long
proof and you better check
all of them because if you don't check
one line
an error can be in that line and so you
have to go linearly through all the
stuff rather than
bypass this so you enlarge tremendous
amount
whatever proof is and in addition
once you have the idea that essentially
a proof system is something that
allows me to convince you of a true
statement
but does not allow me to convince you of
a false statement
and better at the ancestor proof proof
can be beautiful should be
should be elegant but advances is true
or false so she wants to be able to
differentiate
it is possible to prove the truth and it
should be impossible or statistically
extremely hard
to prove something false and if you do
this you can prove way way
more once you understand this and on top
of it
we got some insight i can visit zero
knowledge proofs
that is in something which you took for
granted were
the same knowledge and verification
are actually separate concepts so you
can verify
that an assertion is correct without
having
any idea why this is so and so
people fail to say if you want to verify
something you have to
to have a proof once you have a proof
you know why it's true you have
the proof itself and so somehow you can
totally differentiate knowledge
and and uh and verification validity so
totally you can
decide if something is true and still
have no idea is there a good example
in your mind oh actually
you know at the beginning we labor to
find
the first knowledge zero knowledge proof
then we find a second then we've had the
third
and then a few years later actually we
proved a theorem
which essentially says every theorem no
matter what about
can be explained in a zero-knowledge way
okay so it's not a class of fear but
all theorems and is a very powerful
thing so if we were really
for thousands of years
bought this identity between knowledge
and verification
to be hand-in-hand together and uh for
no reason at all
i mean we had to develop a weaver
technology as you know i'm very big on
technology because
it makes us more human and and make us
understand
more things than before and uh and i
think of it is a
that is a that's a good thing
so this interactive proof process
there's power in games yeah and you've
recently
gotten into uh recently i'm not sure you
can correct me
uh mechanism design yeah uh
so it's i mean first of all maybe you
can explain what mechanism design is
and the the fascinating space of playing
with games
and designing games mechanism design is
that
you want to you want a certain behavior
to arise right if you want to organize
you know
a societal structure or something you
want to have some orderly
uh behavior to our eyes right because uh
it is important for
your goals but
but you know that people they don't care
what my goals are
makers about uh maximizing their utility
so put the grassley making money the
more money
the better so to speak right i'm
exaggerating my self-interest
in what self-interest in whatever way
them so what you want to do
is ideally what you want to do is to
design a game so that while people
played so to maximize their
self-interest
they achieve the social goal and
behavior that i want
that is really the best type of thing
and it is a very
hard science and art to design
with games and it challenges us
to
actually come up with solution concepts
for way to analyzing the games
that need to be broader and i think the
number
game theory has a developing a bunch of
very compelling
way to analyze the game that if the game
has a best property
well you can have a pretty good
guarantee that is going to be played in
a given way
but as it turns out and not surprisingly
these tools have a range of action like
anything else all these
so-called the technical resolution
concept the way to analyze the game
like dominant strategy equilibrium when
something comes to mind to be
very meaningful but as a limited power
in some sense the games that they can be
i'll admit such a way to be analysis
there's a very specific kind of games
and the
the rules are set the constraints are
set the utilities are all set
yes so if you want to reason if there is
always say
that you can analyze a restricted class
of games this way
but most games you know don't fall into
the rest of the class
then what do i do when you need to
enlarge a way what a rational player can
do
so for instance uh in my opinion at
least in some of my
i played with this for a few years and i
i was doing some exotic things i'm sure
in in the space that was not exactly
mainstream
and then i changed my interest and our
blockchain
but what i'm saying for a while i was
doing
so for instance to me is a way in which
i design the game
and you don't have the best move for you
the best move is the move that is best
for you no matter what the other players
are doing
sometimes a game doesn't have that okay
it's too much to ask
but i can design the game such of it
given the option in front of you say oh
these are really stupid for me
take them aside but these these are not
stupid
so if you design them the game solve it
in any combination
or non stupid things that the player can
do
i achieve what i want i'm done i don't
care
to find the very unique equilibrium
i i don't give a damn i want to say well
as long as you don't do stupid things
and nobody else does stupid things
good social things outcome guys i should
be equally happy
and so i really believe that um
this type of analysis you know is uh as
possible and
uh as a bigger
radius so it reaches some more games
more classes of games
and uh and after that we have to enlarge
it again and uh
and it's going to be we're going to have
fun because uh
human behavior can be conceptualized
again in many ways and uh
it's it's a long game jim it's a long
game do you have uh favorite games that
you're looking at now i mean i suppose
your work with blockchain and algorithm
is the kind of game that you're
you you basically just mechanism design
design the game such that it's
scalable secure and decentralized right
yes yes and very often you have to say
and verify and
you must also design so that the
incentives are uh
in terms of whatever little i learned
from my venture in uh mechanism design
is that incentives are very hard to
design
because people are very complex
creatures and so
and so somehow the way we design
algorithm is a
totally different way essentially with
no incentives essentially
and and but but technically speaking
there is a notion
that uh uh is actually believable right
so that to say um people want to
maximize their utility
yes up to a point let me let me tell you
assume
that if you are honest
you make 100 bucks but if you are
dishonest no matter how dishonest you
are you can only make 100 bucks
and one cent what are you going to be
i'm saying you know what
technically speaking even that one's
nobody bothers and say
how much am i going to make by honest
100 if i'm devious and if i'm a criminal
100 bucks in one cent you know i might
as well be honest okay
so that essentially is called you know
epsilon utility equilibrium but uh i
think it's it's good
and and and uh and that's what we design
essentially means of it you know
the reason uh having no incentives
is actually a good thing because to
prevent people from reasoning how else i
encounter game the system
but why can we achieve an argon to have
known incentives
and in bitcoin instead yet to pay the
miners because they do tremendous amount
of work because
if you have to do a lot of work
then you demand to be paid accordingly
because you right
but if i'm going to say here to add two
and two equal to four how much you want
to me pay for vessel if you don't give
me advice
i don't add the two and two i would say
you can add 22
in your sleep you don't need to be paid
to other 2. so
the idea is that if we make the system
so efficient
so that generating the next block is
so damn simple it doesn't hit the
universe let alone my computer
let alone take some microsecond or
computation i might as well
not being received incentives for doing
that
and try to incentivize some other part
of the system but not
the main consensus which is a mechanism
for generating an adding block to the
chain
since you're italian sicilian
i also heard rumors that you are a
connoisseur of food
uh what you know if i said today is the
last day
you get to be alive i'm rushing you
shouldn't have trusted me
you never know the russian whether
you're gonna make it out or not well if
you
had one last meal you can travel
somewhere in the world either you make
it or somebody else makes it
uh what's that going to look like all
right
this is one last meal i must say hey
you know in this ira kovid
i've not been able to see my mom and
uh and that was my mama was a fantastic
chef okay
and ahead of this very traditional food
as you know the very traditional food
are great for a reason
because they survived hundreds of years
of culinary innovation
yeah so and there is one very laborious
thing
which is uh and you heard the name which
is this
uh parmigiana
but to do it it's a piece of art
requires so many hours
but only my mama could do it if we have
one last meal i want to parmesan
okay what is uh what's what's the
laborious processes
the ingredients is it the the actual
process is it the the atmosphere and the
humans involved
and the latter a the ingredient
like in any other in italian cuisine
believes in very few ingredients
if you take say quintessential
italian recipe everybody knows spaghetti
paste okay
pesto is olive oil very good extra
virgin oil
um basil
pine nuts pepper a clove of garlic not
too much otherwise used
yeah you know the flour everything and
then you have to
do either two schools of food parmesan
or pecorino or a mixed number two
yeah i mentioned six ingredients yes
that is typical italian
that is i understand that there are
cuisines for instance a french cuisine
which is
extremely sophisticated and extremely
combinatorial
or some chinese cuisine which has a lot
of
many more ingredients than this and yet
the artist to put them together
a lot of things in italy is really
striving for simplicity
yet to find few ingredients but the
right ingredients to create
something so in parmigiana the
ingredients are eggplants they are
tomatoes
we are basil but but how to put them
together
in the process he's a he's an actor
of love okay labor and love is that uh
you can spend uh the entire day when i'm
exaggerating by the entire morning for
sure
to do it uh properly yes the japanese
cuisine too
there's a mastery to the simplicity with
the sushi i don't know if you've seen
george of sushi but there's a mastery to
that that's
propagated through the generations it's
fascinating that's fascinating
you know people love it uh when i ask
about books
i don't know if uh books whether fiction
non-fiction
technical or completely non-technical
had an impact in your life
throughout if there's anything you would
recommend or even just mention as
something they give you
an insight or moved you in some way
so okay so i don't know if i recommend
because in some sense you almost had to
be italian or to be such a scholar but
being
italian one thing that really
impressed me tremendously is the divine
comedy
it is a medieval poem a very long poem
divided in three parts hell purgatory in
paradise okay
and the vet is the non-trivial story
of a middleman man
gets into a crisis personal crisis
and then out of this crisis
he purifies mesa catastrophes he
purifies himself more and more and more
until
he's become capable of actually meeting
god
okay and that is actually a complex
story
so you have to get some very
sophisticated
language maybe latino at that point that
we were talking about 1200s um
uh italy right in in florence
and this guy instead he chose his own
dialect
not spoken outside his own immediate
circle right
um a florentine dollar actually he dante
really made italian
italian he was it's like how can you
express such a sophisticated things and
so this
and then the point is that these words
that uh nobody actually knew because
they were essentially dialect
and plus a bunch of very intricate
rhymes in which they had to rhyme with
things
and turns out that by getting meaning
from the things with the rhyme
you essentially guess what the world
means
and you invent italian and you
communicate
by almost osmosis what you want is a
miracle of communication
in a dialect a very poor language very
unsophisticated to express a very
sophisticated
situation i love it
people who love it and italians are not
italian but but what i got of it is that
you know
very often limitations
are our strength because if you limit
yourself at a very poor language
somehow you get out of it and you
achieve even better form of
communication that are using a
hyper-sophisticated and literary
language with lots of resonance from the
prior books so that you can actually
instantaneously quote he couldn't quote
anything because nothing was written in
italian before him
so i really felt that limitations are
our strength
and i think that rather than complaining
about eliminations
we should embrace them because
if you embrace our limitation limited as
we are we find
very creative solutions that people with
less limitation we have we would not
even think about it oh this
limitation is a kind of superpower if
you choose to see it that way
uh is there since you speak both
languages is there something that's
lost in translation to you is there
something you can express in italian
that you can't in english
and vice versa maybe is there something
you could say to the musicality of the
language
i mean i from i've been to italy a few
times and uh
i'm not sure if it's the actual words
but it's
the people are certainly very um
there's body language too there's just
the whole being is language
so i don't know if uh you miss some of
that
when you're speaking english in this
country yes in fact
actually i certainly i i'm uh
i miss it and uh somehow it was a
sacrifice
that i made consciously by the time when
um
i arrived i knew that this i was not
going to express myself
i'm a better level and uh and
it was also sacrificed because uh given
to you ever also
your mother tongue is russian so you
know that
you can be very expressive in your
mother tongue and not very expressive
there's a neutron a new language and
then
what people think of you in the new
language because when the precise of
expression of things
it generates you know it shows a normal
elegance
or it shows you know knowledge or he
shows us a census or he shows us a caste
or an education whatever it is
so all of a sudden i found myself on the
border
[Laughter]
so i had to fight all my way up back up
and but
but i'm not saying i go back to fasting
their limitations are actually our
strength in fact is a trick
to limit yourself to exceed right and
you know
there are examples in history if you
think about you know
right he goes to invade mexico he has
what
a few hundred people with him and uh
he has a hundred thousand people in arms
on the other side
first thing he does he limits himself
he sinks his own ship there is no return
okay and at that point he actually
managed
that's really good i i actually
first of all that's inspiring to me i
feel like i have quite a few limitations
but more practically
on the russian side i'm going to try to
do a couple of really
big and really tough interviews in
russian
uh once coveted lifts a little bit i'm
traveling to russia
and i'll keep your advice in mind
that the limitations is a kind of
superpower we should use it to our
advantage
because you do feel less
like you're not able to convey your
wisdom
in in the russian language because i i
moved here when i was 13
so you don't you know the parts of life
you live
under a certain language are the parts
of life you're able to communicate
you know i became i became a thoughtful
deeply thoughtful human in english
yes but the the the pain from world war
ii
this the the music of the people that
was instilled with me
in russian so i can carry both of those
and there's limitations in both
i can't say philosophically profound
stuff in russian
but i can't in english express like that
melancholy feeling
of like the people and so combining
those two also
beautifully said thanks for sharing this
is great yes i
totally understand you yes you've
accomplished some
incredible things in this space of
science
in the space of technology
space of theory and engineering do you
have advice
for somebody young an undergraduate
student somebody in high school
or anyone who just feels young uh about
life
or about career about making their way
in this world
so i was telling before but i believe in
emotion and
my thing is to be true to your
own emotion and that i think that if you
do that
you're doing well because it's a life
well spent
and you are going never tire because you
want to solve all these emotional notes
that have
always intrigued you from the beginning
and i really believe that you know
to to live live meaningfully
creatively and yet to live your
emotional life
so i really believe that whether you're
a scientist or an
artist even more but a scientist i think
of them as artists as well if you are a
human being
so you are really to live fully your
emotions
and to the extent possible sometimes
emotions cannot be overbearing
and my devices try to express them
more and more confident sometimes is
hard but that you are going to be
much more fulfilled than by suppressing
them
what about love one of the big ones what
role does that play um it's
a bit uh a bigger part of emotions but
it's a
it's a scary thing right it's a there's
a lot of
vulnerability that comes with a love
but there is uh also so much you know
energy
and power and uh and um and love in all
senses and in the traditional sense
but also in in the sense of uh
a broader sense for uh for humanity
feeling this you know
compassion of it you know makes us one
with you know other people and be
suffering or other people
i mean all of this is uh is a very scary
stuff
but he's really very very
the sad thing is it really hurts to lose
it
yes that's why you have all the ability
that comes with it yes that's the thing
about emotion is
it's up and down and uh the down seems
to come always
with up so but the up only comes with a
down so
yeah uh let me ask you about the
the ultimate down which is uh
unfortunately
we humans are mortal or appear to be
for the most part uh do you think about
your own mortality
do you do you fear death
i hope so and i because
i mean without death there is no life so
at least there is no meaningful life
a death is actually in some sense our
ultimate motivator
to live a beautiful a meaningful life i
myself
felt as a young man a vetter unless i
i gotten something that i wanted to do i
don't know why i go to this idea i said
something to say if i'm not able to say
i would suicide so
maybe it was a way to motivate myself
but you don't need to motivate it
because
in some sense unfortunately death is
there so
you better get up and do your thing
and uh because that is
the best motivation to to live fully
what do you think what do you hope your
legacy is
you know you mentioned you have two kids
yes and so i really feel that you know
there is uh on one side
is my biological uh legacy and that
is uh my two kids right and uh
and their kids hopefully and that is one
fine
and the other thing is uh this a
common enterprise which is a
society and i really feel that my legacy
would be
better by providing security and privacy
actually for me are metaphorical to say
i want to give you the ability to
interact more and take
more risks and and reach out tomorrow
for more people as difficult and
dangerous as amazing
but my old scientific work is about to
to guarantee privacy and and give you
the security of interaction
and not only in that transaction like it
would be a blockchain transaction but
that is really one of the hardcore of my
emotional problems and i think of it you
know
these are the problems i want to tackle
yeah and ultimately
privacy and security is freedom yes
freedom is at the core of this uh it's
uh dangerous just it's like the emotion
yeah but ultimately that's how we create
all the beautiful things around us do
you think there's meaning to it all
uh this life except the urgency that
death provides
and us anxious beings create cool stuff
along the way
is there a deeper meaning and if it is
what is it
well meaning your life actually there
are three meanings of life
great that's great one too sick
two too sick and three too sick
to seek what you know or is there no
answer there
is no answer to that i really think that
the journey is more
more important than uh the destination
whatever to be
and i think uh that is uh a journey and
uh
is uh in my opinion at the end of the
day
i must admit meaningful in itself and uh
we must admit that maybe whatever your
destination
might be i'd hang it you know
we may never get there but uh hell was a
great ride
well i don't think there's a better way
to end it silvio thank you for joining
thank you for wasting your extremely
valuable time with me today
joining on this journey uh of seeking
uh something together we found nothing
but it was
it was very fun i really enjoyed it
thank you so much
thank you alex those have been really
special for me to be interviewed by you
thank you for listening to this
conversation with sylvia mccauley and
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and now let me leave you with some words
from henry david thoreau
wealth is the ability to fully
experience life
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you