Bankless - Why Are We Here? Crypto-Anarchism Explained | Arjun Bhuptani

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Arjun gives one of the best non-technical talks at the Bankless Summit that everyone in crypto needs to hear. Do you know why you’re here? Arjun explains the first principle concept of Crypto-Anarchism.  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited   🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/97?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ RESOURCES Arjun Bhuptani https://x.com/arjunbhuptani  Presentation Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rwqPdrljsFpZvGCxwEwkYpCAX7mFlGS4/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=118091317616904257032&rtpof=true&sd=true   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Welcome to the Bankless Summit, a series of talks from speakers all around the Ethereum ecosystem, which were all presented at a one-day event hosted the day after DevCon called the Bankless Summit. We are releasing some of these talks on the podcast all throughout this week and next, and the rest are available on the Bankless Premium Feed. You're about to hear Arjun Bhaptani, the CEO of Everclear formerly Connect, who gave what I think might have been the crowd-favorite talk at the summit this year. Arjun takes us back to our crypto-anarchist roots and gives us. is a stellar account of what it means to all be in crypto.

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Hello. Hi, I'm Arjun. If you don't know who I am, I have been in this space for quite a while. I've been involved in building things on top of Ethereum since 2016. I helped with a lot of early L2 research. Actually, if you were here for Amin's talk earlier, he talked about building the first L2 on Ethereum for a spank chain. I also helped build that. And then also was involved deeply in a lot of early thinking around Daos and most recently interoperability. This talk is called, why are we here? It is not a technical talk, which is unusual for me. It's a much more kind of like systems and economics and political and philosophy-oriented talk. And my hope is that people in this audience, people who are watching recordings of this talk at some point in the future, can use this as a way to kind of reflect on the core ideas behind why this space needs to exist in the first place. Because we're in this very, very special place where we're kind of, it looks like we might cross the chasm into the mainstream for the first time ever. And if we do that, I hope that we don't kind of like

forget some of the core reasons for why blockchains should be around in the first place. We live in a weird time. Over the course of the last, I would say, like 100 years or so, the world has kind of gotten increasingly authoritarian. Part of this is propelled by technology. Part of it is just propelled by where we are in the life cycle of the American hegemony and empire. This is a graph that shows just the, like, the level of democracy that exists in the world. And you can see that it's really decreasing very significantly over time. This is a trend that has been going on for some time. And it's also mirrored by like similar trends in, in corporations as well. There's a, there's this like strong centralizing effect where more and more organizations

are consolidating to become these large super monopolies, super governments that, that unfortunately can wield pretty much unchecked power. And at the same time, we have this secondary thing that's happening, which is we're seeing an increase in the number of negative externalities associated with the systems that we live in. There's something very broken about the world that we're in right now. This is global emissions of CO2. This is deforestation. You could really pull up a lot of other charts that look like this.

These are just two examples. But it seems like there's something in the way that human beings are operating right now that is leading to us not effectively thinking about the long-term outcome for humanity versus the short-term benefit of a few stakeholders. What I want to do is try to understand a little bit more about why we're here. Why did we end up in this place? What is so broken about systems today that leads us to continually fall into this cycle? Because this isn't the first time that this has happened.

If you look at throughout history, I was trying to find a good graph of this, but it wasn't able to find this last night. Throughout history, you see this like, continuous cycle of like rise of empires over a long period of time followed by a crash followed by rise of empires over a long period time followed by a crash right and every time that happens who suffers it's it's people so what is it fundamental to these systems that is a little bit broken who here knows what the tragedy of the commons is cool okay good that it's most people for anybody that doesn't the tragedy of the commons is an allegory that kind of talks about the

failures of human coordination there's a lot of similar allegories in fact i if you were familiar with Mollock and the Mollock Dow, we talked about this extensively back in the day. And the allegory kind of goes like, well, if you have a pasture that has a carrying capacity of like 10 sheep, and there are 10 farmers each with one sheep on this pasture, that is a sustainable system. However, without any kind of external policing, there's no incentive for a farmer to only have one sheep in that system, right? Because if you add another sheep, it increases your output, your output of wool or whatever, by 100%. And the cost is not actually borne by you. It's shared amongst everybody else. So like the kind of benefit that you get is 100%, the cost that

you pay is only 10%. And then obviously this leads to this like death spiral where over time, everybody just gets more and more sheep, and then the pasture gets overgrazed, and then you have like environmental impacts throughout the world for all sorts of things like CO2. There's a really, really interesting person named Eleanor Ostrom, who's a Nobel Prize winning economist. She actually doesn't get enough credit for a lot of the work that she does. because Eleanor spent the majority of her life actually working on understanding the tragedy of the commons and basically how you can actually sustainably govern commons systems, what she called common pool resources. And Ostrom's research found three possible ways to do this.

The first is centralization, right? You have some state come and just take ownership of the system. This is sort of like how communism works. The state just imposes rules on how many sheep everybody can have and how they can graze. when they can graze. And that's basically it. But of course, you trust this state unilaterally, right? The state is telling you 100% of what is okay. And if the state decides to cheat, there's not really anything that stops that. So you have this who watches the watchman problem that kind of exists in any kind of system where you have this like godlike role. Option number two is

privatization. This is kind of where we're headed right now with the U.S. economy and where usually is espoused as this like this solution to centralization risk in a lot of cases but unfortunately privatization also has a lot of flaws so one is it's very unclear as to how you define property rights in general who own these things in the first place

right who what if you don't necessarily know who owned the land and then similarly you have the secondary problem of like well how do you enforce these property rights how do you enforce privatization how do you scale that enforcement ultimately you have the same problem as option number one which is who watches the watchman and then there's option number three and

this is what Ostrom ended up kind of concluding was like, you actually can beat the tragedy of the commons. In fact, there's lots and lots of examples where human beings have done this. There are tons and tons of cases where human beings have coordinated around a shared resource for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, and done so effectively and sustainably. However, and there's one very, very important caveat to this, it doesn't scale, right? You can enforce these things on a peer-to-peer basis by, like, within your community who of everybody, that you know the name of, you can convince them to not do things wrong. And if they do things wrong, you can publicly shame them. But how do you do this even in an ecosystem of thousands of

people? How do you do this in an ecosystem of billions of people? How do you solve some of the biggest world's problems when the world's biggest problems, when you can't do this thing where you can't solve this problem of social scalability? How do you enforce rules on a global basis in a way that is ideally peer-to-peer. Now, unfortunately, until somewhat recently, the answer was you can't, right? And so the natural conclusion of all this was the very, very unfortunate realization that institutions don't scale. As a thought experiment, I would like you to spend some time thinking about this interesting question that I have actually asked a lot of people over the last couple of years. Can you think of a single instance in history where

a large-scale institution has effectively represented its constituents, for a long period of time without getting corrupted. I've never actually gotten anyone that has given me a real answer. That's really bleak, right? There's something inherent to humanity. There's something inherent to the human condition that leads us to continually get to this output, which is every single time we try to build an institution,

it breaks. And when we rely on these institutions to create goods for us, any sort of output that we need to need in order to survive as a species, those goods are themselves broken. Why does that happen? So there's this really interesting notion in economics that is that talks about the way that goods are developed. And so goods, and this by this, I mean, really like any kind of product, any kind of innovation, follows a fairly predictable life cycle going from being breakthrough innovation, and then over time, over the course of innovation, over the course of competition, getting to the point where they're just

complete public goods, effectively utilities. You can map out most innovations in this kind of a chart today. So all the way on this end, you have fusion reactors, which are this really, really highly custom thing today. We don't have fusion reactors in our home. You can't buy a fusion reactor on Amazon. God, I hope you can never do that.

And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, you have things like electricity and the Internet. The Internet is a public good. It's effectively open to anybody. And as long as you have electricity, and as long as you have a computer, and as long as you have a few other dependencies, it is something that is fundamentally public. It's not owned by anybody. And then everything else kind of falls in between, right? You have things like compute and storage, the AWS where it's aggressively commoditized, but it's not a public utility yet. Payments are kind of in that category. AI is just now breaking through into becoming something that's productized, but not yet commoditized. And you can also plot a lot of sovereign goods in this chart, too. They kind of behave in a very similar way. All the way on one end of the spectrum, you have combat drones, right? Obviously, the U.S. government, obviously combat drones should not be commoditized. The U.S. government has these as like fairly custom things, but you also have things like voting systems, right? Voting

systems are not actually very easily and widely available because, as we talked about earlier, they require enforcement. And then all the way on the other end, you have things like roads. Anybody can use roads. So how do innovations move through this, through the system? Let's talk about payments, for instance. Payments, for example, Visa are a innovation that have, especially digital payments, that are an innovation that have been around for some time. They really should be commoditized, right? Visa charges like anywhere between 30 basis points to like several percent on making transactions. That's a fee rate that is honestly way too high for the world that we live in today. It doesn't really make any sense. But they stay there. They don't move towards

becoming a utility. And this is somewhat intentional. Because one of the things that's actually really critical to this pattern, to this life cycle of goods, is that when companies are creating goods, when governments are creating goods, they don't necessarily want these goods to become utilities. They don't want every good to become a utility, and they want to limit the ability for their good to become, effectively get disrupted as a result of moving further along in this timeline. So for payments, that means working with governments to regulate the way who has access to payments,

requiring KYC, things like that, basically making it impossible for new entrants to come into the market to disrupt Visa and MasterCard. This is a strategy that you see everywhere. Health insurance in the U.S. is a really great example of this. Health insurance should be commoditized. It doesn't really make sense that it's not. But in the U.S., it is not a commodity good. It's a product, and you pay for it like a product. It is much more expensive than many, many other parts of the world.

And the evidence that it's a product is just you can kind of see the distribution of health insurance providers. This is not what a commodity good looks like. A commodity good is way more fragmented, and that's a good thing. That's how you drive prices down. That's how you actually create competition. There is not competition here. Why isn't there competition? Honestly, because of a broken system.

You have this unfortunate thing that happens over and over again, where corporate monopolies will work together with governments to effectively basically keep, themselves in power usually at the cost of users. There's a there's a flywheel that kind of represents how this happens right you have a incumbent corporations will fund politicians those politicians will be elected and they'll go and pass policy and the policy that they pass will protect the donors that funded them and once they pass that policy those corporations will solidify their monopolies grow revenue and

become basically super super dominant and then they'll partner back with the governments to give them technology dominant So governments will then leverage the exact same technology, example, Twitter, to control people's opinions, to control the way that they think, and to then fund more politicians and kind of go around in this cycle, where, of course, unfortunately, you are the one that's losing. We talk so much about incentives in this space, and that's such a core part of the way that we think about about blockchains, about building infrastructure. But there's also a similar kind of like system of incentives that exists around governance right now, around policy. And regardless of whether you fall into the economic right or right or left, the system of incentives, unfortunately, continues to drive us upwards, which is no matter what happens, every single cycle, we get more and more authoritarian, right? even if you even I mean we'll see kind of what happens with this presidency but even when you when you have net reductions in complexity of legal systems we have not yet seen a net reduction in

authoritarianism we have only seen the slow and gradual reduction in civil liberties over time and in history the only instances where that's changed is when you have a revolution so hopefully we don't have to hit that point what we do need is ideally something that is not a revolution but something that pulls us strongly in the other direction towards anarchism Now, I'm sure the word anarchism makes people a little uncomfy. It makes me a little uncomfy, right? There's a lot of brainwashing around anarchism where, like, the first thing I think of when someone says anarchism is like cars on fire.

Right? Like, that is the first mental image that you have. That's not actually what anarchism is at all. It's just like the association that has been drawn, which you're just like, okay, it's a person in all black that is like throwing a Molotov cocktail. But it's not that. It's this much more simple notion that actually when you go and talk to anybody,

regardless of where they're from, regardless of the political backgrounds, when you go and you talk to anybody about this idea, then you talk about, hey, what do you feel about trying to dismantle some of the problematic systems that kind of govern the world that we live in today? I have yet to meet anybody that's like,

no, I think that's a bad idea. And this is what's kind of important, right? It's like anarchism is not this notion of like no rules, it's this notion of no rulers. It's not an end state. It's a methodology. And crypto anarchism... Cryptoanarchism is an extension of that methodology.

Now, this isn't exactly the definition, but this is my definition, and it's my talks, I can give a definition. My definition of crypto anarchism is this notion of working to dismantle oppressive systems of power and replace them with technology where enforcement can,

happen appear to peer to peer, right? Technology that we now know exists that lets us fix things like the tragedy of the commons. It lets us build these socially scalable systems that have never existed before where no one needs to police them, where we don't have watchmen, right, where the watchmen are every person that is running an Ethereum node, which is a completely different paradigm. It's the first time in human history that we've ever had the ability to create these kinds of systems where the cost of policing them, the cost of operating them is near zero, and where they're where they're fundamentally untamperable. So if we all share this belief

that we can use cryptography, we can use technology, we can use incentives to build these kinds of systems, then that means you are also probably a crypto anarchist. You should cheer, yeah, absolutely. Because honestly, when it comes down to it, decentralization is anarchism, right? But that's what it means.

You're taking away power from a bunch of centralized entities. You're breaking up monopolies. You're breaking up these, like, oppressive systems. That is decentralization. Cryptoanarchism breaks this spiral that we have been locked into. And it does it in this, it's honestly in a way that is effectively political protest, right? Even though we may not think about it that way, even though we are all, to an extent, also working to build, like, businesses or something that kind of looks like businesses,

effectively what we're doing by disrupting these organizations by kind of resisting against these existing systems is protest, right? It's a form of rebellion against this like cycle that we have been trapped in really for all of human history. And the way that this happens is instead of elective governments, you know, stopping there from being any competition, we just build protocols that are not stoppable. And we compete anyway. And in addition to that, we also accelerate the transition of goods into being utilities. There's something really interesting that happens. This is one of the things that's maybe sometimes a little bit challenging in this space is things are so incredibly competitive that you have, someone goes and creates a breakthrough innovation,

right? And they go and they talk about it on Twitter. They raise around. In approximately two weeks, there are 1,500 competitors. And all of a sudden you have this thing that's like this very, very custom system that was built for a very custom use case that everybody's super excited about. And now everyone and their mother is running a bridge. And all of a sudden, bridges become utilities. All of a sudden, restaking becomes a utility. All of a sudden, L2s become utilities. And that's a good thing, right?

And that's effectively what we end up doing to the rest of the world, to the rest of a lot of these, like a lot of the kinds of innovations that are out there, especially digital innovations, like voting systems, is we take them, we pluck them out of being these custom systems, and put them into being utilities. And we disrupt things like payments. We disrupt all of these different ways in which institutions

kind of resist being disrupted. Obviously, they don't like this. It shouldn't need to be said. I mean, talked about this a bunch, which was like, what happens when a lot of the assumptions that we hold true about this space today, like, you know, the U.S. government likes what's going on,

a bunch of other governments like what's going on, what's going on. USDC is not actively being used as a tool for censorship. What happens when those assumptions break down? I don't think we're really thinking about that deeply enough. And in fact, this is the time to really, really think about them deeply. Because as I mentioned earlier, we are crossing the chasm. And because we're crossing the chasm, we're starting to experience what it looks like to actually have products that appeal to the mass market and that also step on people's toes. One of the big mistakes that I think a lot of people make, this is a, this is a Shane from Polymarket. If you don't know, Polymarket obviously blew up, but a few days later,

Shane's house was raided and then his electronics with these. This is obviously like bizarre behavior, right? There's no point to this at all. It doesn't really make any sense legally. But this just goes to highlight that like we think about governments as this like homogenous blob, but that's not what actually exists in practice. Even within the United States governments, there are different factions, some of whom will not agree with you and will not agree with the technology that you're building, let alone all of the many other governments that live in the world, in the rest of the world, that are oftentimes opposed to the U.S. governments' regulations and views. Maybe you are partnering really closely with the U.S. government to build your protocol, and you're fine,

you're bona fide within, like, the U.S. economy. But what happens in Russia? What happens when you travel, and all of a sudden, you are now the focus of a bunch of, you get arrested in other country because you actually violated their laws, even though. you didn't violate anything in the United States. This will happen. Policies between countries are actually not unified and in many cases conflicting. This is why fundamentally, if you think about it, right, if we went and we built the internet today, it would not look like it does today because everybody would try to regulate it. And you would not actually have an outcome where the output makes any sense at all. You have to build the internet. You have to build technology

in the space in a way that is fundamentally neutral and in a way that is fundamentally unstoppable. And this maybe brings me to one of my last points, which is that decentralization is not just the ends. It is the means. And what that means is that, no pun intended, what that means is that we need to actually build technology that can't be stopped. We can't just talk about building technology that can't be stopped, right?

Roll-ups are extremely censorable right now. That is a problem. We need to fix that problem. as possible. If we scale in the way that we expect to scale, and by the way, I'm the biggest like bull of all of this stuff. I have been saying for years that we need to move towards a world with like hundreds of roll-ups. I've been saying for years that there's a benefit to organizations having sovereignty around building their own execution environment and maintaining their own execution environment. However, if we end up in a world where every single

application running on blockchains is running on top of roll-up today, and then we hit mass scale, we are so screwed. And that should keep you up at night. It keeps me up at night. And so we're kind of at this precipice, right? We're like in the next 12 to 24 months, we are going to hit this very, very interesting period. And I think in the next 12 to 24 months, we are going to lock ourselves into one of these three outcomes, which is terrifying. Outcome number one is really the worst outcome that I can possibly imagine, which is we don't just fail in our mission to reduce the scope of systems

of power, we actively make them so much worse because we build the perfect tool to control every single aspect of our lives forever. We are currently on this path. It would be really nice to get out of that path and head towards one of the other two options. Option number two being we fail and just end up in the same spot again, right? Eventually, all of these organizations, all the organizations that we're building don't successfully resist government control, don't successfully resist capture, don't actually become decentralized,

and then just get folded under the exact same regulatory framework that exists. Now, ideally, what we want is the third option. And at least that's why I got into this space. That's what I'm personally fighting for, and that's what I will continue to fight for, is this notion that we actually can fix humanity's coordination failures, right? The whole goal of this talk, if we can do that, and if our thesis in this space is correct,

Then that means we can actually get past this place that humanity has been stuck in for the last 10,000 years where we fail to actually coalesce around what we all want to do together. And we can work towards a world where we can actually imagine if we were all like rowing in the same direction for the first time ever. It would be crazy. We would get so much done. We are entering the end game. I think that this is really where things kind of get decided. And it's, I think it's up to like every person that's in this room, every person that listens to this talk to think about where they fit into this story. and think about where they want this story to end up. And so I'd like you to do that. This is the last slide of the talk. I think I might have a minute for questions after this,

but I would like you to do this after this talk and when you go home. Think about where you want this industry to end up and think about what it would take to get there because I currently am not super happy and super stoked about the direction that we're headed. And you probably shouldn't be too. Thank you so much.

Wow, that was amazing. Oh my God. One more round of applause. That was really cool. All right, real quick questions. Real quick questions. You bring up this interesting point about the movement of, say, products to utilities like bridges. But can you comment on the capitalize, the capital's tendency to consolidate around one or few things? Yeah. I mean, capital's tendency to consolidate around one or a few things. Yeah. I mean, capital's tendency to consolidate around one or a few things is usually something that is like, okay, so like, in competitive free markets, you don't have monopolies.

You just don't, right? Monopies are an indication that, like, your capitalism is breaking down effectively. There's some cases where that's not the case, right? When you have, like, massive economies of scale associated with giving a certain good or service, but that's usually, again, an instance where, like, you have created an inefficient system

because some underlying means of production is being monopolized. So, for example, with, like, Facebook, there is an underlying social graph that they are effectively monopolizing, right? And they're selling to other people. With Google, it's like a search graph, with Amazon is like tons of warehouses, with Twitter, I don't know, Musk, I guess. And, you know, the right answer is over time to actually just, like, decentralized that means of production, right? That's how you actually get from these things being like products or commodities into becoming utilities, is that, like, the means of production is something that then anyone can do,

or at least, or at least, like, is widespread enough, like, with electricity that, like, people, it's like an open system and anyone can participate in it. The best real example of this is the internet where like nobody owns the internet. Nobody owns the network itself. Nobody owns the underlying like network effects of the network. And anyone can participate in it. It might be harder in some places than others,

but anyone can participate in it. That I think is how you break through exactly what you're saying, which is like the centralizing effects of being at a certain point in this flow. Does that help? Sorry. And I guess I'm kind of working. worried about the in the context of blockchain and decentralization, you know, you see, say, like base is awesome, but it is taking up all the mine share. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think,

yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how this market plays out. I think there are certainly places in which there are organizations that have retained monopolies over certain kinds of things, but at the moment, I would say, crypto isn't an interesting place where every single founder, even if you are in a position in the market where you're winning and absolutely dominating, every single founder is terrified about competition and being disrupted, because really, it seems like the main thing that matters here is mind share and attention, right? And that's actually how you know that these are commodity goods, right? Like toothpaste. There's no real difference between types of toothpaste, but you know the big brands because they win all of the

mind share and attention. And I think the same kind of thing exists with dexes or lending protocols where it's like ultimately, you know, there are some network effects associated with like, you know, Uniswap's liquidity, for instance, right? But the differential in price is actually so small fundamentally that for the most part, most users probably wouldn't even know if you were to switch to something else. But why does Uniswap win? Well, because they're everywhere, right? Like you literally for the longest time, we would all be like, okay, well, what is a, what is an example of a quintessential application built on top of a blockchain we can all think about and like talk about? It was Uniswap. And like, they're not just like the decent

centralized exchange, they are the app, which is crazy. I think that that is, those are all like indicators that like we're kind of on the right track, even if it might be kind of bleak to be a founder in that situation as a founder that is currently in that situation. One more? One more. All the way over there. You got it? What do you believe are the biggest centralization problems we need to fix right now, which are the biggest, most scary things? In Ethereum or in general? General.

Privacy. 100%. Terrifying. All right. One more round of applause for Argent. Argent, thank you so much. That's phenomenal. Thank you so much, everybody.

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now at team at at Toku.com. That's team at toku.com. The Uniswap wallet is officially the preferred wallet of bank lists, and it's the one we use any time when we want to transact on chain. Whether you're on your browser or on the go, uniswap wallet makes it easier than ever to swap anytime, Use your wallet to transfer funds directly from a top centralized exchange and taping thousands of tokens across Ethereum. And over 10 other chains like base, arbitram, and optimism. Uniswap wallet delivers deep liquidity, fast execution, and reliable quotes with zero gas swaps through Uniswap X. And when it comes through security, you can rest easy knowing it's backed by Uniswop Labs, one of the most trusted teams in Defi. Their code is open source and independently reviewed so you know it's protected.

So why wait? Download the Uniswap wallet today on Chrome, iOS, and Android. And don't forget to claim your free uni.comi. directly in the mobile wall. Start swapping smarter with Uniswap.