a16z Podcast - Ben Horowitz and Balaji Srinivasan on Netscape and Network States

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Can a country be built from the internet up? Not as a metaphor or an online community, but as a system that replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed, money, law, and governance.In this conversation taken from The Network State Podcast, a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz joins Balaji Srinivasan to explore how internet native institutions are beginning to mirror and challenge traditional state structures. Drawing parallels to China’s early special economic zones, they discuss how constrained experiments like Shenzhen tested new rules without rewriting the entire system, and why similar experimentation is now happening online.The discussion examines crypto, digital identity, and network states as attempts to turn code into coordination and coordination into legitimacy, while grappling with a core tension. Code is deterministic, but societies are not. Ben and Balaji explore where these systems work, where they break, and whether network states are a curiosity or the next phase of governance. Resources:Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitzFollow Balaji on X: https://x.com/balajisListen to more from The Network State: https://ns.com/podcast Stay Updated:If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg](https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.    Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete, but it tends to be the countries that want to grow. A huge strength of the U.S. has been rule of law and the amount of case law and the predictability of the law. But that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law who were judges and, you know, prosecutors and these kinds of things. people who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested

in kind of pushing forward into the future. What the state cares about is power and as tech kind of rose in power to the level of the state, then they got very, very interested. Can you build a new kind of country from the internet up? Not a metaphor, not a community, but something that actually replaces institutions

we usually think of as fixed. Money, law, governance. A few decades ago, China experimented with this idea physically, carving out special economic zones to test new rules without rewriting the entire system. Shinsen was once a fishing village. Today, it's a global tech hub. Now the experiment has moved online.

Crypto, digital identity, internet native communities, and what some call network states are trying to turn code into coordination and coordination into legitimacy. But there's a real tension here. Code is deterministic. Societies aren't. So the question isn't whether these systems are clever.

It's whether they can actually scale and what they replace if they do. In this episode, A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz joins Bologi Shreena Vosin on the Network State podcast to examine how internet-first institutions form where they break and whether network states are a curiosity or the next phase of governance. Ben, thank you for speaking at the Network State Conference. Good to see, Biology. Ready to go. Awesome.

So, you know, Ben, you've been in... you know, a mentor and I think, I'd say a friend, hopefully, for many years now. And, you know, one thing is in the hard thing about hard things, in that book you wrote about your time at Netscape. And Netscape in many ways was like the first internet company. And because it had downloads and so and so forth. And it went viral and you guys went public and you had an acquisition and all the monodrama, right? And then we worked together on the rise of Bitcoin, which was first internet currency.

and obviously we've been very heavily involved with that with A-Sign Z crypto and everything, employing base and all that stuff. And now we're building internet communities. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as, you know, I think of them as the third kind of thing, start societies, internet communities, network states. I love to hear your thoughts. Do you think they're the next big thing or could be? Yeah, so I think they're very kind of parallel in the development in that, you know,

kind of before a Netscape, which was the first thing that kind of brought all of the internet pieces together. You know, there were many pieces. You know, there's FTP and TCPIP and Gopher and this and that. But you needed something to unify all the technology. So it was a little deceptive in that a lot of people deep in the tech kind of saw it as, well, what's new here? You know, like it's just like you're just putting an interface on it. And I think that what the network state is in network school is, is very much like that,

and that we have all the primitive building blocks of community. We've got, you know, Discord and WhatsApp groups, and, you know, we've got, we have Bitcoin now, we have many kind of different currencies, stable coins, and so forth. But, you know, nobody's brought them all to, we have VR, but nobody's put the whole package together. And that's really when it gets unleashed. I mean, in my experience, that's kind of where you hit the knee in the curve

when is that the integration? And it doesn't seem, in a way, it doesn't seem like a lot because all the pieces were already there, but the pieces as pieces just aren't, you know, it's not actually the thing. It's not the product. It's funny because you're right, the system integration,

and the thing is that actually has to happen after all the other pieces are mature because if any one piece of those is wiggly, then the whole thing doesn't work. You have to wait for that to be there. So only when all those pieces are mature, can you snap them together? Right, exactly, exactly. And that's kind of the deceptive thing because until that point, you know, people might have tried it and failed or, you know, it's kind of like this. Oh, no, that doesn't work. Right. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, same with Bitcoin, right? Like it put together like a lot of techniques, you know, peer-to-peer, cryptography, et cetera, that had been around, but they weren't put together in a way where you could actually have money.

Right, because ECDSA existed. Yeah. Hash functions existed. Hashcast existed. And in a sense, I think somebody exactly as you said, remarked is just a, it was a clever integration of existing things, but they all existed before. And they didn't innovate on cryptography. They interfered on the system, right?

Right. And, you know, it's funny you say that because I myself actually had not thought of that before in quite that way as the analogy to the web browser. But once you do snap all the species together, then that itself becomes a platform for other things. Yes, exactly. And then you have web apps and you had everything else because then you could, right? And so what we're starting to see is these startup societies, I call them like the parallel physical,

are each usually inspired by the parallel digital. For example, the startup society that is like a cul-de-sac, which is based on all the microbeamility stuff, and it wants to be a walkable community, right? And then there's, you know, Prospera, which has mini-circle, and it's inspired by the biotech innovations. And then there's another one that's booting up,

which is inspired by all the educational innovations. Yeah. And so the digital is inspiring the physical. Yes, yeah, no, exactly. And I think that's going to, I think the number of ideas around that is really going to multiply because, you know, one of the things that,

if you look at the primitive version, it's all a kind of, you know, a community around an idea. But what about a community around the intersection of many ideas? You know, just for my own sake, it would be great if there was a tech hip-hop community. But, you know, you could imagine many, many dimensions. You know, just sort of, you think of every policy that you might be interested, anything you might be interested in or any policy you might be. vote on, if you took the intersection and found all the like-minded people in the world and put

them in a community, that would be a kind of very powerful thing. Yes. And, you know, one thing is some of the other folks were having speak the conference, for example, the CEO of Angelist, read the Norbert State book, and they've just opened this Angelus' Cafe in San Francisco, and he said he was kicking himself for not doing it three years ago. Yeah. Because on the one hand, it seems an obvious thing, but it's also like a non-obvious thing because people drop in, they give customer feedback so you can materialize the cloud into land. So many, many digital things that we have that we think is purely digital have some physical manifestation that might actually be non-obvious.

Yeah, no, for sure. And then when you add the physical, it does add a whole another dimension of possibility for sure. Yes. That's very interesting. So, you know, one way that we've, we start to establish a few, templates in the space. For example, the pop-up, which is somewhere in between, let's say, a conference, which is like a one-day thing. And what we're doing in network school is a permanent where it's like

a permanent setup. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So a pop-up, like a one-month thing-ish, right? And so it's longer than a conference because people, you know, they have to bring, you know, change of clothes, laundry to, you know, it's more than that. So do you have any kinds of things that you've been, So you mentioned a tech hip-hop thing. And obviously, we're used to thinking about, okay, we could solve this with a new tech company. We could solve this with a new currency. Have you thought about communities that you'd like to see? Well, there's so many, you know, like there's the kind of, I'm part of like many primitive communities in, you know, the form of WhatsApp groups and so forth.

And it would be really nice to see those be much more highly dimensional, maybe have a physical incarnation. You know, it's everything from like, you know, the LLM community to, you know, various different kinds of things. But they're all so primitive because there's no money in them. There's no, there's no crypto in these communities. There's no physical dimension. There's the virtual reality dimension. There's, you know, all you can really do is chat, which is, you know, one of the things you'll do in a community. But there's many, many more ideas.

that you could have. Yeah, you know, it's funny you said because the WhatsApp and signal groups, what I like about them is you have a lot of busy CEOs and investors and so on, and we can remain in kind of lightweight contact with a lot of people. And then you have the physical, like, you know, maybe there's a coffee and you put in an invite there or a Luma invite and 20 of the people or 10 of the people from the group show up there. And you can just pick up right where you left off with this long-running group chat conversations. There's definitely this amazing thing there. Yeah. But, you know, what, what's

interesting is when you, when you say what you just said, you kind of want to be able to, boom, hold a meetup within the chat or like hit a button and create a meetup or boom, hold a meetup and do maybe like a quick VR talk or something like that. I don't know, maybe the chat interface will get there. Maybe we'll need something completely new. Yeah, yeah, because right now, you know, you can do that, but it's a little bit of a little bit of. of a heavy, uh, cognitive and like social lift, right?

Like, no, it's a little more risky to say, hey, let's all get together. You don't want people to go, no. Yeah, yeah, right.

Well, you know, there's something, you know, one thing that's interesting about that is, um, you know, with WhatsApp, you know,

a very modern question is, where are you? Mm-hmm. Because, you know, probably if you analyze text in the 1800s, for example, it's very rare for someone to ask, where are you? Where are you? I'm on the other side of the table from you or have a sheik. You know, because there's not that many times, you know, maybe you send a telegram, but the telegram, you know, or, you know, you sent a postal message, but it's rare that you wouldn't know that the other person's physical location. Yeah, you would certainly know where they are if you're sending a postal message. Yes, that's right. So, but one thing's interesting. You know, WhatsApp itself is location aware, but an interesting thing that happens is people cycle around the globe and they're kind of, you know, they're in the Spain airport or they're here and they're just kind of sending messages. And we sort of take for granted the level of mobility there, even though they're in one place in the chat world, they're moving around

the physical world. So maybe there's something that would suggest, you know, to reduce the social overhead as you mentioned, that, oh, these three people are nearby, you guys should meet up. But you need to allow it to do that location tracking. That's like one concept, for example. Yeah, that would be super convenient because then you'd also not have to wear, oh, hey, let's meet up. Oh, I'm in France, right? Right.

That's going to be hard. Okay, well, that was a waste of a message from me. Yes, the thing is that the people would have to also want to be location tracked. It has to be done in exactly the right way that they feel good about it. Yeah. So, okay, so intranet communities, I mean, There's another angle on this, which is, for example, things like self-driving, things like many of the biotech things that we're interested in. We can potentially have those within special economic zones.

And, you know, do you see my post from a few months ago on the special Elon zone? Oh, I didn't see that. I got to look at that. That sounds like a good post, yeah. Yeah. Or just all Elon's tech gets to work for free. Exactly. Yeah.

restriction, yeah. Exactly, that's right. So my thought was, what is the sort of westernized version of the Asian cause of the special economic zone, the special Elon zone, or more generally the special founder zone, would be find some swathed territory. Maybe it's in the U.S. Maybe it's Elon Salvador. Okay, so, Elon gets, you know, because Tesla's a global business and so on. So some country gives or some state carves out a piece of territory and says, okay, Elon, you can move the speed of physics rather than permits. You can crank out all the humanoids you want. You can mine stuff out of the ground. And what they would do is it import existing regulations on, I don't know, graffiti and stuff. You don't have to rewrite every single law. You just allow, however, quick changes to existing laws. And the crucial thing being that it's like an essentially uninhabited territory,

as close to burning man as possible. Yeah. What are your thoughts on something like that? Yeah, no, I think that's a, by the way, I think it's, It's very doable. There's so many states in the U.S. that would want to do that. I know Nevada would want to do that.

And, I mean, they have Burning Man. They would certainly rather have something that was productive. So I think that's super viable. You know, there are certain states, of course, you could never do it. But for sure. And I think it could be, it could only be really productive. but it would also kind of create a very special community, almost of kind of both like-minded people

and then people who knew how to build techs. That's right. And actually, the thing about this is, if it worked for Elon, then it could work for Palmer Lucky to have the drone zone. And, right? And you could have, you know, different kinds of... Kind of, you know, like a more mundane thing, manufacturing.

Exactly. So on that point, Rare are my team mining. Exactly. That's right. So, like, if you know about how Deng Xiaoping reform China, when he took over, the country was like all brainwashed total communists, and he couldn't, like, reform it all at once. So he just set up a few special economic zones, especially Shenzhen near Hong Kong. And actually, he didn't allow everybody in.

They actually, there was like a membership process or an admissions process where only the most capitalist sympathetic people were allowed in and they weren't going to make trouble. They weren't still diehard Maoists. And of course, that became this gigantic, you know, Chinese city there. And this way they could gradually reform communism rather than try to change it for the whole country at once. They could experiment with new laws and so and so forth. So for manufacturing, all of the OSHA, you know, EPA type stuff, right? You could suspend that in this one's own.

And everybody who came in signed a new social smart contract that would basically say, guess what, I'm coming into this totally desolate peace territory, and I'm coming because of the new rules. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that, but I think that's a great idea. That would be very good for the – it would be amazing for the U.S. if we could do it here. Yes.

So here or not there where you are. Well, we could do it in Singapore. Yes. So I want to – of course, it would be amazing for you do in the U.S., and in a sense, if you go to – do in the rest of the world, then that gives you a template to bring into the U.S. potentially, right? So we can parallel path potentially.

So, okay, on that topic, actually, relatedly, there are a bunch of countries that are pursuing interesting kinds of pro-tech legislation like digital nomad laws, crypto laws, Dow laws. I'd love to know your thoughts on the progressive, for example, in Wyoming, they did the first Dow Law, Tennessee, followed up with the Dow Law. I'd love to know your thoughts on the jurisdictions, politicians, et cetera, that are kind of pursuing the most technologically progressive interactions with, not just tech companies, tech currencies, protocols, sharp communities. You must have some thoughts on this.

Yeah, so, I mean, you know, in the U.S., it does tend to be, like, the states that want to do that, do tend to be the red states or the purple states at least. So, you know, Wyoming, Nevada, Florida, Texas to some degree, a lot of the southern states are very kind of open to manufacturing in these kinds of things. You know, around the world, it's been interesting. So, like, WorldCoin, I think their most kind of active country per capita is Argentina. And I think half the citizens of Buenos Aires are active users on WorldCoyne. And then they also made a lot of progress, surprisingly, with Malaysia, which is pretty good. You know, of course, in the UAE, Dubai has been very, very aggressive, and so they've been good.

So I think countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete. But it tends to be countries that want to grow as opposed to, you know, what's going on in Europe or, you know, some other places or in, you know, California even, where they kind of are like, well, we're rich enough. And now we need to divide up the pie and protect our children, the people. That's right. They're basically, unfortunately, you're taking prosperity for great. granted. Yeah. And then,

uh, the, you mentioned this thing about places that want to grow. One of the things I've been most pleasantly surprised by over the last five years or so is small states putting themselves on the map, like El Salvador. Yeah.

But also like, like small states like Palau, Marshall Islands, you know, they've taken very pro-crypto kinds of, you know, approaches. And my general pattern on this is actually that,

You know, there's 190 to 193 UN members. And it's a little bit like a reverse merger or digital asset treasury company where you've got kind of a listed company and it's got a symbol. And you've got a coin. And then this guy has a symbol and a sense of political legitimacy but not capital

and says capital but not legitimacy. And then they merge together. That's a digital asset treasury company or reverse merger. And that can now be done at the level of the state. whether sovereign state or like a U.S. state. Yeah. Yeah, no, that is a, it's a very, very smart move, I think, by those states.

I mean, I think it's really interesting that you can differentiate just by thinking about how to grow and how to maintain prosperity that there are whole societies that have given up on that idea. Yeah, we, Mark and I just had dinner with one of the, kind of potential account as for prime minister of the UK and she was going through like, you know,

like what's your differentiation? She's like growth. Like we can grow the economy. And I was like, wow, that's a very interesting differentiator. It's interesting also because, you know, historically people have said natural resources

is a differentiator. But I actually think it is, you know, human resources, so to speak, or capital. Like basically. Right.

Letting the human resources do their thing. Yes. And we should come up with a term for that, but I'd like to at some point organize a conference of small countries and pro-growth jurisdictions. And that's kind of like one side of a two-sided market. And we have all the tech founders and venture capitalists is the other side of the two-sided market

and put them together. I mean, Network State Conference is like the V-1 of that, right? And we've got a bunch of, you know, folks here who are doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for sure. Well, I think that goes together. You know, people who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested in kind of pushing forward into the future.

Yeah, because we can bring talent and capital there, just like crypto, just like, you know, just like tech itself. So now, are there, what has, you know, what has surprised you about the last, five, ten, fifteen years in terms of tech and policy, or did nothing's, or maybe, maybe there's so many things, but what have you found to be, to be interesting or something that we should look at, pursue, pay attention to? Well, so I think the big wake-up call for me was first kind of how interested, you know, nation states got in technology policy, which was very very. like all of a sum, because we ran my whole career, nobody cared.

I mean, you know, like, what were the issues? Stock option accounting, H-1B visas, like real, like relative French stuff compared to, you know, the, like, we're going to ban crypto or we are going to call Google and meta and tell them what they can publish. You know, that was a real change. And I think that, you know, my big conclusion is what the state cares about is power. And as tech kind of rose in power to the level of the state, then they got very, very interested. So, like, you know, it's always under the guise of safety, but it's really power. Right.

And, you know, it's been quite interesting. I mean, like, it took us a long time to unravel, like, why the Biden administration was so keen on banning crypto and, like, taking the U.S. out of a whole technological space. Probably, you know, one of the two most important kind of technology platforms for the next 25 years. They're also anti-AI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And AI, well, both him, right? Yeah. Why would you withdraw from that? And it really has to do with, well, you know, control. If we can't control the money, then we can't control the speech. And if we can't control the speech, then we can't control the people. And, you know, both AI and crypto are like, well, we better shut them. We better have control of those things.

Like, they better not be in control of somebody else. And that's, you know, it's just a really interesting learning that that, I guess I had to grow up and learn how the world works, but that is how it works, yeah. It is interesting because, you know, for, you know, you're a little bit older than I am, actually, I mean, 15 oldish, and, you know, during the period where, for many years, we had to convince people that tech was important.

Yeah. And then suddenly, they're like, it's too important. And that happened right in the mid-2010s or thereabouts, It's after about 30, 40 years of building the intranet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, crazy.

It is, it is, it's just so, so we were probably, you know, it's the same with all the, I mean, the first thing. The first sign I got of it was, you know, the big push for, like, women in tech. I'm like, which was always surprising to me because it was like, well, you guys are discriminating against women. enough women in tech. But like, nobody wanted to go into tech. Like, going into tech was like a weird ass thing when I went into it. Like, I got, like, I'm ridiculed and my friends. Like, what are you doing that for? Like, you know, like, really? Computers, this and that. Um, you know, it's so hard and like, you know, there's not that much money in it and this and that and the other. And like, all you do is work. And, and so, like, going in in that world and then all of the sudden, you know, Google and

Metahit and people are getting so rich and then people, all of a sudden, it's like, well, you guys are discriminating. You're not letting people in. And it's like, oh, okay, you want to end? Okay. No one cares about the demographics of plumbing, for example, right? Like, they haven't exist. Yes.

So now, but the other part about that is tech is actually, in a real sense, very globally meritocratic because we've got people from just about every country that are participating in tech in some sense. Well, that's how we always. thought of it, right? Like, it's like, oh, there's all these Jews, Chinese, Indians, like, all these people are coming from all over the world. They're doing tech, you know, like, it's, it's not the, you know, kind of canonical white man or whatever who's doing it, but it was all self-selected, you know, it wasn't, like, there was no, nobody ever cared, like, there was never a conversation in

any of the companies that I worked at, like that would get you to think anybody cared what race or gender you were. Like, it just was never a thing. But nobody wanted, but nobody applied. It's one of those things. And look, if you were kind of not Jews, Chinese, or Indians, you would definitely feel low on the outside because that's what most people were. I mean, it's just like that. Well, yeah. The thing about the Midwest, too, I guess. Yes, that's right. So we, I mean, basically, we have many different demographics, but, you know, the thing about this is, one thing I've been formulating is the thesis of the internet is to America as America was to Britain, like the version 3.0, it's like 10x bigger. And in particular, lots of traditional American values

like freedom of speech or protection against search and seizure. You can protect them on the internet with encryption in a way that is stronger than the protections of a law, for example, right? And so like a smart contract is rule of law. You know, for example, example, Delaware is melting down, but smart contracts are booting up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We just actually moved the, we reincorporated the firm into Nevada. And that's an opportunity, right, for many countries. I mean, I know you guys are like are in Nevada now, but the fact that, you know, Delaware was a stable jurisdiction for decades, maybe centuries, depending on, you know, how long you think the chance of record was the main event. And so now I think there's sort of a

jump ball where if, you know, there's some jurisdiction that could say, hey, guess what we've got a better Dow law and we're better than Delaware because we allow you to port your company from place to place. We've got the crypto stuff. It feels there's a real opportunity in rule of law integrated with rule of code. Maybe you'd agree with that. Well, I definitely think so because the thing that we've seen, you know, in the U.S. over the last probably mainly only over the last five years is, you know, we've always kind of, a huge strength of the U.S. has been rule of law and the amount of case law and like the predictability of the law. But that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law who were judges

and, you know, prosecutors and these kinds of things. And so then what's happened in the last five years is, you know, particularly in the Delaware Chancery Court, is the chair of the Delaware Chancery Court. is the chair of the Delaware Chancery Corps just chose to completely ignore the law and make up her own law, which, you know, it was quite stunning. You know, like the board of directors didn't have a say,

and then even the shareholders didn't have a say and how the company... This is the Tesla case. Whatever she imagined would be the right thing. And, you know, like it took a lot of us by surprise. like, okay, wow, so Delaware doesn't have rule of law anymore. Right. Which it doesn't.

Like, it absolutely doesn't. And it's hard to even get to a point where you think it does. But, yeah, there was also if you look at, you know, there was the prosecution of Trump over the real estate deal, which was also, you know, like, forget about the law. Like, I, the prosecutor and I, the judge will just go, like, The law about, you know, what it means to have an agreement with a bank to get a loan is no longer the law. It's what I believe. And because I believe that they shouldn't have given you a loan because I don't like you, then therefore you were cheating other people. But it's like, well, if I go to borrow money, I disclose the thing, you kind of evaluate my collateral and I lend you the money.

that's not legal in New York, or it wasn't legal for that case. So, you know, you get into this, we're in a different world where the law has been very politicized, I would just say. And, you know, as a result of that, you're kind of, we're in, like, uncharted territory a bit. So I do think that creates an opening. Absolutely. I mean, yes, my view on that is, if you imagine, like a house and there's two factions and they're fighting over the territory, that house is now about. And it can have a window blown up here or some guys can take it and shoot down from here.

And so all of these formerly neutral institutions are now political battlegrounds. Yeah. One side and then maybe another will weaponize. Yeah, I mean, I think it's on now, right? Like, I think we've gone through a bit of a one-way door on this because I think that once one-side does it, like, I don't think the other side is, like, morally higher, on higher ground. I think it's going to be the same kind of thing, but in reverse for sure. Exactly. So that is why my view is with crypto, with the blockchain, with the internet, with the special economic zones, we can potentially rebuild a new internet first version of those things, which now puts more of the, or as much as possible, of the rule of law, into rule of code. so that, for example, the property can't be seized since the private keys, you have to break

encryption in order to seize the property. For example, to break the contract, you have to break the smart contract. Yeah, if the contract, then a little bit by definition, there's no room for a judge to say the contract was invalid, which is kind of the case in both the Delaware courts and in the kind of Trump New York real estate case where there was a contract. And that's all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that contract, the state decided the contract was invalid. And okay, that's interesting. But if it was a smart contract, then there's no, you know, there's no third party. That's right.

And, you know, one of the things I think about a lot is when I'm at a tech conference in, for example, Dubai or in Singapore, the vast majority of people there are not American, often not white. They're from Africa. They're from the Middle East. They're from, you know, Asia. But they all trust Bitcoin. They all trust smart contracts.

And so that is something which actually addresses the concerns of both the left and the right because clearly people of every race, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Trust Bitcoin and smart contracts and so on. But it's also fair, certainly to the right, because it's now, like, it is sort of provably fair, which is new, and that's like a new standard that can, you know, outweigh what, you know, what is, what is no longer thought to be fair by both sides. Yeah, this is actually one of my kind of favorite ideas of yours is, you know, they are called consensus protocols.

And they are a way of getting kind of mathematically strong consensus to the point where everybody in the world agrees to the penny who owns every bit of. of the whatever it is, $3 trillion Bitcoin market cut. Like, that's a hell of a magic trick if you think about it. I mean, yet everybody in the world to agree to a thing like that is quite spectacular. And I think that the, I think it's probably the only future that works, given, you know, what we're seeing now with the U.S. interns of the law. I think that's so, and part of the reason also is everybody from every culture can read code, can diligence code, can do the math, can determine for themselves it's correct, whether they're, you know, Pakistani or Indian, Japanese or Chinese, right, Democrat or Republican.

And so that is, I think, part of the goal of network state is to come up with a series of templates that can sort of restore order from the cloud. You actually, you know, you guys pioneered this in some ways like, reboot from the cloud. Yeah. Yes. Right? Like in a data center, you know, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. So restore from cloud backup is kind of how I think about a big chunk of what we're doing. But not simply the state of a server, but the state of a society, you know, we can do that. And, you know, an interesting question is how far we can take that. Because you can have like minus one and plus one Bitcoin. And you can have a smart contract that governs.

identity, but actually many other kinds of contracts. For example, you could have a marriage and a birth registry on chain. People have started to do things like that. You can even have a jury of peers where people all turn their keys like Claros and, you know, or things have done, things like that. So I think a really interesting question to see how creative we can get, how much of the old world we can replace or at least partially replaced with internet-first variance.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think we have to get, the infrastructure deployed more broadly first. So I do think step one, you know, the biggest challenge right now, you know, a big challenge for the world is like we did, crypto is not pervasive. Like not everybody has a wallet,

not everybody has keys. But it's really important that they do, you know, first of all, just from a security standpoint, like having all of your PII in the cloud in 400 different websites is the most dangerous thing. People are going to look back on that and go, like, that was crazy. That was much worse than driving without seatbelts and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. I like that.

Like me insane. Like, what are you guys doing? But we have to get that underpinning in order, you know, and I think that needs to be the way that money gets distributed to citizens and the way people vote and the way. and then, you know, when you have that basis, then there's a basis to move the law on chain. But I think it's, the trickiness of it now is it's just not pervasive. And we really need it to be provoked.

We need it to be like the Internet, and it's not quite there yet. And then, you know, a lot of that has to do with, you know, the kind of assault on it over the last four years from the Biden administration. And so it's fragmented. around the world and so forth and so on. But I think, like, it's definitely the future.

The question is just how fast. So, yeah, I think we have... It's actually years of years. But by some measures, we have hundreds of millions of crypto holders, at least, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because it is whatever trillion dollars, and it's a big enough deal that it was like a major campaign issue and, you know, blah, blah. But it's a weird thing where, like, on a, like I use it actually quite a lot for wire transfers and other stuff.

But my view on that is where we have Solana and Base, which basically means you could just blast transactions on chain as well as other L-1s. And we have USDC and Cylcoins legal. We have Apple removing its issues where it's blocking a lot of apps in the app store. Hey, Apple is a huge problem. A huge problem, right? And we also have the regulatory assault has been pulled back. So there should be like, you know, a spring of a bunch of stuff that was pent up that should come out there. And then two other things.

I do think we need more developers back in the field. So one of the— Yes. The combination of the assault from, you know, the administration of the power of sub-B and then the rise of AI kind of shifted a lot of the suffering. development energy over to AI from crypto. And we need to get a lot of that back to rebuild. Well, so I actually think AI is going to subsidize crypto in the sense that AI makes everything fake and crypto makes it real again. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So because how do you know?

Right. AI is probabilistic. As probabilistic, crypto is deterministic. And that wallet allows you digitally sign something to show it came from you. And then you can have, you know, essentially a content on everything. And I actually think, exactly, we're going to have proof of human social networks.

I think WorldCoin could help boot something like that up, for example. So I think that that is another subsidy here. And then you're on

privacy, you know, I've talked with some of the folks in, you know, the Ethereum community, Zcash community on HDPZ.

Like, you know, HTTP, HPS, HPZ, which is conceptual, whether it's literally HPZ, but it's basically zero knowledge.

Yeah, zero knowledge. This is, sir, and, oh, very good. Yeah. That's clever, right? And so we could, a lot of the privacy, that's another major potential subsidy for crypto is the, all the zero knowledge techniques that have been built up for not just privacy,

but also scaling, could be applied. For example, homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party, all that kind of stuff is now starting to be something that you might be able to use in traditional web apps

with the right packaging of it. And that package, has to be done. Maybe we can put out some prizes or something to... Yeah, yeah. There's definitely work that's going on on the packaging that's getting better. I mean, I write it. The usability of being on chain, you know, that was one of the big.

Two things that, you know, when the assault started that we needed to get better at, where performance and usability and they kind of are related, we made a lot of progress on performance, not as much on usability. Yeah. And I think hopefully we can get... a lot of that or the next year or so I think

starting to see the other the forecast with base and so and NS.com earned. He was back.

Yes. It's good, let's go. It's a good idea then. It's a good idea now. Yes.

You know, what's funny is, my view on this is, you know how Evan Williams, he did

blogger, and they did Twitter, he did a medium, right? And there's iterations on a theme. And so I think

Earn 2025, 2025, 2026, is kind of like that. It'll be iterations on a theme from everything we learned from six, seven years. Because lots of stuff works now that was only just barely starting to work back in 2017, 2018.

Yeah. So I'll see. Okay, cool. All right. So anything else that people who are building sharp societies, so actually, if you're building a start society, intro community network state, should you come to Anderson Harwitz and pitch Anderson Horowitz? Yeah.

I mean, I think that for sure, we're very interested in it. You know, we're investors in Networkstate.com. Ns.com. Exactly. Yes. That's right. So, yes. Exactly.

That's right. No, we're achieving it. We believe in it. We believe in, you know, the whole thing from the sovereign individual on up. So we want to be part of it for sure. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Ben. All right.

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