Bankless - Layer Zero | Justin Drake

Starting point is 00:00:01 Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Ethereum is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the Ethereum community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been.

Starting point is 00:00:39 Today, I'm speaking with Justin Drake. as we all know is the founder of the ultrasound money meme, and we go through the creation process of the meme itself, as well as how Justin Drake has moved across the different stacks, the different layers of Ethereum, first as an entrepreneur, then as an L1 dev, and now what I call actually a L0 engineer,

Starting point is 00:01:04 a meamer, if you will. He is tinkering with the layer zero of Ethereum by committing himself to the ultra-eastern, sound money meme. And so we start this conversation off with what does it mean to work for a meme? This is what Justin Drake considers his current role in Ethereum. He's working for the ultrasound money meme. And not only that, but he's recruiting other people to also work for this meme, which is just like, kind of breaks the brain to anyone who doesn't really understand the role of memes in money and markets and finance. But Justin Drake definitely understands that. We also just kind of overall have an

Starting point is 00:01:41 Ethereum technical conversation. It turns a little bit more into a more traditional bankless podcast where we talk about, you know, a little bit more of the code than what I advertise on layer zero. But all of that context for, you know, further innovations on Ethereum, staggering shards, putting oracles at the base layer, all this stuff. It actually turns into, towards the end of the conversation, a conversation about Justin Drake, the personality himself, his sort of rebellious nature, his lack of a nature.

Starting point is 00:02:10 his lack of a nation-state identity and also how that is reflected in his kid as well and how those values are also instantiated in Ethereum himself. And so the first two-thirds of this podcast is all about ultrasound money and in Ethereum, the protocol, a little bit tech-focused, but then it turns into the actual personality disposition of the man himself as well as his kid

Starting point is 00:02:35 and kind of the story of his life and how it relates to Ethereum. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Justin Drake. I really enjoyed seeing the man behind the meme. And I'm pretty sure you will as well. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Justin Drake. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use Defi.

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Starting point is 00:04:13 Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants.

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Starting point is 00:05:16 That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. All right, Bankless Nation, welcome to the third episode of Layer Zero. Here we're bringing on Justin Drake. You guys all know him as the ultrasound money man. And I feel like I think that's the right place to start off this conversation. Justin, a fun little story for you. After we recorded our ultrasound money podcast with you, me, and Ryan,

Starting point is 00:05:46 I turned to Ryan as like, this is about to change the game like forever. And every single week on the bankless newsletter, we have like the Market Monday piece, which is like a short little blurb that usually I write it, but sometimes Ryan writes it sometime somebody else writes it, but usually I write it. And in the piece, it was the week before we were going to drop the Ultrasound Money podcast that we've recorded with you. And so I usually write it, and then Ryan comes in and edits it and changes things up a little bit.

Starting point is 00:06:17 And in the Market Monday piece, I had written the Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum narrative will forever change as a result of this podcast. And I use some really like big language. and Ryan, like, asked me, he, he DM'd me. I was like, are you sure you want to make some, like, this grand of a statement and this grandiose of a statement? And I was like, absolutely, absolutely, I do. And he did walk me back a little bit.

Starting point is 00:06:43 But it turns out that that was exactly right. Like, Ethereum as an ecosystem has fundamentally changed ever since the ultrasound money meme really, like, took storm. And it was, you know, it was a, you know, it was a collaborative effort between many people, but it was really you. So how does that feel? How does it feel to be like the ultrasound money guy that changed the trajectory of Ethereum? Well, I guess, you know, I still think that we're at the very beginnings of the ultrasound money meme. I would agree with you that it has kind of rallied the Ethereum community specifically,

Starting point is 00:07:17 but it hasn't grown yet that much beyond the borders of the Ethereum community. I mean, there was, you know, some brief mentions on Bloomberg and on CNBC and whatnot. But, you know, I believe the meme will educate 100 million people. And so we're at the very, very beginnings of that. I mean, how I feel personally, I mean, the meme has kind of infected me. He's kind of taken over my life in a way, you know, like in the same way that a virus takes over its host, You can think of memes as the equivalents of genes that take over their host. And I've been taken over by this meme and I'm kind of spreading it to other people

Starting point is 00:07:58 and other people are themselves spreading it to ever. I mean... Are you like patient zero of this meme? Is that what your role is? Patient zero of ultrasound money? Yeah, I think so. But maybe I'm patient one in the sense that Vitalik had a very, very similar meme before he invented me.

Starting point is 00:08:17 His meme was supersonic money. and that you know that was good but it didn't really catch on in the same way i think partly because you know it doesn't reuse the word sound verbatim as we have with the bitcoins with sound money um so yeah this is kind of interesting you know like just like genes mutate memes mutate as well and you can have a totally kind of um non-viral meme with lots of potential that just needs this one little mutation and that changes the game i mean it's a little bit like monkeys humans, right? We're like 99.9% the same genetic material. It's just these few tiny tweaks that make a lot of difference. You know, as to how I...

Starting point is 00:09:01 So the supersonic money meme came around before ultrasound money, and you're saying it actually mutated into the ultrasound money meme. But you were the mutator, right? Yeah, that's correct. Basically, you know, we were chatting in the telegram group, and, you know, Vitalik was mentioning this meme. I was like, oh, well, it's a good meme, but it didn't really catch on. And then Vitalik was like, hmm, maybe we should try harder, you know, to bring it out to the community. And then, like, a few minutes later, I was like, ha, I've got a better version of the meme. And, you know, from that point onwards, a lot of my time has been, just spent, you know, trying to make this meme a reality, I guess.

Starting point is 00:09:47 and you know I have a very obsessive kind of a personality kind of addictive personality like when I do something I want to do it like right and really go deep and you know it's very different from what I was doing previously you know like when I joined the film foundation I was doing you know crypto economic research and then kind of I went deep in the cryptography and you know I've done all sorts of other things. things, but now, you know, I'm kind of doing something totally different, kind of going down the stack from layer one to layer two as a, uh, to layer zero. Um, and actually I'd say more and more of my work is at layer zero, interestingly. So for example, one of the things that I've been doing is recruiting, right? That's something that just needs to be done at the different foundation. And, and for some reason, um, you know, I've been one of the, you know, the biggest recruiters, uh, the of the research team at the Affirman Foundation. And yeah, so recruiting, I guess you can think of the ultrasound monium as kind of being the

Starting point is 00:11:00 decentralized version of marketing. And you know, these two things kind of HR and recruiting and marketing were things that I kind of despise and I didn't really seem myself doing these kind of roles. But, you know, in a decentralized context, that kind of different and, you know, actually very interesting to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, the, the world of marketing historically has always felt like top down. It's like, here's our brand, here's our image. Let's like, like, shove it down your throat. But like, in the world of, of, of, of crypto marketing, it's very much of just, like, an

Starting point is 00:11:36 infinite amount of just, like, A, B tests, A, B, C, D, E, F, G tests to, like, figure out which one works. And the, it only ever works if, like, the world adopts it themselves, rather, rather than have it just like shoved down its throat by like trillions of dollars of ad spend. Exactly. Yeah, there's these algorithms called genetic algorithms where basically you just try tons of mutations and then something sticks and then it just conquers the world. And it feels like, you know, the FM community had a lot of previous failed attempts, you know, that kind of laid the ground.

Starting point is 00:12:10 You know, the ground was very, very fertile in the sense that the film community was trying to find itself and it desperately wanted kind of this. this meme. And once it found it, they kind of embraced it. And I think that's partly why it grew so fast. But, you know, again, I think it's still a baby meme. It has to grow a bit more. So you're, from my perspective, you're like a genius cryptographer. Your big brains, like, can code all the things, talk about all the crazy, like, cutting edge technology that this industry has to offer that gets, like, way outside of, like, what I've, I can even. and like comprehend. Yet you are, like you said, going from that from layer one down to like layer

Starting point is 00:12:53 zero. Why do you think that you are most suited there rather than back up at the like cryptography level? I mean, I kind of have a bit of a founder, kind of entrepreneurial mindset, kind of builder. I just like building stuff. And actually before I joined the Firm Foundation, I was I was an entrepreneur and I, I'm of a company. And you get to do everything, you know, as a founder. And I, I, I, I, I, kind of this jack-of-all trade in that sense. And, you know, I think part of the reason why I like doing different things is because I'm, I guess I'm quite curious and I want to try and understand the full stack. You know, when you look at computers, for example, you know, it turns out there's like,

Starting point is 00:13:37 there's like 20 stacks, right? If you go, you know, all the way down to the transistor or to the silicon, you know, all the way up to, you know, the website, there's just so many stacks in between. and oftentimes people will focus kind of on maybe three, four, five stacks, layers of the stack. But, you know, I want to, I'd much rather try and get a full understanding of all 20 stacks. And I guess, you know, this is part of just my personal journey in the ephemeral ecosystem to try and understand every, every single layer of the stack. Interesting, yeah. And every single layer of the stack has like, it's its own rabbit hole, right, with his own rabbit holes upon

Starting point is 00:14:16 rabbit holes. But like we say, like everything kind of always leads back to layer zero. So I kind of think that makes sense that like that's actually where you found yourself. Yeah. And actually, if you think of me as an entrepreneur, I was kind of at layer two, right? So I was I was trying to make open bazaar, which is this decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace built on top of blockchain, such as Bitcoin. And then I went to layer one and now layer zero. And you know, it's possible that you know, once we're done, you know, shipping, EF2 and all the good stuff there, then maybe I'll go full circle and go back to layer two and build something cool there. And just read, maybe we'll go through the cycle like one more time.

Starting point is 00:14:59 Possibly, yeah. So you said you kind of like work for this meme now as in like it's kind of your full-time job. Illustrate that. Like how, how, what does it like to work for the ultrasound money mean? yeah so you know we we have these two pieces of infrastructure like one is um the ultrasound money website and the other one is the ultrasound money at twitter account and the basic idea here was to try and do things as decentralized as possible so you know try and and and get you know different team you know different people uh to contribute to to to join the meme and i think i i

Starting point is 00:15:42 I mentioned basically the story here, which is that I think it was at the end of the second ultrasound money bankless podcast. I said, you know, I bought this domain, ultrasound dot money. I'm looking for a team and like 10 people came in. And one of the crazy things is that I had to do zero filtering on these 10 people. All 10 people were invited to contribute. They were all very high quality. And I think part of the reason they were all very high quality is because in order to get

Starting point is 00:16:07 to the very end of the second podcast, they had to go through four hours of content. content. And so only like kind of the the most, you know, enthusiastic people made it to the end. And actually more and more people have started to volunteer, you know, through the, through the Twitter accounts. You know, they say, oh, you know, we love your movement. We love what you're doing. How can I help? So, you know, at this point, there's maybe, you know, 15, 20 people, you know, who volunteered to, to contribute. And, you know, I think a lot of the work that we do at a different foundation is coordination. And, you know, very similar to what Danny is, you know, really, really good at. And I'm, you know, I've tried to help coordinate this team, but also, you know, provide kind of the initial impetus and, and I guess maybe inspiration to get this idea out of the gate.

Starting point is 00:17:05 with a so what kind of talent has shown up at the gates like is it like dev talent or marketing talent like what's is there any sort of through line like talk about all the skill set you that has like come to the ultrasound money meme yeah so um there's quite a lot of dev so you know back and then front end but we have also some non-deaf so for example there's this artist Rodrigo um who who just makes awesome awesome art. And actually, I think one of his pieces was auctioned on the bankless dial. And, you know, this guy just created, you know, this art totally for free and he had no expectation of financial returns. And, you know, he didn't even really have, you know, expectations of, you know, building much of a name for himself. He was just trying to contribute

Starting point is 00:17:59 and do something interesting. You know, at the end of the day, it turned out pretty well for him because he sold so many copies of his NFT. And then I guess we've also had in the non-technical field, like someone who I think wants to remain anonymous, who basically is this meme lord, who is behind a bunch of memes behind the Twitter account. That's awesome. So how do you have goals?

Starting point is 00:18:34 Like what is the goal of this like emergent organization? Like what is the goal with ultrasound money? So if it's a business and you're an entrepreneur, like what are you, what's on the horizon? What are you trying to go towards? Right. I mean, I think the KPI is like how many, how many minds can we infect? And, you know, this is largely kind of an educational thing. It's like how far can we spread the meme to educate as many people as possible?

Starting point is 00:19:03 And, you know, one of the metrics that we track, for example, is, you know, what we call kind of the ultrasound fam, the fam wearing the kind of the bat signal, which is the two emojis, which, you know, you're the grandfather of, which is very cool. That is pretty cool. I am honored to have that spot, yeah. And, you know, the fam has been growing, you know, incredibly. You know, we have 3,300 fam members, I think, right now. and it just keeps on growing, you know, at a steady rate every single day. And actually, if you want to compare it to other Ethereum memes, it's pretty striking. So, for example, there's this other kind of Ethereum meme on Twitter, which is that you're going to use your ENS address, you know, as your Twitter names. For example, Vitalik.eaf. And so one of the things we did is that we went ahead and scraped all of Ethereum Twitter.

Starting point is 00:20:01 So that's about 3 million accounts, including kind of like the 2 million accounts that Vitalik follows. And we found about 6,500 ENS, well, Twitter accounts with an ENS. And so, you know, you have one of the most powerful memes, I think, in a theorem, which is the ENS, which kind of grew to 6,500 over kind of four years. And then this ultrasound money meme, which kind of in just... a matter of, you know, four, five, six months grew to over half the size. That's fantastic, yeah. And so just for the listeners that are a little bit unfamiliar, the Ultrasound Money Fam is if you have the bat emoji followed by the speaker emoji. Does it also work in reverse? Were you also scraping for speaker emoji and then bat emoji,

Starting point is 00:20:55 or does the order matter? So there's tons of creativity and there's lots of flexibility. So it turns out there's like three different speaker emojis. There's like one with three lines, one with one line and one with zero line. People also kind of change the ordering. People sometimes kind of put a comma in between, kind of open bracket, the vat and people kind of do all sorts of of crazy variations. Like, you know, for example, people will use the dolphin and then the speaker because dolphins also produce emojis.

Starting point is 00:21:30 I mean, I kind of like to keep. the dolphin separate for the flippinging. So maybe, you know, at the flippinging, we can, you know, we can all pivot. We can all pivot for a day or two or a week or two. And then, you know, people change the, the, actually, I have a, you know, a regular expression here on my computer. But basically, like, people will swap out the emojis and be quite creative. And, like, people will put it in unexpected places.

Starting point is 00:21:56 So, for example, people will put the bat emoji in the location, which is something that we and scrape. And so now we need to go ahead and scrape that as well. Yeah, yeah. I didn't think I finished my thought, but what Justin is talking about is the ultrasound fam is those that have the bat and then the speaker emoji in their like Twitter header, their Twitter name, right? And so if you are part of like the ENS clan, you have like your name.eath. And then now generally it's followed by the ultrasound money like like bat signal, which is the bat and then the speaker emoji, usually with three lines. And it's interesting to see on the ultrasound.

Starting point is 00:22:31 money page, you have all of the top followed accounts that are, Twitter accounts that are followed by people who have the ultrasound money meme in their Twitter account. And so, like, it's funny to see, like, Anthony Cisano actually recently flipped Ryan, Sean Adams

Starting point is 00:22:47 as the number one person with the most Ultrasound Money fam followers. But I will have to say, I have the highest ratio of followers to ultrasound follower fam on there as well. So I would like people to know that. But it's a fantastic way to make a fun little game about just like putting a personal identifier on your Twitter profile, which is like kind of what that Twitter biospace is for.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we've had is sometimes we've had kind of spam attacks. So like people like very low quality accounts, like accounts that participate, for example, in a lot of giveaways at the bat emoji. And so we try to filter those off. And like one of the simplest and most powerful

Starting point is 00:23:35 kind of quality metrics that we found is basically how many fam members does this account have that follow them. So we call them fam followers. How many fam followers do you have? And as you can see on ultrasound of money and you scroll down to the fam,

Starting point is 00:23:53 like you can clearly see that these these when you start ranking the the the fan members by this like the really the high quality account stand out and and this is true not just for the top fan members but kind of for the whole thing so um where do i want to go with this uh we all we all know like so what is the purpose of the ultrasound money mean like why is that so such an important thing to, like, dedicate your time to. Right. So I think part of the, part of the reason is basically the realization that if Ethereum is not pure technology, right?

Starting point is 00:24:42 There's if you want, if you want utility, if you want things like, like security, if you want economic bandwidth, then the monetary aspect plays a key role. And this is something. that I think the devs, myself included, very heavily underappreciate. And so, you know, what we're basically, what the meme is trying to do basically is educate people on the monetary aspects of Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:25:13 And now, why is this important? The reason it's important is because money is a meme, right? in order to achieve this monetary premium, this magic meme energy, you somehow need to have coordination across the community. And memes, which are basically just ideas that replicate are ideal for coordination because basically they all program us to think in the same way. And so we're in a position where everyone knows that everyone else thinks the same way. And so we can all kind of be on the same wavelength and be coordinated around making EF a monetary kind of shelling point.

Starting point is 00:26:00 And then as I said, once you have this monetary shelling point and you achieve high monetary premium, you're in a position where you can provide a huge amount of utility. And one of the reason is because you can have very, very high economic security. It basically will be impossible even for a nation state to attack Ethereum. And so, you know, some of the kind of code is law and immutability and kind of all these nice properties and lifeness and safety have more credibility behind them. But also, because EF is used as, you know, collateral money, the fact that the money appreciates unlocks economic bandwidth. And so, you know, if you look at, for example, make a Dow, you know, it's actually, in a way, disappointingly small. You know, there's only, quote, only six billion die that are out there, you know, especially when you compare it to a system like USDT, which has 10 times the amount, you know, 60 billion.

Starting point is 00:27:09 And, you know, one of the key limitations is that we need this trustless collateral and we need, you know, a hundred more times, a thousand. more times more collateral. And the only way to get, you know, a thousand more times more collateral is for the token to gain this monetary premium. So here's a question that I don't think has been asked before. Do you think the existence of the ultrasound money meme will, has or will impact the genie coefficient of ether? Oof.

Starting point is 00:27:46 That's a hard question to just like come out. a left field with you at. Okay, so while you think, I'll kind of explain the genie coefficient to users, the genie coefficient is just a measure of like the distribution of ether or any currency or any unit ever, right? And so if you have a strong genie coefficient, I can't remember if the number is high or low, it's a measure of how concentrated ownership over a certain supply of things are. one of the best things about the Ethereum ICO, regardless of what Bitcoiners will say about it,

Starting point is 00:28:23 is that the ICO actually allowed the genie coefficient of ether to be pretty strong for an asset that was just birthed. Usually assets that are birthed have a terrible geneal coefficient because they're in the hands of a few. But the ICO was a mechanism to distribute ether into the hands of many, many people, which is really, really important if we talk about the properties of money. It's good to have money distributed because, as we all know, like, it's easier to get people on, board on a particular money if more people have it. Do you think, so yeah, so back to the question, do you think like this ultrasound money meme has impacted the future current or state of, or the future state of the genie

Starting point is 00:29:00 coefficient of ether? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think to large extent, kind of early adopters don't need much more further conviction. You know, they already have extremely high conviction. And I think the meme maybe kind of crystallizes, expresses kind of an intuitive feeling that they had and kind of confirms. And so in that sense, hopefully, you know, it might not make these kind of early whales, you know, not want to sell anymore that they previously did not want to sell. I mean, one of the things that I'm that I'm hoping is that kind of the meme brings on, you know, many, many more people and especially give them access, for example, to very fresh revenue sources, which are, which will, which will lower the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, staking. So, so, you know, with, with staking, so, you know, with, with, with staking, we're,

Starting point is 00:30:13 a position where we can really distribute if to many, many people. And one of the reason is because the barrier to entry to staking is so low that anyone can participate. And the other reason is that the profit margins are very, very high. So basically, when you combine these two, anyone can come in and anyone can enjoy the fruit of staking, then basically this new issuance is kind of going to dilute, dilute the existing holders. And I guess another aspect of this dilution and redistribution is basically from those who use

Starting point is 00:31:03 the network to the stakers. And the reason is because part of the transaction fees will not be burnt, kind of the MEV portion. And so that is another force towards circulation of funds. Do you think that the concept of proof of stake as it's applied to Ethereum impacts the Gini coefficient or is it kind of a wash and it's just kind of doesn't actually impact it all that much? Tough questions, huh? Right, right. Yeah. These are questions I'm just kind of thinking up on the fly, but I think they're interesting to ponder about.

Starting point is 00:31:44 Okay, so, I mean, because, you know, again, for the same argument, because, because staking is really open to all and because the profit margin is so high, then we have this, this, this, this, this, this natural kind of redistribution of things. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very, very hard to tell, basically. what percentage, like, the existing holders will be staking. Like, one of the policies that we have at the Affirman Foundation is that we basically want to be staking roughly as a percentage, roughly what is currently being staked. So, for example, if there's 10% of the or if that is staked,

Starting point is 00:32:35 then the Affirm Foundation would like to stake about 10%. And the reason we kind of have this kind of unofficial policy is, is because it gives us kind of neutrality. We're not, we're not favored, you know, we're not biased in one way or another towards staking. And so, you know, the question is, you know, are these large holders staking more or less than the average? And, you know, actually, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:10 just, you know, personally, I'm staking actually a little bit less than the average. So there you go. What's the incentive? Why aren't you staking all of your ether? Like why haven't you just aped all the way in? I think part of the reason is that when you make the sausage, you know how it's made. And, you know, there's a bunch of tail risk, you know, that is that is difficult.

Starting point is 00:33:44 to quantify. One of the things that I've, that I've been doing at the FM Foundation is trying to build as quickly as we can, basically a dedicated security team to really harden the beacon chain. So I think we're going to provide a little bit more transparency through block posts and things like that.

Starting point is 00:34:06 But basically, you know, whenever you have new software, especially when you have, you know, four different clients, quite a bit of complexity. You know, there's this bound to be bugs and vulnerabilities and things like that. And I think we're in a privileged position with, with the, with the beacon chain where as far as we can tell, no attacker has really, like no black hat attacker has tried to, to break this. So, you know, we, we have had, you know, quite, you know, significant number of reports from, from white hats and we've been, you know, fixing and, you know, things are definitely.

Starting point is 00:34:44 getting much, much better. You know, like the frequency of reports is going down. The severity of the bugs is going down. It's more and more kind of edge cases that are hard to trigger and things like that. So, yeah, in general, like, you know, securities, you know, one of our big goals and where we're working as fast as we can to get security to a high enough level where we can actually do the merge, right? It would be totally reckless to do the merge if we don't have high confidence in the beacon chain. And this confidence is, is increasing very rapidly. So I've been asking

Starting point is 00:35:26 a lot of questions about ether, ultrason money, and Ethereum. And I actually want to kind of revisit the layer zero aspect of this podcast, which is more about you, you, the individual, but also keeping in theme with the ultrasound money meme. You talked about how like, the importance of the Ultrasound Money meme is to secure Ethereum, right? The value of Etherp implies the security of Ethereum. That is good for everyone that's building on top of Ethereum. Therefore, the role of somebody who's working on the ultrasound money meme, it becomes really, really important.

Starting point is 00:35:55 It's like if you are focused on securing Ethereum, you might actually step away from the code and actually start to work on the memes, which kind of sounds like what you've done. And I kind of think that that is an expansion or an extrapolation of kind of like the original cypherpunk vision, right? Cypherpunks used to be all about math and code and cryptography, except now the role of what a cypherpunk is with the emergence of crypto-economics has expanded into new realms. It's like unlocked new territory that it comes into. So I kind of think of you, Justin, as like a leading new age cypherpunk. How do you feel about that label? Yeah, I mean, it's a very grandiose label. And, you know, I'm having to,

Starting point is 00:36:40 I'm not sure I'd put it on myself. But yeah, I'd agree that, you know, the economic aspect has unlocked kind of this new design space. And actually there's kind of these impossibility results. There's certain things that we just can't do with cryptography alone. And so we need to make these concessions, right? Like when we have this, you know, the protocol sync thesis, cryptography and math are like one of the lowest layers. You know, they're super robust. And then you kind of have like the more mushy.

Starting point is 00:37:10 layers, which is the economics. But, you know, having the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, this is like, these, these, these, these, these, these, these, these powers. Um, and, uh, yeah, this, this is something that I've, I've, I've only, you know, I appreciate it, you know, I guess relatively recently. And, and, and, and, I mean, I guess one of the reasons why, why I'm, I'm working at this layer is because there's, there's, there's a little bit of, uh, of taboo and resistance, I guess, from other technical people. You know, it's, I feel like I'm in a unique position to be doing the work that I'm doing, partly because no one else is really keen to do that work.

Starting point is 00:37:53 You know, it's kind of seen a little bit as dirty work. But I kind of see it as, as very important. We, in the bankless world, we all tend to use like the pioneer as a metaphor. It's like, come on, we're all going west, like, grab your favorite leader and go west with them. Sounds like that you are specifically trying to be like the pioneer for the other like code and math and technical minded people specifically trying to like corral them and being like, no guys, like this is the way, this is where we're going.

Starting point is 00:38:25 Like let's let's all go westward. Yeah, right. I mean, it's not like I kind of pioneered and completely invented this, this idea that the memes are super important. You know, like it turns out that this. goes back, you know, even to gold, right? Gold is just to very large extent, just a meme.

Starting point is 00:38:46 And Bitcoin took it to, to an extreme, you know, like really emphasizing the memes. And, you know, I, I, you know, in the Bitcoin land, there was this kind of this debate. So we'd do small block, big block. And I think both sides

Starting point is 00:39:02 have very, very good arguments, you know. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, I think the, the, the, the, the, the big mistake of Bitcoiners is, is thinking in very, kind of black and white is, is like either, either one or the other, but it turns out that it's both, right? Like, we want the transactional utility and, you know, how do we get this transactional utility? We get it with scalability, with privacy, you know, with programmability, with economic bandwidth and all these things. But, you know, in addition to kind of to the raw transactional utility,

Starting point is 00:39:40 you also want kind of the monetary premium and all the memes. And these things are actually symbiotic. They reinforce each other. And the reason is that in order to achieve monetary premium, you need to distinguish yourself in some way or another. And like one way to distinguish yourself is basically to have like to maximize utility. If you are like, you know, the substrate for the internet of value, and you're settling, you know, the world economy, then, you know, you become the natural

Starting point is 00:40:14 shelling point to become this, this money for the internet. And vice versa, you know, once you, once you've achieved this monetary premium, as I've already mentioned, that provides utility for the utility in a sense that it provides security and economic bandwidth. After, like, having our first and second podcast with you, the first being moon math, all about cryptography and the second being all about ultrasound money. My mind has actually kind of become convinced that like the only viable crypto economic system is a smart contract enabled system which promotes utility and actually promotes like the reasoning for using the thing in the first place. And then also proof of stake because it's also the you know, the system that

Starting point is 00:41:02 requires the least amount of operational costs to secure. And so I feel like if we if we go and through and we're living in a simulation and we run through all of the possible simulations, we will end up at a smart contract proof of stake system every single time. Do you agree with that? So it turns out there's like some technical reasons as to why, for example, smart contracts are not necessarily fully required. And the reason is because once you have the data availability layer and once the blockchain has one single functionality, which is the ability to verify SNOCs, you can do

Starting point is 00:41:37 everything because you can do ZK roll-ups. But, you know, I guess that's just a minor technical detail. I guess the other... But is that also the future of Ethereum in your mind? Is that where we're going as an ecosystem? I think it's definitely possible. Like, the reason is that, you know, in the short and medium term, we're taking this roll-up approach.

Starting point is 00:42:03 And I believe that, you know, the long-term winners are going to be the ZK roll-ups but like one of the the very very so one of the problems with with ephirium which is one of its greatest strengths but also one of its weaknesses is the evm the evm is has so many many quirks and it's it's arguably you know badly designed in many many different ways and you know each of these ways are not a deal breaker but there's like a laundry list of 200 issues with the EVM and they start to add up. And so, you know, one of the things we've been looking into is like, is there a replacement for the for the EVM?

Starting point is 00:42:47 And it turns out that once you have snarks, you can basically have arbitrary VMs. So, and this is something that we're starting to see. Like, for example, stockware came up with, with, with, with KRO and kind of their own VM. and then, you know, like there's the Matter Labs. They have their own ZK Sync. And so in theory, at least, you can take any VM, for example, Wasam, and then you can snarkify it, and then you can start running it on the EVMs simply by verifying the snarks.

Starting point is 00:43:23 And so this has actually two advantages. One is that you get the scalability of ZK roll-ups. You know, you just have to verify one single stock, which is very, very cheap. But the other advantage is that you get to escape the EVM, right? You have, it's kind of this, this wormhole that allows you to go explore a different world. It's like a portal into a different VM. Right.

Starting point is 00:43:49 Exactly. So I think this is definitely a possible future. One of the things that we're, you know, heavily considering is basically if and when we have a VM, which really stands out. for example, is really, really snark-friendly, meaning that it has very, very good performance in this snarkification world. And it has all sorts of other advantages. Maybe it's more deaf-friendly, like wasam,

Starting point is 00:44:13 or maybe it's more friendly to formal verification, or maybe it's more friendly to optimistic approaches, or whatever it is, then we can take this awesome VM and kind of enshrine it at layer one. So that could give us various advantages, like a natural shelling point. to avoid too much fracturing of the ecosystem. It could provide lower latency.

Starting point is 00:44:39 It could maybe provide better security guarantees. It could provide maybe performance optimizations. There's all sorts of things that get unlocked once you're happy to enshrine a VM. But I think at this point in time, we're very, very happy with the situation we're in where we have the EVM. Okay, it's not perfect. But, you know, it's a natural shutting point for all smart contracts, in way beyond Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:45:04 And so there's this very powerful network effect. DVM is good enough in the sense that it unlocks all these parallel worlds that you can go explore through snarkified VMs. And then maybe in the more distant future we can enshrine a really awesome VM. Maybe have one instance running per shot or something like that. Hey, guys. I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Justin Drake so far. coming up in the second half of the conversation.

Starting point is 00:45:33 We talk about both Ether and Ethereum's march towards capital efficiency, and what that means for the holistic system if we always are going towards more and more efficiency. We also talk about the quantum computing threat as it relates to both Ethereum, but also more importantly towards Bitcoin as the thing that can't really adapt or change or overcome obstacles. And then we also talk about what Justin Drake thinks about the current state of the layer zero of Ethereum, and also where he thinks it's going to develop into the long term and where he hopes it develops into the long term. We also talk about layers three and layers four, what those are and how they relate to the layer one and the layer zero. I thought that was a particularly interesting topic of conversation,

Starting point is 00:46:16 and there's a call to action to any graphic designers who are interested in illustrating this concept in an actual design that we can actually all look at. So there's that. And then we also talk about Justin Drake's kid. And also Justin Drake himself and his lack of identity with any one specific nation state or any one specific culture. And how that is a result of how he grew up and how that relates to what he works on on Ethereum. He has a distaste for politics. Yet we all know that governance is a part of this thing.

Starting point is 00:46:47 So we parse apart those details. We also talk about Justin Drake's non-laptop related hobbies. And turns out he likes to tinker on the piano. And even that has something to talk about as it relates to Ethereum. So, I hope you guys are enjoying this conversation at the second half of the show, in my opinion, is even more fun than the first. So let's go ahead and get right into it, but first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use kayak, Expedia, or Google, to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto?

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Starting point is 00:49:28 So I know that there's a small ideological debate going on between, I think you, Vitalik, and a few other of the core Ethereum contributors about like the long-term expressivity of Ethereum. I remember you, once upon a time, submitted an EIP to instantiate the ETH price at the protocol level. and then also in our episode, our first cryptography, moon math episode, you talked about, like, staggering all of the shards so that there's one shard making it finalizing every, like, one second, so you actually get really quick finality over time. And so, like, you seem to be looking towards Ethereum with kind of like a high touch approach. Let's just turn this, like, machine that we have into the most, like, decently complicated, well-oiled, like, fantastically, like, capable machine. Or others, I think Vitalik is more in the camp of just like, let's just make it what we needs and then stop touching it. Do you see this as a future issue that some of the core Ethereum contributors are going

Starting point is 00:50:31 to have to like get into a table and like discuss about what they want to do? Or where does this story go? Yeah. So just a couple of things. Like one is that, you know, the stackerick is something that this consensus on, I think we're going to go. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. there's something we're likely going to go ahead with.

Starting point is 00:50:52 I mean, actually, there's, I think, much more alignment than you kind of portrayed it there. I think everyone wants maximum simplicity and basically just build what's enough. And so I think everyone falls into the vitalic kind of camp and philosophy. I think the real debate is, you know, what do we really need? And like one of my, one of my heuristics, I guess, is that if you can't do it at layer one, we should very, very seriously consider doing it at, if you can't do at layer two, very seriously consider it doing it at layer one. And trustless oracles turns out to be one of those things.

Starting point is 00:51:38 Like, as far as I know, there's no really, like, fully trustless way of doing oracles at, at layer two. Like the best that we have is chain link and you know while chain link might be kind of good enough, you know, in the short and medium term, is it really kind of the long term technical solution that we want, you know, to power, you know, stable coins like, you know, liquidity and and stuff like that. I mean, I think the answer is maybe it's good enough, but it's not convincing answer. And so, you know, on the other hand, we don't want to enshrine all oracles on the one. It doesn't make any sense. And so really what you want to be doing is you want to look at this kind of this long tail and you want to, you want a solution with like

Starting point is 00:52:32 kind of one percent of the complexity that gains you 80 percent of the value. And I think if we were to enshrine one single Oracle, it would probably be kind of the EIF USD price. And it is, it turns out that you can kind of leverage the basic security assumptions that we're making at layer one to get an Oracle with very, very similar security assumptions. And so if you're using Ethereum, you don't have to pay more in terms of security assumptions if you want to use this Oracle. Whereas if you're using chain link, now suddenly you have two assumptions. One is you're paying the platform of Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:53:14 but you're also paying the platform risk of chain link. So, you know... How would the US dollar price of Ether actually become instantiated in the protocol? What's the technical process behind that? Right. So, you know, one way to do it, for example, is with committees. So we have this, for example, this honesty assumption in Ethereum where we assume that, you know, half the stake is honest. and what we do is that we sample committees

Starting point is 00:53:44 which are large enough to be statistically representative of the wider population and then these committees of so-called attestors are going to go vote on various things and we basically assume that if the majority of the committee members vote on something then that's reflective of the wider population and it's kind of true and so we could have these committees basically vote on what they think is the price of US dollar.

Starting point is 00:54:15 I mean, the big problem here is that basically the price of Eiff in US dollars is subjective. And kind of one of our design goals is to be kind of World War III resistant. And there's kind of some of these edge cases where like there is legitimately a definitional question as to what the USD is. So for example, in Argentina, there's kind of, there's kind of two market rates for the Argentinian peso. There's kind of, forget what it's called,

Starting point is 00:54:49 but like blue market and black markets or whatever. Right. And so if you're in a situation where, you know, the U.S. economy goes crumbling, there could be a lot of chaos, and we don't want this kind of chaos around the U.S. dollar to be a systemic risk for Ethereum. Right.

Starting point is 00:55:08 I mean, that's made... There's also the topic of just like the US dollar is an arbitrary anchor in of itself, right? Like the choice to include the dollar is also subjective in the first place. So I think maybe the big debate behind this thing is like, do we even include subjectivity into the layer one at all?

Starting point is 00:55:25 Right, exactly. Like the simple approach, the purest approach is to say, just no subjectivity whatsoever. But yeah, I mean, like, I mean, if you look at a deterministic virtual machine, it's extremely powerful, right? It's too incomplete. It has everything. But actually, it doesn't have all the superpowers that you want.

Starting point is 00:55:53 And more specifically, it doesn't have the oracles. Now, there's various types of oracles that are very, very familiar to a computer. Like if you take a phone, for example, it's aware of things like, what is the time? it's it's also able to gather randomness it's also able to gather pick up the temperature or whatever now in the context of you know

Starting point is 00:56:15 decentralized finance for example and the internet of value knowing what the time is is very important having access to randomness is very important and the blockchain being aware of its own price I would argue is also very important I mean we are definitely improving in terms of these oracles.

Starting point is 00:56:37 So, for example, EIP-159 gives us an Oracle. More specifically, it gives us a base fee oracle. So basically, the blocked DVM is aware of itself as to how valuable its block space is. And I think we need to... In ether terms. In ether terms, exactly. And so the more we have like these really, you know, important oracles, I think the more complete the EVM will be.

Starting point is 00:57:07 Interesting. That's a fantastic. Are there any other parts of like the Ethereum Future roadmap that are kind of like up for debate as it comes to like high touch versus low touch styles? Right. I mean I think one

Starting point is 00:57:22 thing that we have kind of consensus on is that we need to do a quantum upgrade. It's non-negotiable. I mean some people will say, oh, and I mean, this is a diminishing population, but some people will say quantum computers will never arrive, that kind of skeptics. And our position is that even in that scenario, which is not the consensus within kind of quantum physicists, that we still need protection against

Starting point is 00:57:54 quantum computers. And the reason is because that blockchains are meant to be these ultra-conservative pieces of infrastructure. And, you know, we need at least kind of 10 years. of heads up in order to do all the upgrades because these things are very, very slow to upgrade, especially if, you know, in let's say five, 10 years, you know, Ethereum has a $10,000 market cap, it is going to be especially difficult to change it. And so this is one of the actually high touch kind of things that we need to do, like taking out the guts, the cryptographic guts and changing them for post-quantum cryptography. could have quite quite big consequences.

Starting point is 00:58:36 In terms of where there's still kind of debate, I mean, one of the big ones which we talked about is basically, do we want to enshrine a VM other than the EVM? And I'm leaning towards yes. And part of the reason why I'm leaning towards yes is that, you know, the power of innovation is, is so huge. And we've only just scratched the surface

Starting point is 00:59:05 in terms of VMs that are custom design for blockchains. And, you know, we've also just scratched the surface in terms of VMs custom design for snockification and, and for more verification and things like that. And so I'm optimistic that, you know, in five, 10 years' time,

Starting point is 00:59:24 the EVM will look completely outdated. And it will kind of be, it will kind of be stupidly obvious. there'll be this natural shelling point that yes, this is this is like 10, 100 times better and we should just all adopt this new thing. And enshrining it at layer one will help achieve this the shilling point. I mean, another thing that you brought up is, you know, this this idea of a parallel universe where, you know, proof of stake is a necessity because it's the most economically efficient. EIP-159 is a necessity because it's the most economic. efficient.

Starting point is 01:00:04 And it's definitely possible that we'll find ways to be even more economically efficient than we are today. And like one possible way to do that would be to find a way to burn the MEP.

Starting point is 01:00:21 Now this is kind of an alpha leak. I don't know when your podcast will go out, but... You got three weeks. Three weeks. Okay. So in three weeks, it will definitely be published. So basically we have this this kind of M-EV intern, which we hired kind of three months ago. And it's quite possible that he actually cracked M-E-V, which is a huge... That is a, that's a massive statement. Cracking M-E-V? Yeah, yeah. So basically...

Starting point is 01:00:55 That's like stuff that dreams are made of. Oh, yeah. Kind of totally out of left field. He came up with this super simple kind of genius idea to basically do what's called MEV smoothing. So like the big problem of MEV is that it's highly volatile and spiky. And this spikiness basically is a liability for the security of the consensus layer. And so if you can smooth out the MEV, suddenly it starts becoming very similar to issuance, right? this grade A fuel, which you can rely upon, and it's kind of injected at a constant rate. And so basically his idea is, when you produce a block, like all the MEV shouldn't go to the block producer.

Starting point is 01:01:47 It should actually go to all the validators that help get this block on chain, namely, the block proposer and all the committee members that are voting to include, to basically attest for this block. And so you're in a position where actually the MEV is spread out, is kind of smoothed over the whole committee. And so, you know, that actually turns MEV from a liability

Starting point is 01:02:17 into an asset, right, from a security standpoint. So it's... Because it just turns into staking yields, right? Yeah, it turns into something very, very similar to issue. So it, MEV today is already staking yields, but it's like highly volatile yields. And this volatility basically incentivizes reorgs and forking and, and very, you know, kind of nasty things.

Starting point is 01:02:48 Once you're in a position where you, you smooth things out, then it's kind of the, really the, the position you want to be in to, to maximize security. And this, so another consequence of this idea is that potentially we could burn the MEP. So we'd be in a position where the protocol kind of has some knowledge, you know, very similar to this Oracle idea, right? Not only is the EVM aware of the base fees, but it's also aware of how much MUV there is because it's capturing it and spreading it to the whole committees. And so we're potentially in a position where we can burn the MEV. And so we could take kind of the ultrasoundness as it were to the next level where, you know, right now, like the data suggests that the fee burn is about 70%. So of all the fees we're burning 70%. Well, maybe we can burn this extra, you know, 30% as well.

Starting point is 01:03:49 So we can approach 100% of the burn rate of transaction fees. Yeah, potentially. I mean, I don't want to oversell this right now because it's still kind of early research, but yeah, at least the aspect of turning MEP from a liability to an asset seems very, very promising. And there will be an EF research post coming soon. And this kind of speaks to like the

Starting point is 01:04:16 the Dow nature of Ethereum. The word DAWS are kind of misuse. use when we talk about them nowadays. Like bankless Dow, Uniswop Dow, not a Dow, just a digital organization. The only two Dowds that I think are truly functioning at this point in time are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Those are the DAOs, as in they are decentralized and they're autonomous and there's some emergent bottom-up organization.

Starting point is 01:04:44 And like the direction of the Ethereum Dow tends to always go towards efficiency, right? And so if you're telling me that we're like, we're working. towards efficiency and security, and this is just another innovation that we've been able to unlock, that lends towards that idea. And we all know that, like, defy is on a relentless march towards capital efficiency of the assets that find themselves inside of defy. And so, like, and so, like, going back to that, like, if we run the simulation over and over and over again, the block, the crypto economic system that makes it that you discover, you're whatever we call, Ethereum or whatever name we want to name this in these different universes, the number one thing

Starting point is 01:05:26 that you will find inside of every trial of the simulation is that each economic system gravitates towards maximum efficiency every single step of the way. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, another way to rephrase that is just trying to absorb innovation as much as possible. And I think one of the killer features of Ethereum is kind of, you know, kind of, too. clearing completeness is this awesome innovation sponge

Starting point is 01:05:55 and the reason is that you can you can build any program you want on the EVM but yeah like the other aspect of this innovation sponge are the throughput from a data standpoint we're improving that greatly with with sharding

Starting point is 01:06:14 there's also the economic security aspect which we've talked at length and we're improving and then there's also the monetary aspect, which we thought that lines. And it turns out that, you know, in each of these these four kind of directions, we're just making incremental progress. And we're very, very open to absorbing the innovation. And I think that's partly kind of, I think one of your previous questions was where, for

Starting point is 01:06:43 example, is that disagreement within the EF? And I think that there is some disagreement as to when, you know, know, Ethereum will be considered kind of done. Like my, my kind of gut field is that we've only had 13 years of blockchain innovation. And there's at least another 20 years of very, very fruitful kind of exponential kind of innovation. And that, you know, most likely Ethereum won't be kind of, you know, totally done, you know, anytime, anytime soon. and you know like the the the quantum threat aspect one of the good things about it is that it's it's widely accepted and so even the bitcoin has kind of accepted you know kind of the ossification maximilist will will accept it and so it's it's i think that might be kind of one of the last times where we do it so if we assume for example the quantum computers will arrive in 30 years

Starting point is 01:07:40 or let's say 25 years then in in let's say in 15 years, this will be kind of our last chance to get all the good gadgets that we want. And thanks to this kind of forced, massive revamping of the system because of quantum computers. An external ice age, if you will. Right, exactly. Yeah. You said that even bitcoiners tend to accept the quantum threat. Have you heard of Nick Carter's fud dice?

Starting point is 01:08:12 Oh, yes, yes, yes. I love his fud dice, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, but he has quantum computing on the fud dice. So why are they on the fud dice if you say that Bitcoiners are generally accepting of the quantum threat? Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 01:08:29 Interesting. I think the reason why it's on the fud dice is because Nick Carter is myopic. And the reason that he's myopic is that he only thinks kind of 10, 20 years into the future. Like, you know, another kind of similar issue is, the low issuance. Like, okay, low issuance is not really a big deal. You know, we'll just kick the can and we'll think about it in 20 to 30 years. And, you know, I think that that attitude is actually okay if you're happy to embrace innovation.

Starting point is 01:09:00 Because basically you're saying if there is some massive innovation in the next 20 years, which is very, very likely because we live in this exponential innovation world, then we can just go grab the fruits and do the upgrade. but you know you can't have this this this relaxed attitude if you say that you know whatever was created on day one is what we're going to have for the rest of time I mean when I say that quantum is accepted is like I don't think the the stance of the Bitcoin technical community is that quantum computers will never come hence it's not a threat I think they they do acknowledge that they will come

Starting point is 01:09:38 but the reason why they consider it's fud is because it's you know it's it's so far in the distance and in that sense they're a little myopic interesting to me if you put uh quantum computing on the fud dice and you think that bitcoin bitcoin can overcome that via technological changes like you're committing to a hard fork would you agree with that assumption yeah i mean you can do all sorts of crazy gymnastics with soft forks. If that's the technical distinction that you're putting forward.

Starting point is 01:10:16 So soft forks and hard forks are not too dissimilar from a capability standpoint. But yes, like some sort of massive fork that radically changes Bitcoin, yes. And not just from a technical standpoint. It's

Starting point is 01:10:32 also fundamentally a social thing. Why is it a social thing? The reason is that there's lost coins and we need to decide what to do with these lost coins. Like part of the Bitcoin ethos is we're not going to do any kind of rescue. And actually, this is very, very similar to the Dow, right? The problem with the Dow was that you had one single entity, the Dow attacker, which had control over, let's say, I forget what it is exactly, but let's say 10% of the supply,

Starting point is 01:11:00 like a huge amount of the EF supply. And here it's basically, it would be a similar situation. A quantum attacker, which could be a single entity, or maybe a small handful entities could have control over 10% of the Bitcoin supply, this 10% being all the lost Bitcoins. And it's interesting because, you know, if the Bitcoiners are going to be kind of intellectually consistent

Starting point is 01:11:24 with the past observations, they would reject the idea of, you know, of confiscating these coins and just destroying them. They would say, oh, no. code is law and, you know, the Bitcoin script was cracked and, you know, we just need to run the scripts as they're programmed and 10% of the supply is going to go to this quantum attacker. But of course, you know, this is just impractical, especially if you want to be like, you know, money for the world economy, if you're going to have a 10, you know, 100 trillion dollars of monetary energy

Starting point is 01:12:02 stored in the Bitcoin network, it's kind of inconceivable for a single entity to have 10 trillion dollars you know kind of the half the size of the m3 supply of of the u.s. dollar or something doesn't make sense interestingly that it would go all of those 10% of the bitcoins would go to a single entity that would have the maximum amount of like like hashing power which is kind of like equivalent to proof of work right but instead of going through the actual proof of work route you're just you're just running proof of work through private keys, right? Now you're just doing it with quantum computers.

Starting point is 01:12:41 Which is interesting to think about how like the other way to get a bunch of Bitcoins is to like maximize your computational compower, but now it's just in a in a quantum field. I mean, yeah, you're right. It's kind of stretching the analogy, but yeah, it's interesting points. But yeah, it's no, it's a roundabout proof of work, unintentional proof of work, not intended proof of work. But if you take your comment literally, there's actually, this is a very,

Starting point is 01:13:07 observation, which is that proof of work is broken under quantum computers. If you have sufficiently advanced quantum computers, then proof of work is essentially broken. And so, you know, one of the kind of the long-term kind of ideas of how Bitcoin is secured is basically you have these A6, Maw's law is broken so that, you know, it's basically equivalent to to proof of stake where you have fairly homogeneous distribution of these ASECs

Starting point is 01:13:42 and it turns out that this vision is going to get potentially disrupted by quantum computers in a sense that all the ASICs will become worthless from one day to another and you have to go through the same growth phase and

Starting point is 01:14:03 maturation phase that we've gone through. So in the traditional silicon world, there's been four kind of maturation phase for proof of work. We've got one from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs and then A6 and then kind of the end of Moore's law kind of A6, I guess five phases. And then as soon as you change the paradigm, you know, you in this quantum paradigm, then suddenly you're, you go back to to almost the genesis from a security standpoint, where proof of work is just like Satoshi was the only minor at the very beginning, at the very beginning of this quantum error, there's going to be a single minor.

Starting point is 01:14:43 And yes, there is going to be the difficulty adjustment and things like that, but your decentralization is basically going to go down to zero. Yeah, it's just going to be a complete reset of the entire proof of work system, right? Exactly. You're going to start from like day one again. Exactly, yes.

Starting point is 01:14:59 And Bitcoiners will say this is far, you know, because maybe, you know, one of the observations is that you need quantum computers which, you know, potentially much more advanced than the ones that can break the private keys. So, you know, it's maybe an extra 10 or 20 years after the, after these first generation quantum computers. but, you know, it's still very much a possibility that they will come and reset the proof of work. I want to pivot the conversation to back to layer zero. So you used to be a layer one engineer, and now I kind of view you as like a layer zero engineer. So with thinking into the long term about the layer zero of Ethereum of this community that we're all a part of, do you have any like long term projections or wishes for the layer zero of Ethereum? do you want it to turn into?

Starting point is 01:16:00 Interesting. I mean, you know, I really like the layer zero of today. I think the community and culture is just just so, so, so great. And I think there is a risk of dilution, right? As soon as you grow, then you might dilute. But there's potentially a way out, which is basically abstraction. Like, if we're in a position, where many, many, you know, billions of people can use Ethereum without even knowing that

Starting point is 01:16:35 they're using Ethereum, then they'd be effectively be at layer two, but they're not at layer zero. You know how I said that, you know, we're going full circle, basically, between layer zero and layer two, because it's kind of people on both sides. But actually, these are different people. Like, you can be part of the community and not a user, and vice versa. You can be a user and not part of the community. So I think the ideal scenario is basically where the layer zero grows very significantly, but the quality stays very high.

Starting point is 01:17:14 And I think there is actually a possibility to do that. And basically the kind of the filter is kind of geekiness or kind of intellectual curiosity. like it's it's very difficult to get into ephereum if you're not very multidisciplinary and intellectually curious and so you kind of the in a way that the the barrier to entry is maybe relatively high and that could be kind of a filter and then everyone else who just wants to use ephereum for its utilitarian values can just use it without understanding and so i guess it's very similar to planes like everyone uses planes but i guess the plain community like the ultra geeks who knows how, you know, every single button in the cockpit and, you know, how the engines are made in the jets and things like that, that's probably a very special community, which is relatively small and, yeah, kind of pure in that sense. It seems to be that with that perspective, like the whole purpose of Ethereum is to like let a thousand layer zeros be born on top of layer three.

Starting point is 01:18:23 two, right? So like infinity layer threes, if you will, just infinity communities built on top of layer twos, which are built on top of layer ones, which are built on top of the Ethereum community, which is like the layer zero. I see what you mean. Okay. So tons of communities built on top of layer two. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Each one with its own sets of values and principles, which they're allowed to choose from,

Starting point is 01:18:50 because Ethereum allowed them to choose from the full set of all values. and principles because that's the value and principles of the layer zero. Yes, I like that. I mean, maybe we could call it layer four. And the reason is because in my mental model, kind of layer three is the service layer, right? So you need all this middleware between kind of the smart contract and the user, that which is kind of layer three. And so, for example, Coinbase is layer three, right?

Starting point is 01:19:24 They're kind of connected to the blockchain. They make deposits and withdrawals and also things. But they provide this service. And then, I guess, layer four would be the communities that are built on top of that. Whoever, if there's anyone listening who wants to turn this into a graphic, especially if you're in the bankless Dow, I'll tip 5,000 bank to whoever's in the bankless Dow who wants to turn this into a graphic so we can deliberate about this on Twitter. Justin, I want to go into a little bit more. detail about what you get up to. I'm sure like many people in the Ethereum world, you're more or less

Starting point is 01:20:00 a workaholic and so you're probably in front of your computer like, I don't know, anywhere between six and 18 hours a day. But when you close the lid of your laptop, like what happens next in your life? Like what do you go do? Right. So that is correct. I am a workaholic, which is, which is, you know, is great in the sense that I love what I do, but it definitely has downsides, you know, in terms of health, for example, and just friendships outside of work and things like that. But, you know, I do have a family, so I've been married for six years and I have a young kid. and you know I guess a lot of my my time is just being a parent you know just spending time with my kid dropping him to school and teaching him you know stuff like

Starting point is 01:20:57 like today for example we were we were flying a quadcopter you know I'm at my my parents's house and like kind of teaching him you know what goes into a quadcopter for example the fact that the specific quadcopter that we have has a has a has a has a GPS and it uses GPS so that if there's a bit of wind, it doesn't drift away, it kind of stays where it is. And so I explained to him that basically there's these, you know, satellites that every second produce a pulse. And then all these different satellites are slightly, the pulses come at slightly different times. And then the GPS chip will kind of analyze when the pulses are received. And then using that, it can determine its position.

Starting point is 01:21:39 and so, you know, I guess it's just distilling a lot of the complicated technology that I've enjoyed learning kind of about on my own and passing it on to my son. Is he a technically inclined individual? Does he like all the, I mean, all boys to some degree love gadgets. What part of like Justin Drake, the cypherpunk, do you see in this kid? How old is he? He's six. Six, okay.

Starting point is 01:22:13 So, yeah, he's, you know, I mean, maybe every parent will say that, but he's, he's pretty, he's pretty sharp. And he's, he's capable to appreciate many different things. Like, at one point, he was, he was really into mathematics. And I think partly because of memetic desire, you know, like, I, you know, someone told him that I studied mathematics. and then he wanted to do some mathematics. But now it seems like he's moving on. Like now he's really into art and crafty things and stuff like that. He's also very much into languages.

Starting point is 01:22:53 So my family is kind of extremely international. So to kind of illustrate this, I say to people that I was born in the UK from a British dad and an Argentine mother. and then we lived in China and I'm also Italian by by blood and you know my wife is Russian and she speaks Japanese

Starting point is 01:23:19 which is what she studied at university and so he he's kind of inherited this this international aspect you know through learning all sorts of different languages so he has one for example grandmother who speaks to him in French and then another grandmother who speaks to him in Russian and then I speak to him in in in in in in in in English and and and stuff like that with and he really

Starting point is 01:23:42 appreciates the I guess the you know being read you know books in different languages and that is hilariously appropriate for somebody who's like working on the layer zero of Ethereum to have like a such a diverse background of culture that like you don't actually have one specific culture. That is like the most resonant thing with Ethereum that I can actually think of. Yeah, and I've kind of almost lost this nation state identity in the sense that I don't even speak a single language without an accent. So I...

Starting point is 01:24:20 That is so awesome. So I lived roughly half my life in France, you know, from one years old to 14 years old. And when I was 14, I guess I would consider myself kind of French. But, you know, and then I went to live in China and then I came back to the UK and I studied there. And I've spent, you know, 14 years now in the UK. And, you know, I can't really say that I feel like I'm a true Brit or a true French. I'm just a citizen of the world, I guess.

Starting point is 01:24:56 And this is even more true where, you know, I adhere to, I guess, the bankless nation, right? this is my nationality. And I also try to, you know, detach myself, you know, from the nation state. I actually, you know, I feel that it's a very early idea, but the idea of network state from Balaghi is just so mind-blowing. And this is, this is something, some sort of a meme I want to contribute towards, right? Maybe in 20 or 30 years, I could see myself trying to build a network. states with all the infrastructure that we're building today. Well, I think with this massive, like, regulation conversation that has arisen lately,

Starting point is 01:25:43 like, it's only going to accelerate the desire for people to have the options to opt out of their, like, nation state identities. Like, I would never, I don't really consider myself, like, a patriot. I don't fly the United States flag. And I think a lot of younger generations resonate with that inside of the United States where like being a proud supporter of America is like no longer cool for a large part of the population. And we're kind of looking towards online identities to like find to fill that niche, right? To fill that void.

Starting point is 01:26:13 Right. I mean, I personally really dislike politics and I try to minimize it in my life. And, you know, I think governance is a fundamental part of layer zero. But what I like about blockchains is this. governance minimization, right? So, you know, it could be argued that governance has, you know, in the lifetime of the firm, only really kind of stuck its neck out, you know, in a big way once, which was for the Dow.

Starting point is 01:26:47 You know, let's hope that these kind of events don't happen very often and ideally just just this one time and really try to minimize the decisions that the humans have to make and maximize the just the autonomous programmable you know inspectable whatever I think I think it's very very telling that when we talk about it

Starting point is 01:27:13 at the nation state level we call it politics but when we talk about it at the crypto economic level we call it governance which is like the governance has a purpose politics is a game and everyone hates politics but governance is like it's like this

Starting point is 01:27:27 the chores like just you got to brush your Keith, you got to fold your laundry, you got to do your laundry, you got to participate in governance. But if we can minimize governance, it's just like minimizing all the chores that we have to do every single week of our lives. Yeah, absolutely. And I think governance kind of highlights the utilitarian aspect of it, right? We want to do upgrades.

Starting point is 01:27:49 Upgrades are fundamental because we live in this, in this experiential world, and also because we need to fix the various bugs. Whereas, you know, as you say, politics is just. it's just become a kind of a shit show really. Right, right. A meat space shit show, yeah. Depending on it, every person has their interpretation of politics and it's generally always negative. Okay, so going back to my original question, like when you close your laptop and what you get up to, but excluding your family, say Justin Drake has some like alone time, some Justin, some Justin Time.

Starting point is 01:28:23 What's Justin Time look like? Hmm. Okay. I mean one of the things that I do is improvise on the piano so Really? No shit

Starting point is 01:28:37 So you know I I used to take a piano lessons when I was younger but you know I kind of find it constraining to have to adhere to what's written on

Starting point is 01:28:53 the page and the specific notes and so you know at one point I was like I just want to do my my my my own stuff and and I think creativity is is one of the things that you know I I do a lot in my daily job and you know I guess it makes sense to try and reflect that in the in the in the music but yeah so it took me it took me some time to basically have the the confidence you know at first I was just playing random note it was kind of a genetic algorithm, right? I was playing these random notes, but then suddenly I started making patterns, and then I started making kind of these small snippets, and then now I'm in a position where,

Starting point is 01:29:38 you know, I can go on the piano and just just improvise for, you know, for hours. Do you, have you, do you connect those dots between, like, your lack of interest of being aligned to a nation state, which is generally like a top-down ideology to, like, your lack of interest of being taught how to play piano and rather your desire to be more creative and improvise do you connect those two things at all or or or any other like aspects of your life that fit into that pattern no yeah absolutely i've i've always been a little rebellious um you know even in the the french education system like the the french education system is very very top down and rule driven and kind of bureaucratic and whatnot and uh i i just uh very naturally just went

Starting point is 01:30:25 to gain the rules. I mean, sometimes, you know, I had a teacher which would kind of embrace this aspect of me. So, you know, there was this story where, I mean, it's a little, I'm a little ashamed to say it, but basically there's, my brother had the same teacher as I had in kind of in middle school. And my brother asked, like, was there any kind of genius in your, in your, in your, class, so he has a teacher and the teacher said, no, no, there was no one. And then she said, oh, actually, maybe I did have one genius, but only in one specific domain, which was the mathematics. And that was, you know, me. And the reason she thought I was a genius is because I was, I'm not, I'm not,

Starting point is 01:31:16 not video genius, but the reason why I gave the impression that I was a genius is because whenever there was a math problem, I would solve it in a completely different way than the way I was taught. So basically it was kind of a roundabout way and the teacher didn't really understand what I was doing.

Starting point is 01:31:34 But she always said, Justin came up, always came up with the right answer, but kind of the wrong method. And she kind of embraced that and was fine with it. But a lot of other teachers in the French education

Starting point is 01:31:48 didn't like it so much. And so that caused a little bit bit of tension, I guess. It's really interesting to connect us. Again, this podcast is called Layer Zero. And so we have this like non-Nation state identified rebel who likes to be creative and route around problems to discover the right answer. Like too many of these things are lining up with like how Ethereum and crypto-economic

Starting point is 01:32:14 networks like operate at scale at large like throughout the layer ones and the layer two's. And part of my goals with this podcast with layer zero is to like discover the ways that like the DNA of humans and the neurons of humans relates to the code that we write. And so I'm seeing a massive like direct one to one connection with like kind of the stories that you're telling me and how like these this whole entire industry is like built upon. Yeah. I mean I'll say that I also have kind of a bit of a hacker mindset. You know, I try to find the vulnerabilities. I try to find the cracks. I try to take a route which no one expects and is kind of hidden. And, you know, I'm kind of the,

Starting point is 01:32:58 proudly have a kind of a $1,000 bounty for reporting a pretty bad Google Chrome vulnerability that could basically allow, allow an attacker to basically take screenshots of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your, of your desktop remotely. But I also kind of use this hacker mindset in research, right? Because in research, oftentimes you have a problem and it looks like there's some sort of impossibility result. Like you can't do something.

Starting point is 01:33:28 And like the way that you escape impossibility results is kind of by redefining the problem or redefining the assumptions. You really don't want to take for granted things that other people took for granted. and and basically relax the problem in very subtle ways where suddenly you open up a design space. And so, yeah, this is something that I like doing is kind of taking something where people seem stuck. You know, they're no longer making progress.

Starting point is 01:34:00 They've thought about it for a long time. And they believe it's impossible. And then kind of coming in with fresh eyes and saying, in a new perspective and saying, actually, if you tweak your, your viewpoint just a little bit there is a way around it interesting fantastic well just and Drake it's been a wonderful time having you on layer zero and I hope this is not the last time that we hear we talk about this and all these subjects and I hope to have you back for more

Starting point is 01:34:27 fantastic thanks for having me

Bankless - Layer Zero | Justin Drake

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