Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Rethinking the Justice System: A Digital Jurisdiction for Decentralized Organisations

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

In today's world, life and business is moving more into to a virtual space and this has of course been accelerated as a result of the Covid pandemic. Now more than ever it is important to rethink the very basis of how we organise, make decisions, and structure the world’s governance. And how can we do this in the context of crypto and Web3?Web3 infrastructure can provide the foundations of a digital jurisdiction. In the Web3 world rules are enforced by decentralized governance and DAOs allow for a group of stakeholders to participate in governance of an organisation that has no affiliation to a nation state. How do we treat that in the judicial system and how does it sit within existing national jurisdictions?Topics covered in this episode:What is a digital jurisdiction?How Aragon is helping create decentralised autonomous organisations and communitiesThe behaviours of millennials today and how geographical borders have fallenHow to ensure new digital jurisdictions remain utopianSome applications currently being built on AragonWhere new systems sit within current judicial systemsWhy Tim invested in the Aragon Network Token (ANT) modelEpisode links:Powered By AragonAragon Project on TwitterDraper AssociatesLuis Cuende on TwitterTim Draper on TwitterLuis on Epicenter: Episode #236Rethinking the Justice System: A Digital Jurisdiction for Decentralised Organisations | CogX 2020Fabric VenturesCogXShow notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/371

Hi, I'm Sebastian Kuchio, and you're listening to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. On this show, we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level, and we fly high to understand visionary concepts and long-term trends. If you like Epicenter, the best way to support us is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And if you're on a Mac or iOS device, the easiest way to do that is to go to Epicenter.rocks slash Apple. And if you're new to the podcast, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Well, the holidays are now among us, and I think you can all agree. It's been a very interesting year. And we're all taking a well-deserved break here at Epicenter over the holidays. The entire team has

worked tirelessly to bring you the podcast every single week. And, yeah, everyone's taking some well-deserved time off. But we still have something special for you, nonetheless. Back in July, I was invited by the Cogax and Fabric Ventures team to moderate a really fascinating discussion with Louis Quende, who's the founder of Aragon, who's been on the podcast before, and Tim Draper, the famous investor and founder of Draper Associates. This discussion was around how we should think of the judicial system in the context of crypto and Web 3. increasingly life and business are happening in a virtual space and of course this has been accelerated

by the COVID crisis. Web3 infrastructure can play an important role in providing the foundations for a digital jurisdiction and we're already seeing the seeds for this vision. In the Web3 world, rules are enforced by a decentralized system of governance and the most basic example of this is to look at the rights to one's funds. Those are, in short, by the control of the private key at a most basic level. And if we expand on this idea, Dow's allow for a group of stakeholders to participate in governance of an organization that has no affiliation to a nation state. So how do we treat that in the judicial system and where does that sit relative to existing national jurisdictions? So this session starts with a brief introduction

from Lewis and a longer conversation between the three of us. So I'd like to thank the Fabric Ventures and CogX teams for giving us permission to share these sessions with you. I know that they're big fans of the show over there, and I'd like to invite you to check out what they're doing. Cogax is one of my favorite event series. They put on really fascinating events, and actually we'll be releasing another panel next week from one of their event series from this year.

Thanks to them, and I hope you'll enjoy this conversation between Louis Quende, Tim Draper, and I. And before we go to that conversation, I'd like to wish everybody, happy holidays and a very happy and prosperous New Year 2021. So I'm going to be talking about a digital jurisdiction for digital organizations, which is what we are building at Oregon. So to get started, a digital jurisdiction sounds kind of like very science fiction. So let's like break down what these digital organizations are in the first place and why they need a digital jurisdiction. So we've seen this movement of DAOs, these new kinds of human organization that have popped up in the latest years enabled by blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

And so the idea behind the NGOs is that you can create these entities that are decentralized, that have no central leadership, that are autonomous in a way that they can incentivize people. to work for them to actually achieve their goal. And there are also organizations. They have their own rules and kind of like own boundaries. I think the most basic form of DAO we can think about, maybe Bitcoin, where Bitcoin is decentralized, there's no central leader. Satoshi, like, you know, it's not the CEO. It is autonomous because it has an incentive mechanism that enables like miners to come

into the network and give their computing power to actually make Bitcoin happen, and make this idea of a sensor-siber-sistant, the store value, happen. And at the same time, it is kind of an organization because it has its own rules about how the software works. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to take that model and apply it in a way that it can be generalized, so you can create their decentralized organization very easily.

And so right now, there are around 1,400 decentralized autonomous organizations out there. Some of there are not fully decentralized. Some of them are autonomous. There are so, like, very early experiments. but you can read more about them in powerby.aragon.org or APR.1.5.org and see what they are up to. So the way I see it is that Web 1, the first version of the Web, allowed us to basically share ideas across boundaries, like kind of blocks, and then Web 2 enabled us to actually share and discuss those ideas, so like social media. And then now Web 3 is all about DOS. It's all about we can share ideas, we can discuss about them,

And then we can take action because like these ideas don't deserve to just be in the internet and not be implemented at all. There's a lot of chit chat in social media and a lot of it doesn't actually result in change. So if you put together all this social capital, all the people that are thinking about stuff and discussing about stuff and they have attention and interest towards a topic with financial capital, with actual funds that you can have in one of these decentralized organizations because they can control funds. They can control cryptocurrencies. They are native to cryptocurrencies. And if you can put both together, you can actually enable people to take action in ways we haven't seen before. So it might have been seen in the next decade movements that are totally grassroots. And they are able to pull funds.

They are able to recruit people towards a common cause. And they are able to cause social change without a hierarchy, without central leadership, and being totally autonomous in nature. and therefore very hard to corrupt over time, which I think that's what Web 3 is about. And like an exercise that I'm doing these days is I'm asking myself, what do people feel like they belong to? That is like a very existential question, but that is for me a very important thing in how I frame my thesis around decentralized autonomous organizations. More and more, the answer is on nation states, and that's what is surprising to me.

And with the recent events that are going on all around the world, I would say this is even accelerated more. So, like, when you ask a millennial, where do you belong? Like, I think right now some people may say, well, I belong in like the Ethereum community. I belong to this subreddit. I belong to this internet community. And we're going to see that accelerate until the point that nation states will not be the thing that people feel that they belong to the most. I think we're already seeing that, but that's going to accelerate drastically. So you think about these communities to like kind of personified them a bit like some of the communities we've seen, because we were doing this campaign called Power by Aragon, kind of showcasing some of the creators of these communities.

And we're already seeing this. So like, for example, here in the right, we have like Stefan from DeCentraland. The Centralland is this virtual world. It's like if you have watched like a ready player one, this movie about like a. a future in which everyone lives in VR, basically, in virtual reality. They have basically taken that future and put it in the hands of users so that they can create their own virtual reality world, and they have added a decentralized autonomous organization powered by Aragon in order to enable their users to fully govern that world.

So this is like Science Fiction Squared, but it's like a virtual reality world that is power by a decentralized autonomous organization. And that is, that is left today. Like, you can, uh, that is out there today. It's kind of mind blowing. And people really belong that they like really feel that they belong to that community, to a decentralized community, for example. And like right now, we, we see more than this like 1400 D I just created.

And like one, one kind of thought that I wanted to bring up here is as we are able to collapse the costs of creating an. running a firm to instead of creating a company with all the bureaucracy and all of the issues that we have creating entities in the legal world, if we're able to collapse that cost in smart contracts and in blockchains, then you basically get to a point where like, Arragon has incorporated more entities than Panama or Paraguay in the last few years. And this is not a fair comparison for many reasons. Like one of them is obviously incorporating a company. It's not a do the same as creating a piece of software or creating a new decentralized organization

where the cost maybe like 10 bucks and therefore if it's 10 bucks and not a thousand more people are going to create it right also maybe not fair because the economic activity of these companies in like Panama Paraguay maybe more than in Aragon like Aragon organizations right now hold around $12 million worth of assets but it just shows the potential like it shows the potential that we can create a framework for people to organize that is way more efficient, way more powerful, easier to use, and therefore it may actually outcompete national states in their framework that they have for people to organize, which are like, you know, companies, non-profits, all of that different legal entities that you can create. And we can streamline this a lot.

But the kind of problem that DAOs have today is that it's like living in a sky. Like, it's extremely modern. It is like science fiction, but it is like living in a skyscraper in the middle of a totally dysfunctional city. Like DIOs today have a bunch of possible attacks. Like, for example, there is no minority stakeholder protection. So if you're in a company and you invest in a company, then if you are the minority shareholder, the majority shareholder cannot just kick you out. Like that is illegal. In Dio's today, as they are basically controlled by computer code, there is a anything that this allows that. So basically if you're a minority stakeholder, a majority of participants can decide to basically kick you out or just steal all of the organization's money for them. There are other problems, for example, like right now because of Ethereum and how high the network, the gas fees are and how congested the network is, it takes like $5 to vote on a proposal, which is crazy. So there are like a bunch of kind of dysfunctional pieces here because everything thoroughly.

The things we're working on to try to counterbalance that and make DAOs very kind of easy to use and straightforward and actually reach the mainstream are two different tools. One of them is Atta one court, which is this dispute resolution mechanism

that basically enables these decentralized autonomous organizations to, apart from having this smart contract, this computer code which is extremely efficient, but also extremely narrow in what it can do, they can define like English written agreements. So they can say, hey, this is my manifesto, these are my bylaws. And for example, I am not going to allow that majority participants steal

money from minority participants. Something so simple as that, that we keep for granted in the legal system in companies when we create a company like in the US or in Europe doesn't exist today in the NGOs. And that is exactly what Oregon court enables them to have, stuff like this kind of like subtle rules that you cannot encode in computer code. And Aragon Core has a potential to really become like one of the kind of like backbones of the new legal system that is being created right now on blockchains. And then there is Aragon Chain. And Aragon Chain basically is this blockchain where DAOs can run very efficiently because

it is targeted towards them. So like if you think about Ethereum today, as I was saying, it is great. It's extremely secure. But then it is very expensive for certain interactions. So I think some DAOs will choose to stay on Ethereum, but some others that may not need that high of a security that Ethereum offers or that kind of like hyperconnectivity may want to switch to Argon Chain. So the way I'll compare it is that you have like Manhattan, which is like kind of Ethereum. It is very expensive and you can get an studio there, but like it is expensive and you get probably like a small studio. Or you can move to the servers.

You can move to get a house with a pool and a garden, but then you will have to commute if you, you want to interact with many of the like Ethereum native protocols, right? So there are like kind of tradeoffs. But we still believe that coupling these things together, we basically make the AOS viable. So going back to Aragon course, because this is like extremely exciting. If you take a look at how we are engineering the product so that the Aeos can use these subjective agreements, this is a, this is how it will look like. So basically, like, this is an Aragon organization.

This is the front end for it. you have different apps on the left like voting tokens the finance kind of the film management for the DAO and then in the middle you're able to create an agreement and so that agreement is basically like a bunch of like English written text and that then you can reference and when you create a vote when you create a proposal on the organization the proposal has to adhere to that agreement and if it doesn't then any member of that organization can open a dispute so for example if I'm trying to pass a proposal to withdraw all of the organization's money and send it to a terrorist organization, then someone can say, hey, no, I want to dispute that action. And so you open a dispute, you say,

hey, this is not in compliance with a manifesto or with the bylaws that we all agreed upon. I want to dispute it. And then it goes to the Oregon court. And this is how Oregon court looks like. It's running for a few months in kind of like a test environment. So like there's a few real disputes that it has already arbitrated. But, it's mostly kind of like internal disputes because we're still like testing it out. But it's been working incredibly well. And we have more than 300 euros that are, I don't need most people on the internet that thanks to crypto economic incentives are able to make decisions on real things.

So for example, here, there is a dispute to add an app to a rewards like program. So basically like developers build apps and then they can claim rewards. And the idea here is that to choose whether that app was eligible or not. for those awards. And so the apps have to have certain requirements. For example, they have to even source. They have to have documentation. These things you cannot check with computer code, right?

They need humans. They need jurors. And so users have been curating that list. And it's a very early use case, but I'm so excited about it. So the idea here is basically like as Nick Saba, one of the kind of like inventor of like Benes Smart Contract like names and kind of nomenclature. He puts it as dry code. This is like computer code, wet code, that is human language.

And then the way I'm looking at it is that both dry code and wet code are incredibly important to arrive to truly decentralized autonomous organizations. And finally, A&T, as we look at it, is like basically the network's store of value. So, like, is the token that gets y' altogether and is able to, like, incentivize of participants in the network to do their job. the master plan that we have for the algorithm is basically these four lines here. So I love how Elon Musk put together a master plan for Tesla because I love simplicity. I love getting just very complex things and having them very simple.

So the idea is we are building software for decentralized hydrothermal organizations to exist. And then we're going to use that software to let a bunch of them exist in the first place. And then with that market share, we're able to provide services to them that actually make them way better they make this decentralized autonomous organizations way better. And so with those profits at the network that the community makes,

we can actually increase the AEO adoption. And eventually what we can do is we can build this new way of people to organize that goes way beyond nation states. And it's basically a digital jurisdiction. So that's what we're building, a digital jurisdiction for digital organizations. I think this is a lot of things to swallow. So I'm looking forward to like the panel and like kind of putting it in a more comprehensive way. But basically, I think the TLDR, the summary is that DAOs are a very new,

exciting way of organizing via communities and grassroots organization and using blockchain technologies, we can actually make them happen. And I think right now they are really needed in the world because of everything that's going on. And DAOs enabled society to actually tackle problems that we couldn't tackle via any nation state, or because most of them are just kind of really crooked, or via any centralized company. And the AOs add a huge new opportunity that we have to reinvent the kind of socialist fabric of our society and how we organize.

So I'm extremely excited by them and extremely excited about how we can create a digital jurisdiction for the other organizations. Amazing. Thank you so much. I am so excited to see a new Oregon jurisdiction at some point soon and perhaps even citizenship and passports and all of that. So hopefully that's coming.

And now we have a panel discussion on the same topic where Lewis will be joined by Tim Draper, and venture capitalist and the founder of Draper Associates and Sebastian Kutur, co-founder and host of Epicenter podcast. Thank you, Anastasia. Hi, my name is Sebese Kutu. I'm the host of Epicenter. We're in the leading crypto podcasts and we've been around for over six and a half years. I'm very pleased to introduce our panelists today for a conversation about rethinking the

judicial system. a digital jurisdiction for decentralized organizations. So our first panelist, Tim Draper, is a venture capitalist and the founder of Draper Associates and Dripper University. He is a pioneering investor who's been involved in just about every successful internet companies since the internet came about. I'm not going to start listing them. And he's also a bitcoiner, as his tie indicates.

I don't know if you want to take tie there, Tim. Luis Quende, project lead at Aragon, is a platform that allows people to create. and govern Dows. And recently, they launched Eric Gron Court, which arbitrates on subjective disputes and that require human judgment. And on his days off and also at his ear in conferences, he is a DJ. So thank you for joining me today, gentlemen, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, thanks to Luth. Yeah, thanks for having us, Sebastian. And Cog X, I'm thrilled to be talking to the audience. So, Lewis, during your talk, you mentioned that increasingly,

young people, I think you perhaps that millennials feel less and less connected to the place they're born. And, you know, as a millennial, you know, living abroad and, you know, not having a country where I was born for the last 15 years, I do kind of feel that. And I sort of associate with that trend. Why do you think this trend exists and why is it accelerating? Well, I think national states are like these huge places where, like, you have millions and millions of people. And it's just very hard for the human brain to empathize with people you don't know at all, right? And so, like, in the States, back in the day, maybe they were smaller, maybe they were the civil on the planet. I don't know exactly what, like, kind of move the needle.

Maybe it is the internet, right? Like, right now, I can feel more attached to someone I don't know that lives in, like, Australia and, like, literally the other part of the world that I haven't met physically than someone that lives next to my place. And so I think that trend is accelerating more in Eastern States, having been able to adapt to it. Jim, I don't know if you have anything to add on this. Yeah, I have a picture, and this is where Luis and I sort of dovetail. The Internet opened up the world. The geographic borders fell benefiting in a great way. We all became wealthier, quality of life improved.

The things went incredibly well for many, many years. And then Bitcoin came along and there was a decentralized currency. And the nation states, the governments were allowed the network to kind of flow. But when they realized that there was a better currency out there than what they were providing to their citizens, many of them were threatened. and they wanted to pull back and go from that global society that we had back to tribalism. And they created these walls and barriers and trade barriers and whatever at the sacrifice of their own people. One way to look at this is, let's say there are only two people on the earth and I have a house and you have a farm. Well, if we don't trade, I die of starvation and you die of exposure.

So if, and so we need to trade around the world and multiply that by 8 billion people. All those people can provide different things to each other and we all benefit in an enormous way. And if you're a government that isolates and creates this isolation, you are hurting your own people. If you're a government that's free and open, you are helping your people become wealthier and healthier. So I'm looking and I'm saying, oh, wow, this decentralized world that started with Bitcoin and moved to the blockchain smart contracts. And now actually governing can be done sort of in an artificial intelligence way. It's going to change the nature of what a government is. And governments like businesses are going to have to compete for their.

constituents, they're going to have to provide better services for the taxes they provide because the genies out of the bottle, we're global. All of us, citizens of the world, we're global. We're in a really interesting time here where it's the roar of the dying lion. It's the roar of the death of tribalism. And they're saying, no, stay in place. No, wear a mask. Be our people. You know, be trapped in our little location. Stop travel. And maybe it was COVID that did this, but maybe, you know, some countries are sort of taking advantage of this by trapping their citizens in place.

And all of a sudden, this globalism that we had that was booming and really building an extraordinary economy around the world is now being isolated and trapped. And I think that's a temporary phenomenon. And when the roaring lion dies, there is going to be this new world. And the new world is going to be peaceful, loving, open, and we are all going to be able to benefit from each other. And so I got very excited when Louis brought up Aragon because he showed us the way to a new form of governance that is much more. open and transparent and cross-border than any government that we've ever seen. And he's hitting the judicial piece of it, you know, where another company on unstoppable

domains is making it so we get free speech for the entire world. We other, Bitcoin is making it so that we have a currency that we can use anywhere in the world without any friction across borders or any friction. within the bank. The bank takes two and a half to four percent every time you swipe your credit card. But with Bitcoin, it's actually free and open and transparent. We have the beginnings of this new open, transparent, and very frictionless world that can create the kind of liquidity that we only dreamed of.

And that open world is going to have governing that is sort of across borders. Estonian government, they came up with this idea of an e-governance, and I'm actually the third virtual resident of Estonia, the prime minister of Estonia, came to Draper University and made me a virtual resident, which meant that I could be, in effect, a citizen of Estonia without living in their physical territory, and I could do business anywhere in the EU without living in that physical territory. So I think that kind of thing is going to force other governments to think, whoa, wait, you could actually virtually provide governance to people. It doesn't have to be land-based.

And most of what governments do is insurance, you know, whether it's health care insurance or workman's comp insurance or unemployment insurance, which is a big one now. All those insurance products can be provided virtually and they can be provided across. cross borders. So we're looking at a time when suddenly governance can be provided 11 miles offshore or from up in space, and it can provide us the same kind or actually better services for our taxes than our physical land-based tribal governments are providing today. It's an anthropological advance that humans are about to go through. They've been tribal. The tribalism protected them for many years. And all of a sudden, we have this opportunity. And if you can go dystopian, it ends up just being a bunch of nation states. If you go

utopian, it opens up the world. If you're an optimist, you realize this opens up the world and everybody benefits. So we have the opportunity now to take a quantum leap anthropologically. as humans. And this is our chance. It's a big opportunity. So I'm supporting everything that goes after that I can see that can actually penetrate this and drive this decentralized world forward. And I think so much of the, you know, the current situation also kind of applies to this here. And I think, you know, COVID perhaps accelerated some trends that were already in play, in effect. And certainly with the events happening in the U.S. and around the world, world right now around, you know, the social and racial inequalities that plague our societies,

you know, we're seeing that the moats, right, that governments have tried to put around us. We're seeing them really digging their heels in and making sure that sort of people stay in their place. So I'm also sort of, you know, a proponent of this more open and decentralized system whereby, you know, people are free to choose wherever they want to do business or wherever they want to live or wherever they want to reach families. One of the things, one of the things here that I think as technologists and as sort of, you know, people who, you know, live and operate in a sort of privileged space is how do we ensure that these decentralized judicial systems, you know, things like Aragon are building, how do we ensure that these systems as we kind of

reboot society, you mentioned this anthropological upgrade, how do we ensure that as a society, we make sure that these new systems are egalitarian, are diverse, and don't create the same types of tribal natures that we've seen, you know, throughout history, only now it's in a smart contract. Only now, you know, you can't go and complain or you can't go and file a complaint or some sort of physical, you know, action against someone. How do we make sure that the future, this utopian future is utopian and it doesn't turn into dystopia. You know, I think that there's a, there are a couple of people thinking about it in a lot of different ways.

Andrew Yang was working on a universal basic income. I actually think that a universal basic income in crypto might end up being the thing that actually rises. The idea that you do universal basic income in any of these fiat currencies will bankrupt whatever country tries to do it. But you could provide a base level for the world and then provide a very free market above that, which would limit the restrictions people put on other people.

I'll give you one example. The 40 Act and the 33 Act of the SEC, those are 80 years old, But they're basically keeping impoverished people down. They are keeping people from being able to get that first rung of the ladder. They are keeping people from being able to invest in private companies that have high growth rates. They are forcing people. The only people who can invest in venture capital are millionaires.

Why did that happen? Where did that come from? They're trying to protect us from ourselves. The more of the government protects, the more they keep people down. We need actually everyone to be able to participate in this new world. And pretty much we all have smartphones. So we're starting from a pretty good base. Now, we don't all have smartphones.

I think it's now up to 6 billion of the 8 billion people on the planet. But I think within two years, we're going to have all 8 billion of us will have a smartphone. So we'll all have the ability to use this thing to send Bitcoin, to use Aragon for our justice, to provide our input for a judicial system, to provide our voice to an unstoppable domain where they guarantee of freedom of speech, where you cannot stop it. They can't stop it. No one can stop it. No one can censor it.

You know, now you're starting to see censorship on Twitter, censorship on people are saying that the Facebook is favoring one group or another. You're seeing bullying from the major networks where they're saying you have to think this way or else you're an outcast or whatever. But boy, I don't always think the way the news thinks. I'm always thinking five or 10 years out, maybe 20 years out, and I'm thinking, well, wait a second, if you shut down the entire economy rather than just isolating the people who have the virus or are at big risk with a virus, you are going to have bigger problems than you would ever have had if you had, I mean, you're going to have bigger problems if you shut down the economy than you would ever have if you just, I isolated a few of the people who are at risk. This mass driving force that seems to be the media and it's and it says and it has a point of view that you have to comply with. That's the

most dangerous thing going. But the good thing about this decentralized world is that everybody get the voice. So I think we are headed into a utopian frame of mind. We're going through some serious speed bumps on our way because the existing powers, the old line media, the governments, the banks, they are all trying to keep it the old way. And but and they're trying to keep people down because they are up. I think we're about to head into a time where, where it's an equal opportunity for everybody in this new environment. I think I'd like to, I'd like to bring it over to you briefly and ask you if within the work that you're doing at Aragon, if you're also thinking about this and the kinds of frameworks that are being built upon,

are you consulting with, say, historians, anthropologists, you know, ethics committees and stuff to make sure that the systems that you're building don't produce the same sort of inequalities and fractures that we see in our current sort of social system but also judicial systems. Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely the doer type. So, like, I really like to get something working and then people, like, can try to destroy it. And that's what happens with, like, smart contracts. You really something people try to destroy it. But I think, like, we can make a lot of advancements, not even, like, talking to those people.

We can just make advancements by having some common sense in the beginning. Like, for example, following up to what team was saying, Facebook has paid $130 million to create their own moderation court for content. It almost makes me laugh because it's like it is a centralized court or like arbitrator or whatever that they have paid a bunch of money to do. And in the end, what they are doing is basically censoring people. Like that is a deal they are. For much less we have built a fully decentralized court, permissible. So far so it's been working. And I think that is exactly what we need to do.

Like we need to get these things out. We need to start using them. I think the very important thing is that people who create the systems have the right intentions at heart. I think that is super, super important. there's this paradox in kind of decentralized systems where on one hand, you want to make sure that intentions don't matter because that's the whole point, right? Like, you want to see that Satoshi goes away and nothing happens, right? Because he's not a leader anymore in that space.

But at the same time, people who are working on this space right now in creating those tools need to have very strong, like, intentions, and the would intentions at heart. And so I think it is important to do that, to apply a lot of common sense. because, like, you know, stuff like nation and States and like these big companies, web two companies that are censoring the internet have completely eroded our perspective on common sense. So then just doing that is a very good step. And then after you have it out, after you get some users, product market fit, then I think it's a good time to start iterating on feedback. And obviously, being community run, the community can decide what to do with it.

There is no central power that has dictatorship over the protocol. And I think that is the most important thing. Talk about some of the applications that are currently being built on Aragon and some of the early use cases that you've seen for the Aragon court, which came out just recently. Yeah, I mean, Aaron court is like very kind of early and doing like baby steps. Like, you know, it's curating this cute list of like developers that are going to get a reward in this kind of like rewards program. It is probably going to be able to moderate messages. So that is like extremely baby steps. but I'm super excited about it

like I think it will be open for anyone to open disputes like in the next couple of months and then the idea is that like or my dream at least that like 10 years from now like I see no reason why the entire like legal system maybe not the entire because like there's a thing with these centralized court systems right like they are fully limited liability

like you cannot put people into Yale that is the good thing and the bad thing as well because like if you have a terrorist or like a rapist you want to put them in jail right you don't want them to just lose some cryptocurrency in the internet. But on the other hand, that is the amazing thing about decentralized uses systems. Like there is no violence. It's use poor crypt economics.

And that's also what I love about it. Yeah, that's also perhaps one of the limits of this system, unless at some point we start having, you know, private police also, you know, sort of embedded within arbitration agreements and things like that. I mean, I don't know if that's a future towards which we want to go. But we can kind of like perhaps extrapolate here a little bit more. and talk about where, you know, where Aragon court or even a Dow, you know, built on Aragon, where does it sit within the existing, you know, legal and judicial framework?

Is it extrajudicial or is it some sort of a subset? Yeah. We're trying to replace it. Maybe, Tim, you want to address this. I think Luis can do a better job of that. I think, like, the everything that we're building right now, like the paradox is it is going to, at some point, replace the existing systems because it's just like way better. But at the same time, it needs to live with the systems until we get there. So like one example of that,

I was trying like different on-ramp solutions for crypto because like I am very frustrated with the fact that today, if you want to use a crypto product, you have to go through like many hoops to actually do it. So like you cannot use it into your credit card and that's it, right? You have to like buy tokens, K. YC with an exchange, all of that. But that is needed right now because there is just no other way. Like how do you translate your dollars to like you know, crypto or Bitcoin. And so I think we will have like a few years in which we will have to deal with these things very carefully and also invest into like just kind of like compliance with the existing system until we're able to completely overthrow it. But that's what like got me

excited, right? Like I didn't get into crypto to like do KYC compliance. As we wrap up here, you know, we're nearing the end of our panel. Tim, you've invested in lots of companies, too many to name here, but several companies in the crypto space. why did you buy into the ant token model and where do you see the future of this platform going? Well, when I first thought about Bitcoin, I thought, oh, well, that's going to be interesting. Virtual currency. It'll be more liquid. It'll move faster. It'll create more liquidity and people will become wealthier. And I thought it was going to be just sort of the games would turn into eventually a currency that we all agreed on. But then Bitcoin came along and it had this decentralized piece and it also had this

blockchain that kept perfect records. And then from there, you could build smart contracts. All of a sudden, this changes all of commerce, all of finance, all of banking. And the thing that went off in my mind was, well, first, when a bunch of Bitcoin was stolen in Mount Cox, I thought that was the end of Bitcoin, but there was a whole bunch of use of it. And it only dropped about 15% in value on that news. And I thought, wow, people really need this. And then I thought, how would I use it? Well, I would love to have Bitcoin that came, raise money in Bitcoin,

invested into entrepreneurs in Bitcoin, have them pay their employees and suppliers in Bitcoin, and then have the entire. like if a company goes public or gets the entire waterfall in Bitcoin wallets and automatically done. It's amazing how accounting bills and legal bills and auditing bills and bookkeeping bills have gone up over time as regulations get heavier and heavier and heavier, at least in the U.S. It's pushing people away from the U.S. And I started to think, well, this is really necessary for the world economy. We are going to be so much better off if we've got some form of decentralized currency that's global and open and transparent and keeps perfect records and does the whole ledger. And then the idea that you could have a smart contract built into software, which you no longer need to have lawyers.

and all of the battles and all that stuff over because you know that it was built into software and you agreed to it and you both agreed and that was it. That's a world where I'm thinking this is going to be a much more peaceful, loving world, far less complex, many fewer battles, many fewer disputes, fewer regulations, which allows freedom and that freedom allows, encourages entrepreneurship and creativity. I think that's a world I want to see. And so I have put a lot of my effort and a lot of my venture money

into crypto opportunities, into Bitcoin opportunities, into wallets and exchanges and then into these new governing business. like Aragon or Unstoppable or many others who are sort of thinking about how government, what will that look like? Who will be your tribe in this global environment? Will they be cross borders? Will they be sort of a community of people who kind of think in a certain way? Or will it be just a random selection of people that end up feeling like,

hey, this is a great way to go. I'm excited about that future. I think we need to drive toward it. I think we really need to, this is one of those things where in the military, they say freedom isn't free. You have to fight for it. This is one of those times.

You've got to fight for global freedom so that we aren't just kept down by regulation and too much governance and too many intricate, overlapping laws and too much, too many forms to fill out and too many regulations to overcome in trying to create a better world. We need to fight for this.

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