Technology, Connected - What Are Smart Transactions? How STXN Is Trying to Fix Ethereum’s Failed Transactions

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Boris Mamlyuk and Anuj Dasgupta, founders of STXN, join Thinking on Paper to explain how smart transactions could make Ethereum easier to use.Standard blockchain transactions execute immediately under fixed conditions. Users often have limited control over when a transaction runs, what fees they’ll pay or what happens if market conditions change before execution. Failed transactions can still consume gas, leaving users with a fee but no completed action.STXN is developing programmable transactions that allow users and applications to define how, when and under what conditions blockchain activity should occur.In this episode, we discuss:What smart transactions are and how they workWhy Ethereum transactions failWhy failed transactions can still consume gasHow users could control transaction timing, fees and execution conditionsHow scheduled cryptocurrency payments could workWhat a decentralised time oracle isWhy blockchains need reliable ways to coordinate timeHow conditional execution could improve Ethereum applicationsWhat programmable transparency means for companies and governmentsWhether better transaction infrastructure can make blockchain useful to mainstream usersBoris and Anuj also explain why existing crypto products remain difficult for ordinary users and how programmable execution could support payments, decentralised finance and automated blockchain applications.The conversation examines whether smart transactions can reduce failed execution, wasted gas fees and the complexity that continues to limit Ethereum adoption.--🎧 Listen now and stay ahead of the next wave of blockchain innovation.🔗 Get the STXN app & learn more: STXN.io🔗 Follow Us: www.thinkingonpaper.xyz--Timestamps: (00:00) Ethereum’s biggest problem?(04:30) Why Ethereum transactions fail(08:00) What are smart transactions(14:10) How Ethereum’s UX is broken and what STXN is doing about it(17:45) The traffic jam problem, or why Ethereum gets clogged(23:34) Decentralized time oracle(36:02) Google, AI & surveillance(42:33) The crypto philosophy50:10) Blockchain incentives(55:57) Time-locked transactions--#ethereum #blockchain

Disruptors and Curious Minds. Welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper, where we take you behind the scenes of the latest in emerging tech to help try and connect the dots to what it means for the future of humanity, what it means for you as a parent, as a business person, as an entrepreneur, as someone like Mark who just jumps on a snowboard and runs down big hills all day long. Mark Fielding, what are we learning about today? What's going on? That's not my job. Today we are learning about time travel on the blockchain. We're learning about smart transactions. We're learning about real-time adaptability.

We're building verifiable time machines on Ethereum. And I know that sounds pretty scary and it is quite technical. But thinking on paper, we write things down. We help you understand what they really mean. So we're going to be trying to understand about how we time travel on the blockchain. Our guests are Boris Mamiluk and Anurz Das Gupta from STXN. That's Smart Tracks Action Corp. I don't know if they have a more nifty way of saying that.

But welcome to the show. Well, real quick before we bring those guys on, folks, stay tuned. We've got all your favorite segments coming up. We got Mark Fielding's hot buttons. We've got the news. We've got the carryover question. All of that fun stuff. So this will not be as scary if you're reading and listening to Book Club with us as scary.

is the last chapter of Nexus that we unpacked, but time travel, entropy, all the fun stuff. Let's bring on Boris and Anoush. Hi, Mark. Hi, Jeremy. Good to be here. So in our pre-production chat, we talked about you guys have a history with each other. You know each other have been working together for about seven years. We always like to start with one question because your technology is very interesting, but it's a little complicated. It's kind of next level deep blockchain. So what do you tell your friends and family that are not technical when you're, you know, breaking bread, you're sharing some dinner, sharing a lunch.

What do you tell them about what you do to give them a little leg up in this whole thing? Yeah. I mean, I usually tell people that, you know, you don't need to care about blockchains because, I mean, let's be honest. I mean, it's kind of useless because when was the last time most people did a trade, really? It's not for everybody. but if WhatsApp or Telegram or Airbnb shuts down, even for 30 seconds, WhatsApp shuts down, I think there's going to be like a crisis.

It's going to be on the news, but not if Ethereum shuts down for three hours. Most people won't even know with what. Oh, yeah, what about that thing? And that's going to change with what we do because you're going to build real applications on the blockchain. That means you can get your favorite apps. You don't have to think about who is stealing my data,

what's happening to this and that. is a real person behind the scenes. All of that trust, not a problem. Blockchain. That's the promise of blockchain, and that's what we want to bring to everything. So that's what we tell people that, you know, that soon they will be invested in blockchains.

Yeah, if you think about transactions in blockchain or just regular day-to-day non-blockchain life, you think about swapping one asset for another, or you may think about sending or paying right for, a loaf of bread. Smart transactions introduces the idea of programmability to individual transactions.

Imagine if you can encode conditional logics. What you can do is you can create arbitrarily complex transactional chains that enable new forms of economic exchange, new types of social organization.

So smart transactions in a nutshell is making transactions programmable. It puts the power of smart contracts and individual transactions. And the utility of that and the applications of that really touch everything from point of sale payments

all the way to really complex financial derivatives upon derivatives upon derivatives. Because of the blockchain, is this something that you have done specifically that didn't exist before? Is this an improvement protocol? Like where does this come from? transaction is anything that you do online like we have a conversation i'm seeing something you're saying

something in return that's a transaction so on chain or online you're paying for something and the next thing you know the thing is shipped to you that's a transaction so ethereum already has transactions where i want to send you eat so you request to eat i send you eat that's a transaction but what we are doing is currently for most people if you want to use ethereum it's kind of complex it's not easy you know, products that are built in a not smart way makes smart people feel they are not smart. But if something is built in a really smart way, even the dumb people feel they are smart

because that's the beauty of building something smart. And blockchain are not smart. Let's be honest. I mean, it's not usable for most people. It's not like an iPhone where anybody, even if we trained if we use an iPhone. And so what really is we took the existing transaction that exists, how it works and everything.

you're not changing that. You don't have to fret about it because with our system, if you pay the wrong person, it'll come back to you. Like, you can have rewards and rules. That's like you do in regular banking transactions, you know. So, you know, that's what we're adding. Let me see if I can throw this analogy out at you, and this could be a completely ridiculous analogy,

but I'm going to give it a rip. So right now the way many people understand blockchain to be is there are different chains. You know, there are different protocols, different layer ones, layer twos, all of that kind of stuff. And if you look at each of these protocols as a single lane highway, right? And you have these interactions happening down all of these single lane highways. Now, are what you saying that your technology can do is make better use of the interactions

that happen on these single lane highways and also between single lane highways? So is this like a multi-chain? kind of enablement or does that is that something completely off the mark? We can we usually think of blockchains as being that highway that only goes in one direction. It's a append only ledger. The traffic can only go in one way. And so as a result, if there's a traffic jam, if it's rush hour traffic on the 405 freeway in LAX, you're stuck. You're stuck for three hours. What we're doing at STXN in relation to this analogy is something like a hyperloop, but it's a open source hyperloop that goes underneath the highway, across the highway,

allows for bidirectional travel, hence the time machine dimension and the time travel dimension in Ethereum, and enables right overhead, uh, overhead. head crossing. So what we're doing is we're augmenting the capacity of the blockchain ecosystem, primarily within Ethereum land, which is Ethereum and its peripheries and its adjutons, but also a cross-chain with time. So could this be like traffic cop, air traffic control kind of thing, a little bit, optimization of routes and paths? You can think of it like that. So, yes. I mean, it's also a big part of it is just like you are able to, like what smartphone was to a phone, it's something like that. It just makes it more easier to use because

right now most people using blockchains, they're kind of scared of if they make a mistake, the money is stuck. Like, there's nothing you can do about it, but with what we call time travel, which is, you know, it's like in Gmail. If you send a wrong email, you get the five seconds to, you know, say undo or unsend or something like that. That's like I can't travel. Like you did something and it almost gives you, I'm not the literal text, you don't actually go in the past on Gmail,

but it gives you the feeling that as if you have second thoughts, you can always cancel. So simple things like this make it so much smarter. Yeah, and to add a data point so that this doesn't come across as just subjective, you know, impressions, especially when we're throwing around words like dumb transactions and smart transactions. One in five transactions that are submitted through the most popular Ethereum wallet

end up failing. Imagine one in five cars never make it to their destination, but nevertheless end up spending money and time on gas, end up spending precious resources to make the journey, but they never arrive there. The audience will agree that's a pretty dumb mode of transportation. That's a pretty dumb setup, especially because you can't really control for transaction inclusion.

You can't really guarantee that you're going to be one of those four-fifths that ultimately ends up at their destination. So that's a pretty bad setup. That's a raw deal. We're not the only team within Ethereum that's tackling this. That largest wallet that we were just mentioning has their own approach to smart transactions that they introduced that promises to have 99.9.9.9. percent transaction inclusion rates, cheaper transaction flow, and so forth. There are proposals

from people like Vitalik himself, who introduced an Ethereum on proven proposal called 7702. The promises to make Ethereum wallets, Ethereum addresses, rather, act as smart contracts in particular contexts, which is kind of like putting the power of smart contracts in specific types of transactions. And so there are a lot of. lots of teams that are tackling this problem space head on. What we're doing, what differentiates us is we are committed to doing so in a maximally transparent, maximally Ethereum manner, as opposed to taking a shortcut, which is just privatizing the plumbing, privatizing the transaction flow, building what are

known as private memples, and giving great transaction inclusion rates. but at a pretty severe security cost. And so that's our chief differentiator, which is we are Ethereum's to the core. We've been here since the very beginning. And our commitment is to get this right because the cost of failure is just too high. Not just for us as a team,

but for the ecosystem as a whole, for humanity as a whole, without sounding too grandiose. Real quick, Mark, I've got a quick follow up on that. Something you mentioned, Boris, I thought was really interesting. So the programmable nature of smart contracts, but incorporated into these transactions,

is that where you're kind of leaning on there? Correct. Greatly simplified, because ain't nobody got time to write a smart contract and deploy it on the blockchain. As Anoush said, that flow, that Ux flow is first-gen nerd speak. Right now in order to actually use blockchains, you need new infrastructure that makes this incredibly easy.

Okay, can I speak as somebody, this is my kind of technology? I'm not a developer, but I am heavily into farming air drops and exploring blockchain and trying to work out where the interesting protocols are. I've had a lot of transactions blocked. I've had a lot of transactions failed. I think we're speaking now to a crypto-native, audience. Sorry if you're listening and you're not a crypto native, but I think that this is going to be really invaluable for crypto native people to understand what you're actually trying to do here.

So, first of all, could you explain why four out of five transactions fail, for whatever reason that is? And then explain how programmable contracts alleviate that? Problem first. Yeah. So the huge failure rate currently has to do with two things. One is sort of default settings in a lot of wallets that set seemingly reasonable tolerances for a particular transaction. So let's say a slippage tolerance or a gas fee that are reasonable for most situations,

but in moments of heavy network congestion or, yeah, it's just, heavy usage, those might be inadequate, and so you have entire batches or swaths of transactions where you're sitting at a computer, you're trying to click on a button to save a position from being liquidated, and you're just getting failure upon failure upon failure, which compounds. So that 20% failure rate, or 15 to 20%, depending on the wallet or depending on the blockchain, it isn't just consistent or predictable. It often comes in surges, where you have periods of relative low congestion, everything's going smooth, much like your highway analogy. And then there's a traffic jam, there's a crash, and everything goes to smithereens.

And you can have a situation where you're ready to pound the monitor because you're having failure upon failure upon failure. That's reason number one. Reason number two has to do with the block production chain, the actors who are involved in the process of bundling transactions together and ultimately submitting them to validators. And those bundlers, transaction searchers, are optimizing for high-value transaction bundles, which they can then exploit in what's known as MEV, maximumly extractable value. So they can structure the transaction chain in such a way that they can sandwich trades and so forth. And these two elements combine to exacerbate the problem.

And there are, of course, a lot of additional kind of problem sets within that as well. I love that we're staying in this traffic analogy. In continuing this, so Boris, you mentioned the idea of default settings. And I think this is common in a lot of different technologies. Like, you think about this video conferencing thing that we're working. on right now back in the day it took a lot of know-how to get video and coded and decoded and muxed and demuxed and all of that kind of stuff but now it's very easy to do so the analogy back to the road would be like hey if everyone was at cruise control at you know 62 miles an hour perpetually

without taking into account the turns and the things and all of that kind of stuff um i think i'm starting to see that you're now enabling um automatically some of the magic that the experts have to people that don't actually have access to that magic. Yeah, and lest we, you know, be seen as being sort of a crypto project serving only crypto natives, Mark, to your point, it's really important to point out that although we're doing deep Ethereum infrastructure, we're also app developers. And so we have demos for smart transactions that are live, that are in prod. We have hundreds of thousands of beta testers, essentially, real humans.

They're clicking buttons to do socially useful work and are being rewarded by protocols. And so, again, without embellishment, without exaggeration, right now as we speak, we have two apps that are the easiest entry points for crypto-curious people to go from zero to full-fledged Ethereum on the market full stop. And that's something we're incredibly proud of. Available in every single market that Google and Apple serve rated E for everyone.

Huge accomplishments because of the highly politicized, geographically bounded nature of blockchain politics and global governance. And so again, less we be misconstitutional, construed as being Ethereum nerds for Ethereum, we are launching and running apps that are open to everybody and that are inviting completely new network participants that may not even know that this is run on smart transactions

or that all of this is happening in Ethereum. What are they doing on the apps, the five-year-olds, or anybody, what would a crypto-curious person be doing on one of these apps? Yeah, so you had mentioned are these financial apps? And straight off the bat, no, absolutely not. So they include very similar or functionally equivalent utility to what is known as a wallet or a crypto wallet app. So they generate private keys, they generate Ethereum addresses. You can do wallet type stuff with these apps, but they're not financial in nature. One of them, which we launched, just a few weeks ago, and we already have more than 50,000 users is an app called Block Clock. It's an app that opens to a button. You press it, and it sends your local machine time, your phone time, to our decentralized backend. The backend compiles all these timestamps and builds a consensus time.

So it's a crowd clock. In technical terms, it's a decentralized network time protocol. So the way that we get time usually is in a very centralized server client model. There are a few atomic clocks, there are a few authoritative timekeepers that spit out time signatures to billions of people all around the world. That works most of the time, pun intended, but there are occasional async or the clocks go out of sync with catastrophic effect. Catastrophic on the markets, catastrophic in terms of entire platforms going down. And so it's really important to have an alternative and an additional way of keeping track of time that is not reliant on centralized time. And so what we did is we flipped the script and we built the decentralized network time protocol that's live in an app.

99.9% of the time, again, pun intended, it's going to be showing the same time that we're getting from the atomic clocks. But in those rare instances where it's saying, uh-oh, the clocks are out of sync, the world's clocks are out of sync, we generate a very valuable market signal and a very valuable kind of tech signal. It's like an Atlassian dashboard just for time. And that's just the front-facing utility. Behind the scenes, we also have a pretty naughty Web 3 browser that's built into our app. And like we said earlier, like full key management. So you go from literally zero. You don't need to buy anything.

We're not selling you anything. You go from zero to installing an app contributing your timestamps. and being rewarded by a protocol for doing that. We think that's pretty cool. So feeding my information based on what my timestamp locally says, feeding the platform with that is, so I'm helping you with time. Right, so check this out. Disruptors of Curious Minds,

if you call back to when Mark and I completely unpacked Carlo Revelli's The Order of Time, if you want to jump in and nerd out on time and entropy and all of that stuff, that episode. But Boris, this is really cool. So what, what sort of outputs? How long has a block clock been up and running? Less than two weeks. And we got more than 50,000 timekeepers. What, what's the biggest takeaway in the last two weeks that like blew your mind about like? Because you always, when you start something, it's like, hey, we're going to try this and you have intentions of what it might look like. What's the most surprising thing in the last two weeks that's come out of this experiment for you guys? The most surprising thing is the old Ethereum adage. And it's

not only Ethereum, right? Incentives drive behavior. Incentives matter. So the reward for clicking the button is a token called time token. It is currently on our test net. So it's not like you can quote unquote cash out and buy other cryptocurrencies for it. It's a fake imaginary cryptocurrency. for now. Nevertheless, we have hardcore timekeepers that are publicly bragging about hitting the button thousands of times. So one guy on Twitter or on X was saying, I've got more than 3,000 time tokens. And these are people, right, who have lives, who have families, they're tapping the button doing useful work because they understand that we wouldn't have launched this unless it was, useful in the hope that their protocol rewards are going to be are going to be worth something or doing you know doing something meaningful that's really really cool and that's really surprising

you know everybody thinks blockchains are only about money but at the same time time is money so we are taking blockchains back to time and that was nakamoto never that's what Nakamoto called it. Nagamoto did not call it blockchain. He used the word time chain to refer to what we now call blockchains. So Nagamato was all about time. He was so a big part of our work is inspired

among many things, Nakamoto's own words about what he was trying to do. He was trying to invent a way for people to make sure that every 10 minutes is 10 minutes. And that 10 minutes would not be just based on atomic clock, but people talking to each of them. and figuring out, is this good enough for 10 minutes?

And I think that's a more organic human sense. Like, it's almost connect the psychological sense of time with the physical labor of time, which, you know, clocks don't give clocks. Sometimes something seems like 10 minutes, but it's actually one hour. But here, when you actually do the work and it's actually 10 minutes, it's actually 10 minutes in Bitcoin. In the case of our case, you actually create a time

everybody to a collective. is the world's first collective democratic time is what we are built. And I want to play my stupid question card because I don't understand where the smart transaction is taking place. Like what needs to happen in Ethereum in all the layer twos? Is it taking place on the DAP? Where is it taking place and follow-on question for a user like me? What's the experience look like?

What do I have to know? What do I have to do to make a smart transaction to, so I don't get foot run by the box and I can actually get some benefit from this smart transaction? Any wallet that you use, there will be a kind of a button to enable smart transactions. And the moment you enable, you suddenly have new features in transactions. Those switches could be, please have my transaction, whatever you're doing on Jain, happen in this amount of time. or please take 0.001 eat every month because I'm subscribed to some kind of service

or never make sure that I cannot receive funds from an address originating from North Korea. You know, all these kinds of stuff will be automatically done. Any wallet or any system could enable this and you just have to do yes. And then it will be like a conversational dialogue. Like I want to do this and do that and it will figure out how to make that happen. That's for a user. And from infrastructure perspective, we are purely L1. So it's not L2.

It's very core Ethereum. So we are working with currently Ethereum has a PBS model. So there are people who are building the blocks and people who are called basically solving the MIV. They're called MEPB solvers or searchers. And we're working with these actors like core Ethereum validators and nodes that you keep the system. them up. We're working with them to add these services on the server side and the user all have to do is just like enable the or in the case of block clock you have to do nothing. Just download that and magically you send time which has almost no financial value unless the

financial as it. But it is so smart it can still get confirmed, which is currently difficult in as you can imagine. So yeah, when 7702 hours. not a consequence of 7702. It's kind of the other way around in many ways. But more interestingly, it's like, you know, sometimes a time comes for an idea to happen and then different people say calculus was invented by Newton and Leibniz independently.

So it's a bit like that. It is time, puns intended, for, you know, time to be democratized for smart transactions to be here. So, you know, Vigalik has his own proposal. We have our own. But, you know, we do your friends. So we, you know, crossball the neck, of course.

All right. Hey, let's move the hot buttons. Stretch it out, guys. Here we go. Mark Fielding. Just so people are listening, what they're wondering what hot buns is. Think Daniel Carneman thinking fast, thinking slow. This is thinking fast.

One question, one word answers. Might be related to technology. Might not. Question number one, Boris. Vitalik or Gavin? Wood. Vitelek. Anuj, what's your

superpower? One word. Dandraal. Boris, jazz or classical? Classical. Anuj, the benefit of blockchain in one word. Dime. Boris, Memcoins. To the moon.

That was good. Just on the Memecoin question because I know in the pre-show you said, ask us anything. So maybe you love meme coins, maybe you don't. But both of you, what do you really dislike about what's happening in blockchain today? Rampant fraud. It's so easy.

And this is, you know, the bitter with the sweets. So the same thing, the same superpower that allows blockchain to be this really transformation in human. consensus and human social organization, right? These are consensus engines, not just financial tools. This isn't just financial infrastructure. This is general purpose consensus. The same thing that makes them so powerful, which is their permissionless nature, anybody can do whatever they want on chain, is one of the kings in the armor, which is that malicious actors can do really malicious things on chain, often without any accountability

or for the time being without any accountability, but their reckoning is coming because what happens on chain stays on chain and it's ultimately going to be easy to track them and bring them to justice. But there's a ton of fraud. Satoshi says a certain amount of fraud

is accepted as unavoidable. Anouche has a terrific blog analyzing this part of the Satoshi lore, we think it is regrettable, it is lamentable, and it's a major problem that we all have a collective duty to reckon with in combat. But if you can go back in time,

you can fix those things. And that's our pitch to like how to avoid scams. Like what if every time we invest some money, you just put some sort of a time lock. It's say, I give you money, you can do whatever you want with my money. but just give me two months where you do whatever,

only thing is you cannot take the money out of the blockchain. You cannot cash out. And at the end of two months, you have to agree on some conditions, like if you didn't do this or if you used this and that way, it would automatically give in back to you. So it could be as simple as if you cashed out in these countries in the world, with these addresses in the world,

automatically, you cancels those transactions. and give me back my money. Let's hit the news. I want to hit the news because this kind of ties in with what you guys are talking about. Blockchain is definitely in the news and obviously AI has been in the news and increasingly more so. These two questions kind of relate to both of those things. So the first, there's been a lot of talk out of the World Economic Forum, Davos, recently,

about blockchain possibly being the killer use case for. blockchain being keeping track of the data that's used in training models for AI, controlling the biases, and that sort of thing. What do you, what do you guys think? Is that the killer use case for blockchain? The killer use case for blockchain is that there is no single killer use case for blockchain. It's like saying what's the killer use case per paper? Paper can be used for anything from rolling dubies to writing sonnets. Paper is all powerful

because of its manifold utility. So too with blockchains. And so everybody, and, you know, in one's blockchain journey, it's common, right, to search for the killer use case. It's sort of like that Eldorado, that, yeah, that prize.

I'm guilty of that. I had a couple of blocks saying that, hey, this is the blockchain. killer use case. But over time, you kind of gravitate towards like the real genius of Ethereum, which is a Turing complete programming language. It really expresses an infinite range of future possibilities, and that's brilliant. And the fact that you have tens of thousands of people who are contributing to keep this range of future possibilities infinite to the

infinite garden makes for pretty awesome. invention. So Davos folks, like the the wealth folks, right, they're coming with their own biases, their own, you know, their own preconceptions and their own agendas. And the biggest agenda that they're advocating is classifying blockchains as financial market infrastructure. Because that's the easiest way for them to capture

blockchain processes and blockchain actors. What they're doing by tying AI with blockchain is another backhanded way at effectuating capture. And we need to be very, very skeptical and very critical of those overtures, especially when it's coming from policymaking circles. That being said, the crypto AI intersection is the hottest, most bleeding sort of slice of frontier tech right now. And there are amazing teams that are building at this intersection. There's a project called Jensen that's essentially putting AI inference on chain. And there are a lot of projects in this category that are most important. Live in production with real users, real value that's being

created. And that growth curve is just exploding right now. And that's a really, really exciting place to be. But whenever there's talk about policymakers sort of having figured out how they're going to govern AI and blockchain, all sorts of alarm lights should be going off because that's danger, Robinson. That's danger. Well, here's a couple quick things that I pulled out of that Boris. And that was great, very articulate answer. And paper the original technology, we think on paper here, right you mentioned AI inference on chain so mark and i are i haven't told mark this yet but mark and i are creating a startup where we are going to put human aha moments on chain which is the the messy gushy equivalent of AI inference uh question number two or news point number two guys

so google made some big changes to its AI principles i don't know if you guys saw that or not so so basically in a nutshell um miraculously due to you know the timing of the things that that are going on in the states that we all know about, change of regime and all of that stuff, they're removing all the language and lifting all bands on using AI for weapons and surveillance. We are reading Harare's text Nexus right now, which is pointing a lot of this stuff into the light.

But like, what do you, how does that make you feel? Like, what is that going to mean for folks as we move forward with such a big folks? organization like Google doing something like that. I mean, at least they're not pretending anymore. So that's a good start. So I think that, I mean, you know, nobody in crypto is surprised.

Why do you think not a single major corporation has any actual inroads in crypto, like real inroads? I mean, they provide, you know, compute space this there and the other. It's okay, but not like a real, you know, they have like all these. companies have really embraced AI and other things and the own thing. But crypto, everything they do, I mean, for the people inside crypto really have been OGs, it's a kind of a joke every time they do something.

And it's not like they don't have good engineers. They have some of the best people working on some of the best things. But they just don't seem to touch crypto. I mean, you could have companies like Apple, creates absolutely amazing products. They could create a product for a crypto that anybody could use easily. and there is money to be made, but why do you think they would never do that? Because there's something inherently

ethical about crypto and that of course, you know, I mean, it's not, it's not good if you want to just be like, you know, for name only, you just want to say we're doing the right thing for people. I think they are afraid, but they also don't understand it,

the power of it. Absolutely. Yeah, they're terrified. I mean, anybody that from the casual user to Ilya, Andrei Carpati, Elon Musk, anybody that deals with Frontier models should be terrified. I mean, I don't know

if you've, you guys, I'm sure the audience has already started playing with ChatGPT's operator. Have you guys just showed hands? Have you played with the operator? Chat GPT's operator. It's spooky, capable, equally spooky in what it refuses to do. So going back to what Anouge was saying with an imagined ideal UX for smart transactions,

being able to interact with a wallet and give it general parameters on what you want to accomplish, i.e. keep my funds safe or grow my funds or get me into XYZ social club as an example. If you ask operator right now, Chad GPT's operator and Chad GPT, let's not forget, owned, co-founded by Sam Altman, who is the co-founder of WorldCoin and WorldCain and is a self-proclaimed Ethereum OG in his own right. You ask operator, hey, can you help me with private key management? Or, hey, I want to give you an Ethereum private key in order to do some experimental research stuff on Ethereum. Chat Chpc suddenly throws up all sorts of red flags, folds, operator says, I don't know what to do and basically crashes.

So, yeah, they're terrified. From Google to chat GPT, we have first-hand experience with this, kind of with this nexus. And yeah, to answer your question, they're absolutely terrified. And to Anusia's point, a big part of it is because they have no idea themselves what these models are capable of. big proof is Facebook because Facebook a few years ago tried to launch their own cryptocurrency. And it was a disaster to the point that somebody should make like 10 movies about it. Like you cannot make shit up. It's like kids would write a movie about how to run a startup.

And they're a successful company. Just when it's cryptocurrency, all their success went down the drain. Like as if these are forgot how to do everything and anything. like from the policies legal to the tech, to the hiring, to the attitude to the perception with other crypto companies and the crypto at large, just absolutely abysmal. And, you know, and after that, they have not touched at all crypto and they lost enormous money and no other, it was a cautionary tale for every other big company. That it is such a good thing like crypto is inherently big cop resistant.

something which is so moving. I mean, we don't have that. People think about, you know, the far right, the far next, but we already have something in tech, which is completely resistant to all this big company takeover. And it's crypto. Because no big company has successfully been able to take over crypto. And it's enormous wanted to be made.

Anous, very interesting point, right? Because large companies have their audience, have their influence, have their control over certain things. and crypto inherently kind of flips the script on that, or let's call blockchain, flips the script on that, allowing less of, you know, changes the forces, right? Changes the forces of who can access what and how they can access and that sort of thing.

I think you're onto something there, for sure. Crypto is neither left or right. That's all the great part. Like, you don't think crypto is just communist hating the big government or the big companies or far-right people heading the big government. No, it's like all kinds of people. It almost doesn't even matter.

They're taking so much superior to all of that. Like, I've seen in conferences and settings like crypto people who are really far right and far left working together, like there ain't no problem because they know this is crypto. They're able to transcend that divide. And that, you know. You were talking about analogies earlier and pop culture. A really great metaphor that comes to my analogy is the Hotel Continental. in the John Wick series. Okay, you know the Hotel Continental

is the neutral ground. And if you have a specific coin, it doesn't matter what mafia you belong to, what crew you belong to. You can get into this Hotel Continental. You can feed yourself, you can rest up, and you can feel safe. And that's crypto.

In John Wick 4, they blow up the Continental and they rebuild it. But with that analogy, it was right in question afraid what happens

when they act on that fear yeah when these big tech companies governments that as you've just described it

if they act on that fear do we get John Wick 4 we've been on the receiving end of that in blockchain

for many years like this is Operation Showpoint 2.0 I don't know if you're familiar with that phenomenon

you know massive not just debanking you know you often hear about debanking of crypto companies, like even huge companies with billions of dollars of turnover,

but as consequential, if not more, is deplatforming. And so for the longest time, if you use the C word in a Google ads campaign, crypto, you were automatically censored. Your ads could not run. I mean, just think about that for a second. Think about that on a larger scale, the whole net neutrality thing. So whoever's controlling the pipes higher and higher up, like who lets what? through and for what purpose, right? And the whole thing gets really scary. So I want to flip the

script because we, we, we, um, we tend to go down the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, is the, the, the, is a book, which was, yikes, pretty, uh, pretty, it was a doozy. Um, let's, let's, let's talk about the carryover question we have from, from, from last episode. And I think this is, this is a good one. And, and the question was, how do we make sure everyone can use technology and make sure that technology is applied for good? We mentioned demo block clock, which is sort of the doomsday clock. It detects when AGI has thrown the world's clocks out of sync and Y2K is going to happen, but for real this time, right? That's the dystopian. And then we have the Yang.

to that, which is an app called Clean App, powered by smart transactions. It's been around for many iterations for more than a decade. And Clean App is an app it opens the camera and it invites people to submit photos of waste and hazards that they come across. So you're at a playground. You see syringes or you see cigarette butts. You can clean it up, but chances are you're there with your kids. You don't want to get your hands dirty. You just want to play with your kids. So you take a photo and in the not too distant future, you're going to have optimists and other robots that are going to come in your real time and clean it up. And so this is a technology that's as solar punk and emancipatory and, you know, ferretto optimal to any future without it, as you can imagine,

politically and impeachable. And it's live on smart transactions. Is the robot around yet or is this kind of the early phases of it? Are we attaching the robot after? So yeah, so humans and bots. So right now in the protocol, there's an app where you can add a responsible party. So you draw a polygon and you say, I want reports from this area to go to, let's say, your personal email address or you want them to go to the city or the council, wherever you are. and those reports are forwarded along. And there's a lot of very valuable, you know, raw material, like resource that is in dump sites. So think about the recyclable value, cardboard, plastics, metals that can be and will be recaptured. And the main thing to emphasize here is this is an app, again, that's live in fraud, with 250,000 installs, tens of thousands of active monthly users.

and chances are you've never heard of it because so much of the rhetoric around blockchain is oh financial market infrastructure or meme coins or you know swap this swap that or stable coins and you have apps that are you know that are doing great that are scaling that are that are taking blockchain in a site with different direction

with all of those paths it's not one or the other or one is better than the other with all of them, all the lanes in our proverbial highway combining to make this, right, this beautiful, this beautiful yellow brick road. Hey, I love it. What a way to land the plane, guys. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been, this has been a great discussion. We'll definitely post some links where everyone can go check. I'm going to go download these apps. I guess we can get them from your website, right? Absolutely. Stxn.io and just follow the links. Follow the yellow brick road. So the question of secure data storage in space

would be a long time horizon question, which is what are the measures taken to assure data integrity 500, 5,000 years from now? And it's inspired by the long tomorrow clock in San Francisco and sort of deep thinking, which is the idea is brilliant. Let's make sure that the data is stored safely and the question is right knowing data degradation

kind of rates in like physical media what are the measures taken to assure that this data is going to be around in 50,000 years like those time horizons all right Mark we are backstage post smart transaction

discussions a bit of a headspin as always how did the analogy land when he talked about if we're in a one lane road and cars are overtaking us because of their knowledge of the road. But what they're doing is helping you, not a race car driver with knowledge of the road, being able to navigate conditions at a higher level that are technically above your pay grid.

Anything which makes my experience easier and less prone to malicious intent is there's a lot of UX problems with blockchain. There's a lot of, as they alluded to in the show, fraud, crime, idiots doing stupid things. And again, anything which makes my experience and other people's experience more enjoyable at the end of it is going to be a net positive for the space. It's going to bring more people in. So I like what they're doing. I have to say that anyone listening, we had a bit of a problem with connection at the beginning. but it smoothed out. And I think that Boris and Angejouj,

dropped some of the most poetic, powerful insight that was really you could genuinely hear they were speaking from a place of passion and belief that they've invested and are investing their life's work into this. And that was really, really, really nice to hear. Agreed. Agreed. And in this app that you could take pictures of things

that need to be cleaned up and those things with geolocation kind of fed to people that are able to, you know, help clean up those things. Coordination is a big piece of the puzzle. And I think that app, that framework is really interesting. I had a friend of mine in the real estate business. And there's a lot of things like residential real estate agents have to do during the course of managing multiple transactions and showing people houses and putting up signs and picking up signs and doing all these little things. And he's like, man, I wonder if there's a way to automate. pass like that and incentivize people that are just in the area to put a sign up for me or take

down an old sign. And I'm like, I'm going to point him to this app and just kind of see if maybe it could be used in that purpose. Really interesting. We need to have a show on incentives on blockchain crypto incentives because whereas I agree with the need for incentives, in my experience, most incentives on the blockchain are very, very small. And yet there's a lot of hope that they will get bigger. They're very small incentives, and I don't think that they last. They're not sustainable.

I think we need to have a psychologist on to talk about incentives and what incentives mean to the human dynamic and have that piece of the puzzle to understand why things work in coordination and that sort of thing. And then also, like, you know, what incentives are meaningful?

Like, you know, like you said, these incentives are really small. Is that going to push me over the edge to want to do something that I wouldn't normally do, which is kind of interesting, right? Make me coordinate with a larger group, you know, if I don't have the true passion to do that. I think it's an interesting piece to explore. Anyway, so with like the tie-in, again, I'm not a psychologist. I'm probably thinking about this wrong, but if you tie in the gambling and incentives, like the hope that you can make more, that you can win more, that the incentives

will grow is perhaps more powerful and more influential than the incentive. The dopamine release, we could probably get a neuroscientist to talk about that. I thought his answer on the Davos stuff was awesome because you have, like humans in general, like we all want to, you know, especially in these like hierarchical organizations, we want to like get our arms around something and call it and label it and, you know, careless linius back in the day going around looking at plants and saying, hey, I'm going to categorize this thing. I'm going to categorize that thing, and we're going to organize it. You know, and Harari in our book talks about bureaucracies that tag and organize and put things in place, right?

That's kind of what we want to do. But sometimes, you know, you have the hierarchy on top and you have the emergent on the bottom. Sometimes you need to give way to the emergent sometimes and actually do things and let things happen as well. Yeah, well, we're reading Nexus, so we don't need to speak about kind of personal. brand building and I think that I listen to some of these talks at Daros and yet obviously you get the CEOs and the founders of these big AI companies but then you have you have panels full of people with the agendas politicians who don't know what they're talking about and then you have on the other hand people like

Boris who could literally speak to an audience and make them understand and make them believe in a technology that they know about rather than you get these big displays of political my way I feel personally that they're just there a lot of the time because they have to be there. There has to be a political conversation about crypto or AI. It has to be there. And, okay, we'll get all our mates and the suits to go there and pretend that they're putting humanity first.

And like, I want to go back to your news article, I know, because it got me angry on the Google AI. They didn't say ethics. I think our former guest Reid was talking about this on social media today, about everyone's scared to say ethics now. Now, that website, I'm sorry, but you can't put a few butterflies on a really nice white website with some very, very well-designed spacing between your images of butterflies and peace and swirls. And then have, it just reeks of desperation to me.

I didn't like it. And the timing of everything, too, is like, unbelievable, man. Like, I just, let, I pulled some of these quotes here that, you know, I don't want to you know, belabor this, belabor this too much. But, well, so that, so per Wired magazine, which is where I did some research on this, Kevin Kelly, the original founder and Maverick of Wired magazine will be on the show. Per Wired, quote, the company removed language promising not to pursue technologies that cause or are likely to cause harm, weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,

technologies that gather or use information for surveillance, violating internationally accepted norms, technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights. All that language has been removed from the butterflies. What do we do, Mark? we keep asking questions, we stay curious, we keep thinking on paper, we keep our head above the noise and find our own understanding of what is happening. Thinking on paper.xy Z, I'm Jeremy, this is Mark, that's all for today. No, it's not. If anyone is still listening on the Kevin Kelly, we have 10 signed copies

of Kevin Kelly's new book to give away. We have 10 seats to the recording of the show where you'll get to be. Behind the seat. with us and Kevin Kelly when we're recording it go to thinkton on paper by xyz sign up and get in the hat you go view it to it stay curious be disruptive keep thinking on paper