Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Rhys Lindmark: MIT's Digital Currency Initiative – Why We Need Blockchain Ethics

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have the potential to change the world in meaningful ways. And this change may drastically impact people’s lives – both for the better and for the worse. While ethics are often discussed for technologies like AI, the ethical considerations around blockchain technologies have received less focussed attention.We’re joined by Rhys Lindmark, Head of Community and Long-Term Societal Impact at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. Previously the host of the podcast “Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future,” Rhys’ approach to blockchain was always about considering its potential impact. Since joining the DCI, his podcast, now “Gray Mirror,” continues to explore these questions. He has also recently started teaching a blockchain ethics course with the DCI’s Director, Neha Narula.Topics covered in this episode:Rhys’ background as a podcaster and proponent of Effective AltruismHis advocacy work around universal tithing and donating to charityThe controversy surrounding the MIT Media Lab and the resignation of their Director Joi ItoThe difference between ethics and moralsWhy we need to study blockchain ethicsShould we have ethics committees in blockchain as there exists about AIThe ethical considerations for different use cases and applications of blockchain technologyThe role of miners and should they have ethical obligations to censor certain transactionsThe DCI’s blockchain ethics class and what students learnEpisode links: Blockchain Ethics ClassBlockchain Ethics Class SyllabusWhy it’s time to start talking about blockchain ethics (MIT TechnologyReview)Jeffrey Epstein case: Federal prosecutors broke law, judge says (MiamiHerald)Director of M.I.T.’s Media Lab Resigns After Taking Money From JeffreyEpstein (New York Times)MIT Digital Currency InitiativeRhys Lindmark on TwitterSponsors: Cosmos: Change the future of finance at the SF Blockchain Week Defi Hackathon – $50,000 prize pool for winning teams - https://epicenter.rocks/sfcosmosTrail of Bits: Trust the team at the forefront of blockchain security research - https://trailofbits.comB9Lab: Level up and become a Solidity smart contract auditor – 5% off the with the code EPICENTER - https://solidified.b9lab.com/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/311

This is Epicenter, episode 311 with guest, Reese Lindmark. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Couture. And I'm Friedricha Ernst. Today our guest is Reese Lindmark. Reese is the head of community and long-term social impact at MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative. Of course, we've talked about the DCI before on the show. We had the director, Neha Nerula, on the podcast last year. I met Reese a couple years ago, and I was always impressed with the way that he thinks about

social issues. I was also really amazed to find out that he gives a non-negligible part of his salary to charity. And I remember at the time, it had led me to really rethink the way that I could make an impact, and I had started doing a little bit more volunteer work in local nonprofits in my vicinity. Rees is also a fellow podcaster. And he's the host of Gray Mirror, which is a podcast about technology, society, and ethics. It used to be called Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future. That used to be the best blockchain title ever. I love that.

Yeah, it's a good name for a podcast. A little hard to remember, but a good name nonetheless. So we talked about how one can make better choices around making a positive impact on the world. We also addressed the turmoil happening at the Media Lab at the moment surrounding the funding that they've received from a known pedophile. And then also central to the conversation was the topic of blockchain ethics. And that's because Reese and Neha are giving a blockchain ethics class at the moment. And ethics around blockchain is not something that's discussed very much. But since the technology has a potential for such a

massive social impact, it's worth considering. And I think that it's something that all of us collectively should be spending a lot more time thinking and talking about. Absolutely. So I think we kind of tend to skirt this issue as technologists just because the questions are actually really hard and there's no clear right and wrong words. Just drawing the line in the sand is super difficult. So I think it's super commendable that the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative actually takes this on as a challenge instead of just.

you know, saying this is technology, we're not really responsible for the societal outcome of this. And I mean, basically, we've seen these kinds of institutes for AI pop up in the last couple of years. And I think it's time that we actually have them for blockchain as well. Well, hopefully with this course, it'll get more people thinking of the ethical questions surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrencies and get a conversation going that will hopefully have a positive impact. Before we go to our interview with Reese, I would love to tell you about our sponsors for today's episode. As you know, we're going to San Francisco for SF Blockchain Week, and Cosmos is sponsoring the Defy Hackathon that's happening over the weekend. It's a $50,000 prize pool in Adam for winning teams. It's going to be a huge event. Hundreds of people have already registered. You don't have

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means that you can create interoperability mechanisms with other DAPs in the cosmos ecosystem. And that's really a first. And it'll be really exciting to see what people build with IBC. So to register, go to epicenter.rox slash sF cosmos. And when you fill the form, make sure to let them know that Epicenter sent you. We're also brought to you by B9 Lab, the blockchain education specialists. And Epicenter is all about education. So this is really a perfect fit. They have a new smart contract auditing course, and it is for experienced Ethereum developers. It starts on November 18th. It's part-time, and it's seven to eight weeks long. What's great about this course is that you'll learn through real-world examples of smart contract vulnerabilities that are found in the

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But anyway, as I described in that last example, when things go wrong, they could go really, really wrong. And it's great that that particular vulnerability never made it through to the production maker Dow smart contract. and you should be also taking the steps necessary to make sure that you catch those bugs. There was major vulnerabilities before you go to production. And so this is why getting your systems audited and creating robust security processes and fostering a culture of security in your organization is really important. And Trill of Bits can help you do that. They work with your team to audit every aspect of your project.

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here is your interview with Reese Lindmark. We're here with Reese Lindmark. Reese, thanks for joining us today. Yeah, excited to be on the show. a fan for a while and excited to chat over Zoom today. Well, likewise, I mean, you know, I've been a fan of you and your podcast and just your work in general for the last little while since we met. I can't remember where we met, but I know we...

I think at DevCon 3, or at least that's the first time we met in person. Yeah, that's probably right. So tell us a bit about your background, like who you are and how you became the person that you came to be. Well, we were just talking about this before the show. It's lots of conditioning and childhood and all of that. And I think more generally, though, for me, within the blockchain and cryptocurrency world, I guess I was a computer science major going into college. It was always into math and science kind of things.

And after college, I did a music education startup for a bit. But around 2016, it was Trump and it was Brexit and it was all those things. And I was like, hmm, should I really just be focusing on making music education apps for kids? And the answer was no. And so I kind of left and took a more macro take on society in the world and put on various lenses that we might talk about over the show like effective altruism and systems thinking and things like that. And really from that perspective, thought about how I could have the most impact on the world. And from that perspective, got into blockchain and cryptocurrency technology as a powerful, a thing that is both a decentralizing force, which is powerful if you want to create kind of anti-fragility in a system. and also as a source that changes how we think about trust and money.

And when you start to change core primitives, like trust and money, that is also powerful for changing a macro system. So essentially got into blockchain and crypto at that time, I guess two and a half years ago. And from there, did a variety of things in the space. I helped start the first ETH Denver and get ETH global off the ground to some extent. And then was doing podcasting, as you noted. I have a podcast called Gray Mirror, which everybody can listen to. and about a, and I was all self-funded through Patreon at that point in time, and then now, I guess a year, year and a half ago is when I joined the MIT Media Lab and specifically the digital currency initiative here as a head of community and long-term societal impact.

Yeah, so that's kind of my background on how I got here. And there's kind of a sub-strand as well or a parallel strand about like how I think about ethics and how that relates to my professional life. but that's how kind of the tech side of me has progressed through time. Cool. We'll deep dive into many of the things you have talked about just now. But let's go to the MIT Media Lab. So head of community and long-term societal impact, that's a fantastic job title. So what does this position actually entail?

Yeah, good question. Well, it was the job title was made up by myself and my boss. And yeah, I think that long-term societal impact is honestly the most, the more important piece, though the community piece shows that I'm having that impact not through code. I don't code anymore, but rather through norms and teaching and those kinds of things. So I guess when I think about my job, it's primarily thinking about, as the title says, thinking about the long-term societal impacts of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology and then trying to shape them in a positive way.

So that can look like podcasting or I'm teaching a class this semester on blockchain ethics, It can also look like, you know, going on this podcast, you know, doing some writing. So a variety of small things like that. We're helping to kind of build the academic field of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology with other fields besides ethics like law and computer science and economics. But ethics is also a piece of that. So it's kind of a mismatch of a variety of non-coding things in thinking about the positive impacts of the tech. Cool.

So before you came into this position, your podcast was called creating. A Humanist Blockchain Future, which I thought was the greatest name for a podcast. What was the transition from that into Grey Mirror? How did that happen? And covering the same topics, is it the same podcast or is it another podcast or is it just a different name? So creating a humanist blockchain future, when I think about it now, it's like, man, that was a funny title. Too long also. No one could remember it whenever I would tell people the title, they could not remember it. I changed the name because I didn't want to focus exclusively on blockchain and wanted to focus more on the loop between how tech changes society and how society changes technology. And so gray mirror, the idea behind

that name was to say, hey, instead of like Black Mirror, the Netflix show where tech changes society in all negative ways, we should think about tech changing society in both positive and negative ways. And so that's what I, the kind of topics that I tackle in my show are the positive and negative ways that tech, society, and ethics. all kind of co-evolve and interact with each other. So no real, it's all the same podcast and RSS feed, but now it is just, I guess it's technically within the digital currency initiative now and the focus is more wide in scope.

You're an outspoken proponent of effective altruism. For the folks out there who are not familiar with this concept, what is effective altruism? And can you explain what got you into that? Yeah, good question. So, and let me say, I think of, I'm both an outspoken, you know, proponent of effective altruism, and I think that it's just one of many lenses that we can use to view the world. So effective altruism is really good for thinking about kind of long-term social impact and for like cost-effectiveness of these things.

But also there are things like social justice activism, which is really good for thinking about power structures and how kind of, you know, privilege over time. there's other things like systems thinking, that's another really good lens where you can view how the world, how things kind of co-evolve with each other. So I guess just to say, effective altruism is one lens to view the world, and it is a powerful one, but it's not my only lens. The way that I think about it for listeners is it's essentially a mindset and a group of people who are trying to answer and think about and act on the question, how can they have the most impact in the world? and usually when they think about that, and they think about it in this kind of very, the birth of it was from the rationalist community in San Francisco and kind of a philosophical PhD, philosophy PhD community in Oxford. And so they think about this very kind of rational, logical way. And once you start to think about how to have that kind of impact, then the kind of questions that you think about are things like, okay, well, what should we be maximizing for? should it be happiness or should it be meaning or should it be some other positive metric.

And when they start to think about maximizing for these metrics, they think from this term called consequentialism, which is where they think about the outcomes of actions. So it's like, okay, we have, if we're trying to do good in the world, how should we measure good? Well, let's measure it based off like the outcomes and, you know, the consequences are the outcomes of the stuff that we do. And then once you measure the outcomes, you're like, oh, are we thinking about happiness? Or are we thinking. about meaning or whatever. And then once you think about maximizing for those things, then you can start to think about who we are maximizing them for. And then when you come from that perspective,

you can either think, you know, effective altruists think about something like animal rights as a big cause area for them, where they say, hmm, you know, there's 70 billion factory farm land animals every year. So maybe we should care a lot about that. That's a lot of, you know, bad happiness that's happening. Or maybe we should think about, you know, if we think about humans, don't just think about the people around you, but think about, you know, we have about 7.5 billion people on Earth, and about 10% of them, 750 million are still living in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day. And that really is an awful situation. And so let's think about them and how we can help them.

Or they think about, you know, not just humans live today and not just human and not just animals alive today, but all the future people. So you say, if society, you know, we've had about, there's 7.5 billion people today. we've had about 100 billion humans altogether, depending on when you count. But in the future, if humanity keeps going, we'll have hundreds of billions or trillions of humans. And so if we were to extinct ourselves or self-terminate from climate change or nuclear weapons or whatever, then that would be sad for all those future lives that couldn't be lived. And so let's kind of think about that as well. So this is to say it is a mindset that thinks about consequences and how to have a positive impact in the world

and depending on your view on it, you can kind of optimize for different things within that framework. Let me say one final bit on that, which is the most crucial piece for me, actually, which is, so when you're optimizing for happiness, one crucial result that you get quickly is that money has diminishing returns on happiness. So, for example, if I have zero dollars and I get $1,000, that's awesome. Now I can, like, eat and do all these great things. If I'm one of those people and, you know, living on less than $2 a day. but for myself and for you all, if we get $1,000, it's not that big of a deal. And so studies have shown that this correlation pretty much holds true that money has

diminishing returns on happiness. Happiness is logarithmic with respect to money. So essentially doubles. Every time you double money, you only get a little bit more happiness. And so for me, the way that I implement that within my life is after about $45,000, you stop getting happier when you make more money. It just really, really levels out. And so I decide to self-tax myself 10 to 20% of my post-tax income.

So I give about $500 a month to charity and to other things every month because I have enough. I'm living in abundance. Like I'm drinking great coffee right now. I'm on this awesome podcast. I have a loving family. And I really can help the world in a way. And it doesn't even, it doesn't hurt my happiness at all to self-tax myself 500 or $1,000 bucks a month. In fact, it makes me more happy. And so that mindset is crucial for how I act as well.

That's one of the things that I thought has always been so interesting about you because I think that of all the people I know, you're probably the only person that gives that much money to charity every month. And so I've always found this fascinating. Now, how do you explain this to people? Because most people will say, well, I'm living on like two, three, four grand a month or something. I want to put money aside for my future. I want to buy a house. I want to set money aside for like my kids' college or university. And that's money that I could be putting to those uses. How do you explain that to people or like how do you tackle those specific issues when like half of your sort of disposable income is going to a charity like a charitable cause?

So for me personally, I mean, A, obviously when I do. tell my parents about this, they kind of think I'm an idiot. They're like, what, what do you mean? You should be saving for your future or, you know, saving for, you know, your kids or whatever. Put money in a retirement account. So I've definitely felt that. I've also felt it myself personally around like, okay, how much can I really give? And should I do 10%, should I do 20%, what should those numbers look like? And how much can I kind of stress test myself there? So I've definitely, the nice pieces that I can empathize with folks who are dealing with that. And I think that mainly what I do, when folks, you know, push back or say like, wait a second, this money that I have, it's really,

I need it for all these little pieces of my life. I mostly say, yeah, totally. That's cool. I agree with you. And I just recommend that they kind of experiment, you know, start with 1% or 5% and start to think about those pieces in your life and how, I think for a lot of folks, it depends on how people do their budgeting. But really, you know, you get into spreadsheets and you think about how the money that they have and what percentage is going to each of these different things for them and to think about their bonus money that they have or ways to create bonus money. And then causes, I think part of it is like understanding that self-perspective and like how to create the enoughness or the abundance in yourself.

And part of it's also getting really excited about the impact you can have. So for me, I mean, there's a lot of examples of this, but like you can essentially pay 10 or 15 bucks to carbon offset your emissions for a full year. So I get really excited about that. You can pay 30 bucks a month to give someone a universal basic income in rural Kenya with this thing called give directly. So I get really excited about that. So there's things like, or just like giving random people money on the internet.

Like I just went on Craigslist and like gave somebody 120 bucks. And so there's, that stuff feels really good. So I think it's partially the, you know, getting people to start to reflect on their own abundance and enoughness. And it's starting to think about the impact they can have and getting excited about that. And then when you can combine those two things together, you can kind of make this shift. Though I will say, I do think that this shift from scarcity to abundance.

especially around money is one that us all as a society need to deeply, deeply make, and it is going to be very difficult because for the last, you know, definitely the last 300 years we've been in it. And more generally speaking, we've definitely been in this self-facing individual kind of win-lose greed mindset. And it made sense for a long time because only up until recently was it the case that you could actively self-tax yourself and not change your happiness at all. Like if I tried this 300 years ago, it would not work.

But you can try it now. So I think it's small things, it's little conversations with people and meeting them where they're at. Now, do you think that the money that you're giving to charity could be, are you looking also at ways that you can optimize the way that that money impacts those people? Say, for example, like investing that money in some sort of a fund where like, you know, the end result is that you end up having more money that you could give to those charities or like, what are some ways? that as a donor, you can optimize on the amounts that you're giving? Yeah, good question. So I think there are kind of two perspectives that effective altruists bring to this. One is there's the quote unquote cause selection level.

And what that means is based, it's kind of that pro con that I gave earlier of, oh, should you care about animal rights and help the 70 billion factory farm land animals? Or should you care about global health and help, you know, the 750 billion people in extreme poverty, or should you help the long-term future and, you know, try to, like, mitigate existential risks to humanity. And so you can optimize from that level and say, which of these do I think is the most important? Do I most care about? And then start to give to that cause. And then once you start to give within a cause, then you can do what's called, like, cost-effectiveness stuff in that cause. So, for example, if I were to try to give to something, if I'm trying to help

with, like, global health, then I should probably not give to my, brother or to, you know, my local art, you know, place around town, or even to, in general, to folks in developed countries where, and that's a difficult thing here, but the amount of impact that you can have for folks in developed countries versus developing countries is huge, it's almost like 100x difference. And so you should, this cost-effectiveness piece is choosing between the charities and saying which ones have had the most impact compared to other ones. So those are kind of the two big kind of optimizing vectors. that you can look at. And then I guess on this question of should you invest your money and give more

later or should you just give money now is always an open question. I think that, and I haven't, it's kind of funny because, you know, the answer to that, I've seen a variety of people, the debates on each side of this, I think that for me, I pretty much fall on the, just give it straight now perspective because I'm already, it's not like I'm not doing the investing side. And so I already do the investing side. And in addition to that, giving the money, I really think about it as giving the money to people now, and then that has a massive, it's very difficult to judge the impact of the money that you would give to someone like this universal basic income now versus being able to wait a bit and then give it later. And I think

that because all of us are over-indexed on investing and then maybe later, once you have a bunch of money or whatever, then giving it, I essentially super try to over-index the other way and try to give now instead of giving later. Do I recognize that's not a very powerful answer to that and I'll look more deeply into it. I do get that because I think basically when you put things off, often you tend to not do them in the end. So I think basically doing it now is a good way of doing it at all. I'm just wondering in us how much giving someone a UBI via Give Direct, for instance,

is better than taking the same money and supporting someone who makes a problem. to change the structures of how society works in that everyone is guaranteed a basic income, for instance. So basically, in the inners how much it's worth just fighting the symptoms and how much we should actually look at the root course of things and try to treat that. Obviously, I mean, that's a long shot. And giving someone $15 a month is a good start. And basically weighing these options against one another, I think is a really true. really, really difficult. But of course, I mean, basically, that shouldn't paralyze you and lead you to not give anything, which I think it does actually do for many people. So I think that's a

great question, though. And I think, well, one note is that these kinds of questions are the exact questions that the effective altruist community engages with, and they engage with it in a very rational kind of way of like, okay, let's, you know, think about the consequences of these two things. Let's make some expected value calculations, et cetera, et cetera, and determine which one would be better. So that kind of question is right in line with all of that. And I think, yeah, to hope to not be paralyzed with it is definitely true. I know for me that that difference, yeah, it's a question of like macro systems change versus yet dealing with the root causes or versus, you know, dealing with the symptoms of it. And I think that you can see this balance with something

like climate change and effective altruism. This balance is talked about a lot. And some of the most impactful charities that they have, they don't actually like plant trees for carbon. offsets, what they do is this macro political work, like this one called Coalition of Rainforest Nations. And what it does is it protects rainforest more generally, but it doesn't actually like plant trees. But effective altruism has found it to be super, super impactful because it does some of that more macro political systemic work. So that's an open question for sure. And I just personally love the give directly one because it, A, so I mean, when you compare give directly to some other pieces. It's still surprisingly effective. And it just feels so nice to just be able to give

someone, it's an easy, really easy story to tell where you're just like, I'm just gifting this person money. And like it makes them happier. It makes me happier. And it's a win-win scenario. And I agree, I could think about some more macrosystemic stuff, but I just really love the story of give directly. Okay, that's really fascinating. Let's switch gears a little bit. I mean, we want to spend some time on your blockchain ethics course. But first, I think it's worth spending a little bit time on what's happening at the Media Lab at the moment. So yeah, can you break down what's been going on over the last two, three months and how it's affected the DCI? Let me say before I say anything here, is that this is a little bit, whenever dealing with some of these very hot topic issues,

especially over something like a podcast, it's kind of scary. And so I just want to be vulnerable about that for a second, which is that, you know, I'm going to continue to speak words in these next couple of minutes. And if I speak the wrong words, then, like, who knows, maybe, like, the Twitter mobs will be after me. And so I say that in kind of a funny way, but it's also pretty serious. Or it's like when you deal with these very hot topic issues, it can be a little bit scary. So I just want to share that. So for the listeners, what's been happening at the Media Lab is, if you haven't been aware, there's this person, Jeffrey Epstein, who has recently. killed himself in jail, and he is a person who is a sex trafficker and a pedophile and has been

doing that for a long time. And in America, he was also very connected to essentially lots of elite billionaires and philanthropists in academia. And his ties to that world have been coming out more and more over time. And more recently, those ties were very explicitly seen with the MIT Media Lab and with the director of the media lab, Joey Ito. And those ties were, essentially Epstein giving money to the Media Lab and giving money to Joey Ito's kind of funds. And so his like venture capital funds. And so when all that came out, and especially when there was this New Yorker article about how Epstein's philanthropy was seen within the Media Lab and it was a pretty negative article,

that is Joey resigned from the Media Lab. And now there is both more macro kind of systemic, like kind of, kind of, bureaucratic, but also kind of a community-led processes happening within the media lab to heal the media lab and to find a new director, and also within MIT more generally around how they should think about funders and fundraising. So that's kind of how what has been happening, and specifically for the DCI, it's funny because it doesn't affect us that much. It is definitely jarring. And I think that, you know, for us, I mean, part of it is, I know for me, Part of it's just a kind of a beautiful.

I mean, beautiful is not the right word here. But once this Epstein stuff started to become news, then I was like, oh, I hadn't really looked that deeply into it. And so I read the, there's this Miami Herald article, which was kind of like a whistleblower article about Epstein's kind of child pedophilia ring in Florida. And whenever talking about any of this Epstein stuff, it's really thinking about the victims there is so crucial. And I think reading, if anybody hasn't, if you've been reading this article, you know, just type in Miami Herald Epstein.

It's a long article, but it's really, it's very well done. And it's really sad and awful to see what Epstein did to these girls. It's girls between ages of 13 and 17 who are really poor. And he had offered them very small sums of money, 100 bucks, 200 bucks to come to him and to give him massages and to do sexual favors and to bring other girls into the mix. And then when all of this was found out about, the U.S. government, the legal system essentially treated Epstein as a plutocrat and didn't give him a serious sentence. And it is just a, it's both a despicable act of Epstein and the legal system. And it's awful to see what was done and to hear what was done for these victims of sexual assault. And so I talk about that because when I think about the impact on DCI,

part of it's just like re-engaging more with that world and thinking more and in revitalizing our mission towards you know changing money and transparency for the public good and thinking about this as a good example of that and thinking of this as you know a manifestation of you know plutocratic billionaire late stage capitalism and of you know a patriarchal misogynistic society and how those things are trying to fight and so the DCI took that it was also impacted with by it emotionally but also more than anything I mean we We're just continuing to try to do impactful work. And so that's the various research and education and kind of ecosystem initiatives that we have.

So it hasn't affected us too deeply, but all those kind of reinvigurations of the mission and emotional kind of taking a step back, we're definitely part of it. Jeffrey Epstein had given to the MIT for a long time and had been blacklisted from giving to the MIT at a certain point after I think this. this trial in New York happened where he was convicted, but given a very lenient sentence, MIT Media Lab continued to take money from Epstein, basically earmarking his funds as anonymous donations. So do you think the Media Lab can emerge from this on the other side, and does the future of the Media Lab look like? Well, let me say, and I don't think we need to get too deep into the different, and I really honestly, I don't know that much about it. it. The blacklisting, I think, is a, from my understanding of the, of the two articles I read,

uh, that are, these are just public articles, the New Yorker article, which talked about how Epstein was a, not blacklisted, but, uh, they, they could note people in the MIT database about, like, it wasn't blacklist, but it was called, like, certain giver was, you know, noted as, you know, not wanted or something, but actually that wasn't a blacklist. That was just like, hey, we tried to hit this person up for money three times and they didn't respond. And so there was no notion. I think there will be a notion now of like what blacklists look like in these databases. But as far as I understand, at least at the time, that that was, it wasn't like Epstein was blacklisted from the MIT perspective,

but rather he was sought. I wish I could remember the term for this donor. But he was called a donor that they tried to hit up for money but did not give them money initially. In any case, this is to say, how can the media lab? So those are all the like, like, woof kind of logistics things about how academia operates and how donors operate with that. I think the Media Lab specifically, how it will resolve this, it is going to be, yeah, it's going to be a process. I mean, I think there's a lot of strength. The real question, I think, for folks, is a classic exit versus voice question that anybody can ask within any system that they're in and say, hey, when something bad happens in the system, do I want to express voice within the system?

or do I want to exit the system? So do I want to help? The question for folks is they want to help govern and create a new awesome media lab or do they want to exit the media lab and go to do things in other places? And I think that more than anything, what I've seen is that there is a lot of long-term,

people who are in it for the long-term here and into the long-term strength of the media lab. And so there's a lot of, you could think of them as either bureaucratic processes or kind of community-led processes that are happening now. So there's like an executive. committee of five folks. There's a bunch of different working groups that are happening around funding

transparency and, you know, gender and identity at the Media Lab and things like that. And I think that those processes will essentially run for the next, you know, six to 24 months and then likely still continue after that. And so we're kind of in that stage now of like people working through and having lots and lots of conversations. When I think from a very abstract, like long-term perspective, what will happen with the Media Lab, I mean, in general, I would be very surprised if it went away. I mean, it is a place with $80 million of annual funding with a bunch of scientists from all around the world and a bunch of students and a bunch of companies that support it. And so I'd be surprised if it went away, though I definitely think that this will be a time, a little bit of a time of contraction and a re-evaluation of its goals and its mission and things like that. I think more than anything, we'll see who the next executive director is. I think that will be a big part of the Media Labs future mission. Thank you for that answer. It's good to hear the inside perspective. So let's switch gears a little bit. Your subject meta expertise is blockchain ethics and you're teaching a course on blockchain ethics at the Media Lab. And we want to dig into the nitty gritty of this in a bit. But maybe before we embark on this conversation, it would be super helpful to properly define the term ethics and especially offset it from the term. morals since these two terms are often used interchangeably.

Would you be able to do that for us? Yeah, so I think I agree that the term ethics is a semantically overloaded term and is kind of, it's unfortunate in that way. And I think that something like blockchain ethics, the main reason why I use the term ethics to talk about blockchain ethics is because it is from the field of tech ethics and AI ethics and things like that. And it was just, when thinking, about, you know, the goal of something like blockchain ethics is kind of a, is a group of

people and of movement in a field aligned around how to positively shape this technology. And that thing, does it need to be called blockchain ethics? Not really. I kind of wish it was called something like the impact of, you know, crypto economic systems or something like that, or positively shaping the impact of crypto economic systems. But that's, that would not get traction, essentially. And so you have to kind of put it in the field of tech ethics more. generally. So that's my first answer is just from a semantic kind of meme perspective. You have to

fit with tech ethics and AI ethics and therefore blockchain ethics. The other piece here is around, yeah, kind of the philosophical academic underpinnings of the field of ethics. I guess I'd make three differentiations. The first is ethics versus morals. And generally speaking, people think about ethics as kind of an external thing where society is saying, okay, what does society say are the good external things to do versus morals, which are more like kind of like the internal good things to do. But I actually think that that framing is not as quite as helpful as thinking about ethics in the field of what's called normative ethics, which is like what should we do in the world. It's this question of should versus something like science, which is really good at determining like

is questions. So it's like is questions versus ought questions or is questions versus should questions. Within normative ethics, what should we do? They're kind of three big types. One of them, and this connects back to the effective altruist piece, one of them is consequentialism, where you say, what is, or what should we do? Well, we should do the thing that maximizes impact. You know, this is a very utilitarian kind of mindset, and utilitarianism is a subfield or sub-idea within consequentialism. So there's consequentialism, and then there's deontology, and then there's virtue ethics. And virtue ethics are, you know, virtue ethics in deontology are kind of, you could map them onto morals if you want to. They're more kind of internal things. Virtue ethics is

thinking about what are the virtues that I want to do in society. That is good. And so that's like, oh, maybe I want to be honest or I want to be compassionate or whatever. Instead of thinking about the outcomes of your actions, you think about, you know, doing these really good processes or they're, you know, doing the actions rather than the outcomes and think about the virtues. And then the final piece here There's deontology, which is thinking about laws and like thinking about, okay, what is good is actually, you know, how I, you know, conform to these, you know, norms or laws of society. So those are kind of the three big buckets that I put it into for normative ethics and how that relates to morals more generally. Does that help? Yeah, that's really helpful to, it helps to frame,

I guess, this discussion. Talk about your blockchain ethics class. Why did you want to do this? Yeah, I think, you know, the deep. underlying reason for why I wanted to do it was, I mean, just, I think, as both of you believe, when you see something like this technology and you say, oh, okay, you have a lot of people rewriting how money works, that could be very impactful on society. And when you see that, you say, okay, how do we want to positively shape this thing? And so I think that when you start to think in those ways, and you say, okay, if, you know, blockchain is going to have even 10% of the internet's impact, you know, we should take great care in proactively developing it.

When you start to think from that perspective, you start to say, oh, okay, what already exists around the proactive development of this field and positively shaping it. And the issue right now is that to some extent, something like AI ethics has a really robust kind of mature ecosystem of AI ethics centers. I mean, if you think 10 or 15 years ago, there were almost none of these centers around the world. There was like, you know, zero dollars in funding-ish. But Now there's hundreds or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and there are dozens of centers around the world that focus on AI ethics. And I really expect something similar to happen with blockchain and blockchain ethics over the next

kind of 10 or 15 years. And so this is really just kind of kickstarting that conversation and starting to build this new field of tech ethics specifically around blockchain and trying to positively shape that. So it's the reason why I do it is because I think this could be a very impactful technology and I want to make sure that there's a kind of a civil society, non-profit academic movement that is contributing to the positive shaping of it in addition to companies and governments. So technologists themselves often tend to shy away from these fundamental questions

to which there isn't one right answer. So, you know, the smushy questions, if you will. So how should we deal with this? Should there be an ethics committee or should people from within the space aim to self-regulate? Or what's the structure that you propose? For me personally, the structure that I propose, I almost always come from the meta-framework level with these things and don't want to necessarily propose any specific structures for folks. You know, I'm thinking about it as there's this great thing called Lawrence, there's this person Lawrence Lessig who has this thing called the pathetic dot theorem. and he, or pathetic dot theory, and it came up when he was thinking about the creative commons

and the early internet. And when you're both thinking about how to shape something and how something is being shaped, you can think about how it's being changed through the code itself. And so this is like, okay, what actual code have we put into our, you know, crypto wallets or, you know, the exchanges or things like that are smart contracts. But then you can also shape things by saying, okay, let's use markets. So it's like change the incentive system here. or you can, you know, shape things by using the law itself and saying, okay, we want to use and make something illegal or not illegal, or you can shape things using norms where you kind of shame people for doing something bad and give people praise for doing something good. And so I think that I think about ethics committees and things like that, I think that there will be, we will see people try to use each of those four different categories in order to positively shape this technology.

and I think that kind of the way that I think about it is you already have governments to some extent doing the law side of things. You already have kind of native to blockchain and cryptocurrency. You already have kind of the incentives and code-based side of things. And I think that really trying to amplify the self-regulatory norm piece will be the – is probably the piece that's the least well defined right now and the piece that could use the most emphasis. But I think all those pieces will be part of shaping this. and that will look like, you know, centers around the world and, you know, both, you know, blockchain ethics centers around the world that are focused on this and focused on researching these kinds of things.

It will look like, you know, committees at the, you know, the state, you know, level, at the government level that are looking into these things. And it will look like possibly within these new protocol networks, people who are specifically focused on the long-term impact of this, just like people like Salesforce or Google have, like, ethics boards and things like that. So do you think that the ethics process in blockchain will be fundamentally the same as, say, in AI or biotechnology or geoengineering? Because one of the hallmarks of blockchain technology that's always being touted is that in principle it's unsensible, right? So basically that's not true for any of these other technologies.

So would you say that blockchain in that respect is fundamentally different? or is it just another emerging technology that needs to be thought about in terms of consequences and what we want for it and what we don't want? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, so I would say definitely different is my high-level answer. And you kind of, there are kind of two different ways to answer your question there. The first is, so I've been talking about this thus far as a new field of tech ethics. And I think that that's true and that obviously blockchain cryptocurrency technology.

is all about the technology, and it's like this new digital technology. But you could also think about it as a new in the field of like financial ethics because it is money in and of itself. And so, you know, when you come from the field of finance, you have a whole different set of questions that kind of come up, things like macro systemic stability of the financial system or investor regulation or, you know, protecting against illicit transactions, things like that. Or you can think of it from an institutional perspective. And so this is this field of what's called. new institutional economics and, you know, Ronald Coase and the theory of the firm, which is thinking about these new kinds of, you know, in 1937, this guy of Ronald Coase was asking questions around why do firms exist and markets exist? Why do both of those kind of coordinating

and motivating institutions exist? And it came down to transaction costs and things like that. And so you can think of blockchain and cryptocurrency networks as a new kind of institution, just like, you know, the internet aggregators like Google, Amazon, Facebook, where new kinds of institutions, just like, you know, when the nation state, the first, you know, nation states started that it was a new kind of institution. So I think that that's one huge difference between blockchain and crypto and something like AI ethics is that AI ethics does not have the kind of naturally baked in financial ethics piece or the naturally baked in institutional piece. And then specifically to your question around, you know, censorship resistance and how that's

another key piece of this, I think that that is another key difference, which is for something like AI, you still have some of these questions of like the root goal of AI is to, I don't know that much about AI, but in general, you're trying to outsource the decisions to the computer or to outsource the sense making to the computer. And that is kind of, that brings questions of unstoppable and when you should bring in humans into the loop. And so that is kind of this question of, you know, bringing ethics into something where you just allow the computer to do the decisions. That is kind of, you know, they're kind of in juxtaposition with each other. And same with something like the internet, where the early internet was something designed to be

permissionless, designed to be, you know, a trustless, quote unquote, protocol. And these questions of, oh, you're trying to bring ethics into this thing that's designed to be totally permissionless. That was still kind of, you know, in opposition to the original idea. And so I think exactly what you're saying is true, which is a key part of the blockchain and cryptic world is this kind of permissionless, you know, decentralized protocol aspect of it that has this censorship resistant money. And when you try to say, oh, we're going to bring in ethics into that, you say, whoa, whoa, whoa, how dare you censor our thing and bring in ethics into this when the goal is to have that not be possible within these systems. So, yeah, I think that's a difference

as well. In the context of a blockchain network, what role do you see a minor play who, you know, And in fact, the miners are the last line of defense, if you will, and are able to collectively censor transactions on the blockchain. Do they have any ethical obligations to do this, in your opinion? I think this is an awesome question. I think that there's, and very connected, of course, to the censorship resistance piece, which is, and the reason why we have the censorship resistance is to some extent because of the decentralized nature of the network and things like miners not censoring transactions

or they say, okay, even if this is from, you know, XYZ, we're going to put it, you know, into the blockchain. And so it's a very difficult question. My personal instinct is it, of course, it depends. If I was trying to send a bunch of money somewhere else in the world and when that money was received in that other point in the world, it would blow up all of society. And it would blow up the earth and all the solar system and all the universe. That would be sad. And so I think that a minor at that point in time would have the moral obligation to censor that transaction. Say, you know what?

This is in the mempool, but I'm not going to add that. However, that is obviously an extreme case. And so I think in general, if I were to talk about this with lawmakers or with other folks, I would try to not have minors have much moral or legal obligation here as part of the system. And I'd say one final piece here, which is that there's this great book called Blockchain and the Law by Prima Verdeioli and Aaron Wright. And what they do is they essentially, a lot of these questions have been asked before around, you know, you could ask a very similar question with someone like Internet service providers or people like that where you say, hey, there's this packet going over the network, which is child porn. Or there's this packet going over the network, which is, you know, telling people to, you know, give me money for drugs or whatever. And so a question that was brought up then was very similar of, hey, should the people who are sending the packets over the network,

should they, do they have a moral obligation to check out what those packets are and or censor them? And so I think, and in the end, what we saw is that the miners can be regulated, just like the packet network folks can be regulated, but you can really regulate so many different parts of this stack, whether it's the internet service providers or the miners or the exchanges or a bunch of different pieces here. And in general, I think the higher leverage points are not necessarily the miners, but rather other pieces. That's my personal instinct to not want minors to censored transactions. Yeah, I think I agree on that point pretty much completely. So if miners are not meant to censor transactions, which other parts of the stack or service provider stack do you think perhaps should lend themselves to be regulated? And so just as a note for folks, what we're diving into here, when we think about those four

different parts of less expathetic dot, we're really thinking about the kind of the law piece now and saying, okay, if we want to positively shape this technology with law, how should we do that, and aka what regulations should we put on the various actors in the system? What should we determine legal and illegal? And I think that, well, A, with blockchain crypto, just like stuff with the internet, you have this big global regulatory environment and all the regulatory environment and all the regulatory arbitrage that happens there. And I think that there's a question of who should be regulated and the question of who is regulated. And you can see that folks like exchanges are the ones,

that's really the leverage point that lots of law enforcement agencies have pushed, which is, you know, of the bit-wise top ten exchanges, I think, you know, six of them have a bit license in New York city, and then nine of them have whatever the other big regulatory thing is there, some kind of FATF style like, hey, we are a actual regulated cryptocurrency exchange. And so I think that the only one that doesn't, by the way, is Binance, which is classic. And I do think it makes sense for there to be, for exchanges themselves, for a lot of them to have K. And at the same time, I think that it makes sense for things like Binance to exist, where if you want to kind of exit the system and to try to not be KYC or AML to kind of do that.

And the other thing here is that this is always this cat and mouse game between, okay, who should we regulate in the system? And then once you start to regulate it, how will the system respond? And then how will law enforcement respond to the response? And so there's a recent, you know, child pornography ring that was busted that was using, you know, Bitcoin and Tor and all these things. And what you saw is that although Bitcoin has pseudonymous properties and that they were using stuff like Tor, you could still, you know, law enforcement agencies and people like Chainalysis were able to look at the blockchain and look at these transactions and go through these kind of Tor style mixers and say, okay, we can still determine who is actually doing this child porn ring. And so I think this is a long form way to answer question, which is in general, I think regulating exchanges makes some moderate sense. and there's always going to be regulatory arbitrage to escape that. And when we see this kind of cat and mouse game play out,

it will be always a question of how hard the nation state governments want to clamp down on this stuff. Do they want to do 51% attacks? Do they want to really go deep on, you know, Tor and Bitcoin monitoring, those kind of questions? How do you feel about CK Snarks and other privacy-enabling technology in this context? I think, and, And we see it both with ZK Snarks, but also things like end-to-end encryption, more generally on these messenger platforms and saying, oh, boy, how should we allow end-end encryption? Should we not?

These things are very difficult. I really like that society has a anonymous way to transfer value around. And that's what we've had for, you know, many years with something like cash. And so when we go on to the internet, we have this kind of very difficult state where you have the anonymous. is going away and you have surveillance authoritarianism and the ability for these companies or nation states to both, you know, to track all of our social media things, but then soon, you know, all of our, you know, financial transactions, that's a very scary state of affairs. And so I think that to keep the old status quo, which is some kinds of ability to transact anonymously with

other folks, I think that makes a lot of sense. The question, though, is it is categorically different than the way that cash used to work, which is, do we want to have this anonymous payment system? Yes. However, do we want to have an anonymous payment system where you can transact as much money as you want to anybody else in the world all anonymously? I think that's a more open question. You know, that doesn't directly map onto the old status quo of cash and things like that. That's my kind of the way I think about this question. When I think about the march of technologies over time, I think that more than anything,

the response that I want to have is one of, kind of like my answer earlier, is one of norms, where if you have these technologies that allow for bad things to happen, yes, it is possible for law enforcement and nation states to kind of regulate them at various parts in the protocol, internet protocol stack. But more than anything, I think we need to focus on regulating ourselves and making sure that, hey, we do have something like ZK Snarks and the ability to send money anonymously over the internet. But even if we do have that, given that power, we have this great responsibility to not use it to fund, you know, terrorist financing and things like that. And so really, it all comes back to for me as the long, slow march of technology continues to happen.

We as a society need to respond in turn with increased responsibility and norms around how to use this technology effectively. So you're talking about norms and ethics are very much about forming social norms. And I think we've established that blockchain protocols in the context of ethics should be seen in a similar light as sort of TCPIP networks, right? And like the network layer is not something that where transactions shouldn't be held with much scrutiny, at least not from the point of view of miners. But blockchains are just a technology. I mean, there's many different variances of blockchains. We've got like Bitcoin, Ethereum, different public. networks, also permission blockchains. And I think the ethical considerations are better suited

when it comes to the applications that we're building on top of blockchain. So, for example, a Dow on a public blockchain, or if some companies building an enterprise consortium settling system on like Corder, or you might have a funding mechanism built on some other blockchain construction, what's the framework? by which we should be applying ethics to all these different types of applications, which are very different from each other, and where the ethical considerations may be very different. Is there a one-size-fits-all framework,

or should every one of these sort of sub-groups or like sub-communities or whatever you want to call it have their own ethics? That's a good question. So let me say, I guess, a couple things. one is I directionally agree with you that building out the protocol layer versus the application layer that generally speaking ethics should come more into play at the application layer than the protocol layer. I also agree with you to say like, hey, this is a whole bunch of different things in blockchain

ethics. And so it would be nice if there is a one-size-fits-all framework. And my response to that is my meta one-size-fits-all framework is giving people the tools with which they can make their own ethical choices to say, hey, hey, let's A, start by being self-aware of these things and be able to, you know, counteract and imbalance, you know, consequentialist ethics versus something like virtue ethics. And then as they start to think in that way, then to say, okay, let's say we've determined there are some good or bad things about these systems.

How should we affect that? Should we affect it, you know, back to Lessig's dot with norms or law or markets or code or whatever? So just giving people those frameworks with which to view the world, I think is the most important piece. Who, and I think about the actual, when people start to say like, hey, I'm a developer. or should I build this thing or not, I think the most important thing is probably what people are already doing,

which is saying, hey, when I'm building this thing, who am I building it for? What is the value that I'm trying to create? Who is the internal team that's trying to create this thing? Do we have lots of good voices trying to produce and create this new technology? And once you start to think about, like, hey, what value are we creating for the world? Then you can say, okay, well, how would people weaponize this technology? what could it be used for in other senses.

So I think just kind of thinking through those things that people are probably already thinking about, which is how do you create value for this? And then what does this thing also enable long term? I think, you know, asking those two questions are the best first start to this. And that will give you a long way down the road of how should you build the thing or not? Or can you make changes to the things such that it would be more or less positive for society? So if I were to build something where I thought, well, this is tremendously useful for a set of people. So let's say, for instance, it's super useful for whistleblowers and journalists and

all of these other people. But at the same time, it could potentially be used by people for things that I don't agree with. So whatever it may be, terrorism or pornography or human trafficking or whatever, it doesn't really matter. So what would I then do ideally? So I think my point is, that almost everything can be used for good or for evil. So as the creator of that technology, what exactly is my burden? What exactly do I have to evaluate and how do I make a decision based on that? So what I would say is I personally don't really agree with the term like technology is not good or bad. It's purely just this neutral thing.

I think that technology can be used for good or bad things, but I think that certain kinds of technology are more can be used for have have natural inclinations towards good or have natural inclinations towards bad. For example, it's like if I'm thinking about things that can, I was just debating this with someone else last night, of like, you know, we were talking about how much a hammer allows one to kill other people versus how much a gun allows one to kill other people. And it's like, you could say that they're both just technologies and like kind of throw up your hands say, you know what, hammer and gun, both the same. It's not, you know, the technology that kills people. it's like the people who kill people and we can't really control it. Or you could say, you know what, it is different that like something like a nuclear bomb is different than a hammer, is different than an AK-47, is different than a hunting rifle. And so I think part of it, if you're building the technology that you talked about there, I think that part of it is of asking that question and saying, okay, is the thing more, and I would come from a consequentialist perspective, which is one where you kind of pro-con, the positive that you think you'll create with it versus the negative.

And if you create something, you're like, oh, God, this looks like it's only going to be used for, like, people to do, you know, like terrorist financing or whatever, like child trafficking, maybe don't build it. But if you're building something that you think and you're going to try to share it with the whistleblower community, you're going to put things in place that make it so it's like, you know, something like secure drop, which a lot of whistleblowers use is, like very technical and hard to use and things like that. And so you say, okay, maybe I'll try to do things like this that will make it, you know, more difficult, that will make it maybe easier for some folks to use than others. and so I think, you know, my answer is, again, kind of a no answer, but that, A, you know, technology's not totally neutral, things have positive and negative inclinations. B, when you start to build it, evaluate what you think the positive impact will be versus what the negative impact will be, because it will definitely be both. And then if it's going to be mostly positive impacts, then try to say, okay, how do we reemphasize those positive impacts, share it with those communities that I think will be positive and try to mitigate those other communities and how they may use it for negative means. Interesting. I'd like to zoom out a little bit from here. So from inside the blockchain community, it's very easy to feel that this is the greatest

technological advancement, more or less, since the internet. So as someone with more of a bird's eye perspective, do you think there's a chance that blockchain is going to go away or maybe not go away completely, but find its niche and then just be stuck in that niche forever without causing a major paradigm shift in how society works and how the future of humanity is going to be shaped out. Yeah, definitely from within the ecosystem, it often looks like, whoa, like you have a bunch of smart people who are working on building a lot of like underlying protocols here. Like, this is going to be really impactful.

And it's still like a very small piece. I mean, if you think about the total, you know, cryptocurrency market cap about 200 billion, that's still gold is about 8 trillion. So it's still like 40x less than gold. And so we're still at the very beginning stages here. The other question is back to Sebastian's question from Earth. earlier of like, what do we define as blockchain? Do we define blockchain as purely these new permissionless style networks, something like Bitcoin and, you know, censorship resistant

money or kind of new smart contract networks? Or do we define it in addition as these kind of, you know, permissions validator set networks where you have these permission validator sets and, you know, the enterprise blockchain world? Or do we also define it as kind of this instigatory piece with, you know, fintech more generally to say, hey, existing financial system, hey, central bankers, you should think about these things more, and you should implement some of the things that we're doing in your central bank digital currencies and things like that. And so I think depending on which level you look at it from,

it will have different amounts of impact, or how you define kind of blockchain. It will have different amounts of impact. My general instinct is that it will not be a small evolutionary niche, and I think that that's true because, for a variety of reasons, but I think perhaps the most important of which is, A, it has catalyzed the more general banking and financial ecosystem more generally. And I think that that should be thought of as part of blockchain's impacts, and those I think

will be large. And then second, I think that this gets into another long conversation that we don't necessarily need to have. But blockchain and cryptocurrency technology is a, you can think of it as this kind of anti-fragile, non-violent protest where you had this small community in this white paper that was produced to make this magic internet money, you know, 10 years ago with Bitcoin. And now you have this whole ecosystem of folks who are really excited to exit our current state of late stage capitalism and to build this new parallel world where they change how money works and how we should think about institutions and things like that. And people are more bought into that world of, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum and stuff like that than they are bought into stuff like old nation states.

And so I think that when you have this new system that's being built of an evolutionary niche, that, has money naturally baked into it, what that allows for that new nonviolent movement to do is it allows it to propagate through time more easily. And unlike some of these things like, you know, peer-to-peer, you know, encrypted communication, which didn't have money baked into it naturally, something like blockchain cryptocurrency, there's too much money in the ecosystem. And that allows the kind of evolutionary being that is blockchain as an institution to continue to survive and compete versus existing institutions and to, be very strong at battling them.

Well, that's super interesting. Would you be able to expand on the role of nation states in the context of the future of blockchain? So I think that the role of nation states will be a couplefold. One will be their continued existing attempts to, you know, regulate a global world and be the primary institution in a global world and to get people excited by them. And you can see that battle happening with like nation states, versus these new, like, internet aggregators like Google Ames on Facebook, whatever.

So how nation states are continuing to their own, like, demise, essentially, or how they kind of work through their own demise, I think will be one piece. And if they demise more quickly, then more people will exit to things like blockchain and cryptocurrency networks and or, you know, other kinds of institutions that motivate people like religion or whatever. So that's one piece. I think the other piece is how nation states are connected to their central banking systems. and how those central banking systems both think about blockchain cryptocurrency technology,

but more importantly at this point, again, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are very small in the macro scheme of things for how much like money they have and how much volume they have. And so it's really a question of how they implement and start to do experiment with things like central bank digital currencies and how those kind of co-evolve with, you know, permissionless blockchain networks. So that's kind of one other piece here. And then the third piece is, yeah, how, as they're starting to both lose their power and as they are starting to evaluate these new

networks and start to think about regulating them, it's all these questions that we talked about through the show of how should nation states want to still have these great public policy goals of like, hey, let's try to like mitigate the amount of terrorist financing or child porn or whatever that happens with these new technologies. And so I think how they regulate that, it will be the third big kind of axis of interaction between nation states and blockchain networks. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think we could talk about this for hours, but at some point we have to get to the end, unfortunately. Go to sleep and eat food and those kinds of things.

So tell us about this. What have you learned since starting this course? And what's the future for this class? Yeah, good question. So the class is, it's about 15 to 20. students, mostly folks at MIT, but also folks at Harvard, mostly computer scientists folks, but also we got, you know, policy makers and designers and city planners and things like that, too.

And mostly graduate students, you know, like 60 years, you know, computer science PhDs, but also undergrads. So it's kind of a wide variety of folks in the class. And I think that, you know, what I've personally learned, A, I've learned a lot of things about teaching, just like, you know, selfishly personally, that has been a great piece of this. a good amount of teaching in my past, but never within an explicit, you know, university setting. It's very difficult to teach this class because, A, blockchain and cryptocurrency technology is very complex subject. And B, taking a very complex thing and then trying to understand

how that thing will actually impact society is even more complex. And especially that's difficult because it hasn't been done before. So there aren't, there's no, like, field of blockchain ethics where I can just like take existing syllabi or whatever. Like as far as I know, this is the first blockchain ethics class. To be clear, it's myself and my boss and director, the DCI, Neha, Nerula, who are teaching it. And so it's great to have her input as well, especially around a lot of the technical things. She's like a distributed systems, PhD, and all these great things. So I think that that's been a learning for myself is, you know, just as I've been teaching and trying to teach this very new thing. And let me say one final piece on

that new thing. Although this is technically the first blockchain ethics class, there are lots of like blockchain and law classes, and they deal with a lot of these similar issues. And what I would say personally for things I've learned are just, it's been very helpful for me to take these loose ideas that it had before around how to think about this stuff and to kind of categorize it and scaffold it in more explicit ways. And then part of it's also been my own learning for these things. So when quick specific example of this is, you know, when you think about financial ethics, there's a question of how should one think about financial ethics? And we are lucky to have, you know, one of the DCI advisors is this guy, Gary Gensler, who was the ex-chairman of the CFTC, and he, you know,

spoke at the Libra hearings and things like that. And he was just able to provide me with like, hey, here's how we think about, you know, financial regulation and the public policy goals there. And so being able to think through those things with experts and then to try to teach those to students and get a good feedback loop with them has been really, really helpful. Is the content of this class available to folks outside of Harvard and MIT? Definitely, yeah. The class is really one specific implementation of the more macro goal, which is build the field of blockchain ethics and make it the case that, you know,

there are lots of people in civil society who are actively thinking about how to positively shape this stuff. And so this is just one implementation. And I hope that there will be many other blockchain ethics courses or whatever in the world in the future. And so, yeah, if people go to blockchainethics.co.co.co, they can find there's a forum there. There's a syllabus there. And so I definitely think starting with the syllabus, you know, it's kind of a long syllabus, like, you know, 20 or 30 pages. But there's a lot of awesome readings and things to do there. And eventually we'll upload the videos from the lectures and stuff online as well. So, yeah, the goal is to be as open source as possible to kind of help catalyze this as a field.

Well, it's a fantastic initiative, and I wish you lots of luck in the future with this course. And you should definitely subscribe to Reese's podcast, Gray Mirror, which I'm sure you can find everywhere where one finds podcasts. And yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you all for having me. And thank you for engaging. I think that you all at Epicenter do a good job of both engaging with the deep technical stuff, which is super, super important to say, like, hey, let's actually build this thing first. and with engaging with more of these kind of macroethical systemic questions. So thank you for your time as well.

And thank you listeners. And good luck and definitely go to blockchainethics.com and check it out. Thank you, Reese. Thanks, Reese. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to live.

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