The Pomp Podcast - Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK: A Corporate Ethereum Dystopiaal

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

Charles Hopkinson is a Colorado-based tech entrepreneur and mathematician. He's also the CEO of IOHK. In this conversation, Charles and Anthony Pompliano discuss why he didn't want to do an ICO, what Ethereum would have become had it gone with a corporate structure, what he did once he left Ethereum, IOHK and Cardano, where we're going, and what needs to happen to get there. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Charles Hoskinson is a Colorado-based technology entrepreneur and mathematician and the current CEO of Input Output Hong Kong. In this conversation, we discuss why he didn't want to do an ICO, what Ethereum would have become had it gone with a corporate structure, what he did once he left ethereum he gives an explanation of io hk and cardano and then we talk about where we're going and what needs to happen to get there i really enjoyed this conversation and i hope you do as well want to know who has the best url crypto.com that's right crypto.com they're a crypto platform with one goal motherfucking mass adoption that's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through

buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry. Your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to coinmine.com. You buy a coin mine it's like an xbox or a playstation that helps you turn your electricity into bitcoin that's right you purchase it it shows up at your doorstep you pull it out of the box you plug it in connect to your wi-fi five minutes or less you're mining bitcoin all you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new

features on a consistent basis kind of like how tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software, just your update in your CoinMine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out BlockFi.com

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but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with Charles himself. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for having me on. We are recording at the Wyoming Bitcoin and Crypto Conference. You've given a number of talks while you've been here uh before we jump into all that though let's go through your background you've done a bunch of stuff what was the first thing you did in crypto what'd you do before crypto before that was a mathematician okay it wasn't a particularly good one but uh you know i did a little bit of consulting a little bit of programming and i was trying to find my

place in life i was kind of a nomad so at one point i wanted to be a doctor because all my family does that my brother's a doctor my dad's a doctor grandfather's a doctor but i don't like people. So it's kind of not a field you go into if you're not a people person. So I said, all right, well, mathematics sounds fun. And I did that, but I really didn't want to climb the academic hierarchy. It's one of those like exercises in self-flagellation where you spend 10, 15 years getting abused, being completely poor. Then you get tenure and you're like, yay, I have tenure. Now I can do whatever I want and I'll still be paid little amounts of money, but I'll be a big fish in a small tank. So that wasn't particularly appealing, but then I was trying to figure out,

well, what do I do as a mathematician? Maybe I go into finance, maybe I'd be a developer, whatever have you. And I really, really liked things like Austrian economics and so forth. I'd worked on the Ron Paul campaign back in 2007. And so suddenly when Bitcoin came by, I said, wow, this thing's really cool, and this might be interesting. But I didn't think it was going to work. Anybody would adopt it.

Because I was in very early, in like 2011. People were still trading on spreadsheets. There weren't really stable exchanges. Nobody was taking it seriously. So it was a fun thing to do. It felt like a club and yet another one of those Austrian economic protest movements, but it wasn't a real movement. Then in 2013, that was kind of the bellwether year. All of a sudden, all this money came in.

Bitcoin hit a billion dollars. And I said, wow, this thing's probably here to stay, and it's going to move really quickly, so I should do something. The problem is I didn't know anybody. I didn't really have any job skills. I'm not particularly good at business, especially back then. So I said, all right, well, I remember what an old professor told me. He said, those who cannot do, teach. So what I did is I created a free class called Bitcoin or How I Learned to Stop Worrying or Love Crypto.

It was after, you know, Dr. Strangelove. And I released it on Udemy, and I said, all right, if anybody wants to sign up, sign up. And I ended up getting over 80,000 students for the class. Wow. How did you market it? I didn't. It was just viral. I put it on Bitcoin Talk and the Reddit and so forth, and people just shipped the link out, and they'd send it to friends and family.

And I met everybody through that. I met Roger Ver, Eric Voorhees, Andreas Antonopoulos. And back then, nobody was really that important and didn't really have a big ego. So they'd actually talk to you. You could send them emails. It almost reminds me of Minecraft. I was an early adopter there, and I used to send emails to Notch, and he would reply back. And then after he got really rich, he'd stop replying back.

I said, there's some sort of relationship here between wealth and power and access. But anyway, after I did that, one of my students was a Chinese guy. His name was Li Shailao, and he ran a fund called BitFund. And he said, hey, I love what you guys are doing. I'll give you half a million dollars to start something. I said, well, that's a terrible idea. I don't have a business plan. I'm not an entrepreneur.

I don't know how to do any of this. He said, oh, I like the cut of your jib. You'll figure it out. So I said, all right, well, let me poll my students. And so I asked my students, if you had a half a million dollars, what would you do? And I got a bimodal distribution between two answers. Some group of people said stablecoin. Some group of people said decentralized exchange.

So I said, shit, let's put them both together and I'll create a forum post on Bitcoin Talk and see if anybody's interested in this. It's still searchable. It says Project Invictus. And I had this mind map and I said, I want to do this. Is anybody interested? Ironically, the very first person who replied was Dan Larimer, ByteMaster. And this was before anybody knew who he was. He was working as a contract programmer at some robotics company.

And he said, I have this crazy idea called BitShares. And I said, well, that looks interesting. So I called up Dan, and we started emailing back and forth. And we eventually decided to set up a company, and we set up something called Invictus Innovations. It was I3. It was Invictus Innovations Incorporated. It was a Virginia company. And I flew out and lived with Dan's father, Stan, and his mom, Pam.

And they had this lovely little farm out in Floyd, Virginia. It was right next to Blacksburg. And for a few months, I was working on bit shares with Dan. But, boy, we just started fighting every day. Really? Yeah, oh, God. It was miserable working with Dan. And he probably found it miserable working with me.

You see, the Chinese investor we had said, hey, there's this thing called an ICO. We should do that. And I looked at it, and this was back in 2013, pre-Ethereum. MasterCoin had just been done. That was the very first ICO. And I said, yeah, I don't know about that. You know, this seems like a securities offering. I don't know.

And the Chinese were like, yeah, yeah, but you guys go do that. It's easy for you to say that. You're in Beijing, right? You'll get liquidity, and I have to deal with it. We're in Virginia in the backyard of the United States. So eventually we just couldn't come to terms, and I took a buyout, and then I moved on. And when you and Dan were disagreeing, what were the disagreements on? I didn't want to do an ICO.

Oh, it was really around the ICO. Yeah, well, I mean, that was one of the things. The other thing was the lack of rigor in the project. Because Dan has this habit of going from A to D. And you say, what about B and C? And he says, oh, don't worry about it. That's a done deal. And you're like, well, no, that's not how you design protocols.

I've always been a guy who, like, we need to do things in a peer-reviewed way, in a structured way. We need to get third-party validation, these types of things. He said, no, that's not how this works. We need to be first to market. We need a momentum. We need to just release, and if we screw something up, we can fix it, yada, yada, yada. So there was just strategic disagreements, and then there was direction disagreements. And at the end of the day, his dad owned part of the company.

He owned part of the company. There was two Laramers, one Hoskinson. So I wasn't going to win that. And I learned early on, if early in a relationship you can't get along, don't try to drag it out and make it painful for everybody. Just go. Yep. So I took a buyout and, you know, I got some Bitcoin out of it. And then I was kind of unemployed for a little bit. And Anthony DiOrio reached out to me and he said, hey, for those that are listening, we are at the conference and we are in the room right now. And there's a baby and the baby is very enthralled with the conversation. So it's letting you know that that it's here. yeah so uh anyway uh anthony reached out to me and at the time he was running the bitcoin alliance

of canada and he knew me from my education work that i had done and he said hey can you create some educational content for uh bac and i said sure so i started doing that and about a month into it he said by the way there's this really brilliant kid and he gave me a white paper and i can't make heads or tails of it can you read it let me know what you think about it and i said sure i read the white paper and it was ethereum it was a overlay protocol on prime coin and Vitalik wrote it. And Vitalik knew Anthony because they both lived in Toronto and Vitalik was going to a meetup group in the Decentral meetup group. And anyway, after I read it, I said, there's a lot missing, but I think this could be something great. What are you guys doing?

And he said, well, we have this informal Skype meeting we're holding and there's a few people in it. If you want to join it, you're well more than welcome. And I said, sure. So I was the fifth person to join that meeting. The other four were Anthony, Mihalycia, Amir Chitreed, and Vitalik himself. So Vitalik knew Amir through Color Coins. He knew Mihalycia because they started Bitcoin Magazine together. And then he met Anthony from Decentral. And so basically, I came in in November, December of 2013 and started having conversations about how we should structure it, what we should do. And eventually, we just came to the conclusion that the only way we were going to move forward is if we all met each other. So Anthony said, look, we're speaking at the

North American Bitcoin Conference in January of 2014, I'll run a beach house and fly on down. And if you guys want to come, come and we'll see if we're assholes or if we like each other. And so we flew down there and the rest is kind of history in this space. We liked each other enough to try for it. We left Miami knowing that we had something very real and very significant. And there's really kind of two factions that were there. One were the developer or open source factions. The other was kind of the business arm. So in the business arm, there was Amir and Mihai and Anthony and Joe Lubin. And on the developer side,

it was Jeff Wilchie and Gavin and Vitalik. And I was kind of in the middle where I was sufficiently technical. I could talk to them and I had kind of enough business sense where I could talk to the business arm. So I tried to keep everything together and we had to make kind of a philosophical decision

about what to do with the project. And we call it the crypto Google or the crypto Mozilla question. So basically, do we create a for-profit, take some VC money, go build Ethereum and then release it like Ripple Or do we go and do an ICO like MasterCoin from a not-for-profit organization? So I made a very strong argument for Crypto Google.

I felt that if there weren't golden handcuffs and financial incentives, kind of all the founders would scatter to the wind the minute that we became successful and the project wouldn't have right governance. And there was a high probability we'd just spend all the money and it wouldn't work out so well. And initially, everybody was on board with that. It was an 8-0 vote, so no dissent. But it didn't sit right with Vitalik. And little by little, he started thinking about it. The project kept getting bigger. And by June of 2014, there were like 100 people that were doing various things.

There was like 1,000 people in the Skype group. So it was just too big. So we revisited that decision. And Vitalik decided unilaterally to go to Crypto Mozilla. And shortly thereafter, the whole business arm got devastated. So Amir and I left that day. We got pushed out. And then shortly after, Joe started ConsenSys and did his thing.

Anthony left and started Decentral. And then the developers started getting gutted. So Gavin created FDev and eventually Parity Tech, and then Jeff started doing video games. So no one actually stayed. So we were both right. He created a tremendously successful product, and I was right in that there wasn't an incentive to stay, but I guess it didn't matter regardless. What would have happened to Ethereum if you had gone with the corporate structure and everyone had stayed? What we were proposing was that we would own a for-profit Swiss entity.

It was called Ethereum Switzerland GmbH. And we would get some VC money, centralize the project there, build the protocol, and then release the protocol under our foundation and do the ICO with a finished product. I felt the risk to investors was significantly lower. And second, if we were going to have existential problems, they would occur under the for-profit structure under smart money. So we would have less risk of lawsuits and these types of things. So had we launched it, we probably would have looked a lot like Ripple in that respect. But the only difference being that there would have been an ICO still and it would have been done from a foundation. And there also would have been a clear separation of concerns between the founders and the custodians who do the ICO.

They would have been a separate board that was truly independent. So probably consensus and Decentral would have been rolled up into one entity that we own. So maybe that would have been a better model or maybe the model that they chose was better. It's one of those what-if games that you don't really know. When you left, what did you go do next? Yeah, so I was kind of in the hinterlands. You know, I was 0 and 2. You know, BitShares didn't work out for me, and Ethereum didn't work out for me.

And everyone was like, man, maybe this crypto thing isn't for you, Charles. And I said, ah, OK, maybe. But I got invited to do a TED Talk in Bermuda. And I said, OK, that'll be my capstone. I'll do my TED Talk. I'll leave the space, and then I'll go back into mathematics or something. Who knows? Maybe I'll sell cars.

I don't know. So I went and did the TED Talk, and people liked it so much that I started getting invitations to speak at other locations. And then somebody who worked on me on the Ethereum project, Jeremy Woods, said, hey, there's these guys in Japan that would really like you to build a cryptocurrency for them. I said, okay, well, I don't have a company, and I'm just one guy, and if we're going to do that, that's like a serious deal. We have to kind of figure this out. So I flew out to Osaka, Japan, and then basically Jeremy and I started talking to these guys. And we said, fine, let's build a company. So we formed IOHK.

We formed it in early 2015. And basically the idea would be that there's probably going to be a lot of money and a lot of desire for cryptocurrencies, but not a lot of scientific or engineering talent to service that money. So if we built a specialized firm that's kind of like a factory for cryptocurrencies, we'd probably do pretty well. And we basically went and did that. We got a contract and started getting paid. And then we started hiring lots of scientists and lots of engineers. And we started working on Cardano, and it was really what got us started.

I-O-H-K? Yes, Input Output Hong Kong. Where did that name come from? Well, Input Output was mostly just, we looked at cryptocurrencies as like regulating the inputs and outputs of society. So we say, okay, there's these new systems, and you put stuff in, you get stuff out. And we're now in complete control of how commerce, society, identity, property rights are going to work. So we like the association with kind of traditional engineering things. I.O. is like an engineering term, right?

But we also like that philosophical connection. And Hong Kong, because we got an Asia contract, and we were in Asia, and it was either Singapore or Hong Kong. And we went both, and we liked Hong Kong more, and we incorporated there. We eventually left Hong Kong. We're pulling assets out because of geopolitics and also because the Chinese government's really swallowing that country. But it was good for the time, and it was also a crypto haven back in 2015. There were a lot of crypto businesses there. Got it.

And so you start and the first thing you build is Cardano. Yeah, and it was a high-risk, high-return project. So basically we structured it like a DARPA project. We said, look, if we're going to build a cryptocurrency, then it's got to be worth our time. It's got to be worth the industry's time. It's very easy to fork Bitcoin or just take what Ethereum had done. It hadn't been released at the time, but there was a test that we could have easily just taken that like Tron did and just put some stuff on it and said, okay, we have a product now. Yay, and walked away.

We said, no, if I'm going to spend years of my life doing something, then let's do it right. So what we did is said, okay, if a system was to scale to billions of people and be useful for those people and be really a financial operating system for them, so their whole financial life lives in it from securities and commodities to currencies to their identity to their land, then what would it have to have? And we identified three areas to go do some research in. So the first was scalability, and we said the system has to get faster or stay at the same performance regardless of how many users it has. So as you gain users, you get faster, kind of like BitTorrent. When you download Game of Thrones, you get it really quickly because a lot of people are doing it. But if you download Pee-Wee's Playhouse, you get it really slowly because very few people download that. Then second, interoperability is a big deal because at the end of the day, there's going to be tons of these systems.

and if they can't talk to each other, it would almost be like Wi-Fi where your Samsung phone could only connect to a Samsung router or your Apple phone could only connect to an Apple router. That would just be a terrible user experience and Wi-Fi would be useless to us.

But because it's ubiquitous and it's a standard and we can talk to each other, it's now a very useful thing to society. So this is going to be the same way. These systems have to have protocols that allow you to move information and value between them.

And then finally, sustainability. The governance problem we have in this space is normally products are curated by a company or a federation of companies. So you have the iPhone to Apple or Windows to Microsoft. And so then there's that who pays and who decides thing. It's obvious. You say, oh, Microsoft is going to pay,

and they're going to decide the future of Windows. Great. And if I have faith in them, I have faith in that product. But we're trying to make the argument that these protocols are headless. Bitcoin has no leader, no controller. But at the same time, we're trying to say that this is a stable, great platform

to build your business on and stake your country's financial future on. And you say, well, if I don't really have an explicit way of understanding how will this protocol evolve or change and who will pay for it then i run into two problems one is the golden rule it's he who has the gold makes the rules so whoever's paying for it's probably gonna have a huge amount of influence over the roadmap and that's probably not you second there's the issue of well if we disagree we run into like a bitcoin bitcoin cash type of deal where you know suddenly the entire ecosystem forks and now you have two

where there was one and you have to pick sides and the minute you pick a side then you're a monster to the other side you go from bitcoin jesus to bitcoin judas and that's just really not a good thing for the ecosystem so we said if these are to be real in scale to this many users we need to have protocols that allow us to govern them to pay for things to print money to pay for things and to vote on improvement proposals in a way that people are okay with that reduce forks so these were the kind of three base philosophical research goals and we started from first principles so we said we're not going to assume anything proof of work proof of stake blockchain not a blockchain whatever we're just going to do a bunch of research so for the first two years of the

project 2015 2016 and a little bit in 2017 it was just pure r&d pure research we wrote tons of papers we did a boatload of research into proof of stake we learned a lot about all the the stuff in the industry like we actually wrote a formal mathematical definition for a blockchain it's called the gkl15 model we just did all this stuff we also did a lot of research into programming languages because we looked at smart contracts we said these are kind of necessary for the system to be useful, but then what makes a good smart contract language? What accounting system should we use? We formalized the UTXO system. We proved the UTXO system's equivalent to Ethereum style accounts. We did all this like broken window fixing along the way. Then at the end of that,

we said, okay, we have enough now to actually pivot and go from a research project to try to commercialize the technology. So then what we did is we started gradually building up a protocol. And the first milestone was just releasing it in kind of a federated mode, similar to how Ripple runs and just use it to get exchange listings get the philosophy out there and tell people what we're trying to do because no one had heard of cardano it was like did no marketing at all so for two years we were just silently sitting there and everybody thought i was dead they're like charles is gone who could no one invited me to anything no one really cared and then suddenly in 2017 we're like oh yeah by the way we got this protocol and here's all these papers and

i guess there's 100 people working here and all these scientists and everything oh that's what he's been doing for two years okay this is interesting so cardano released and immediately it hit the top 10 and for a little while we were worth like 30 billion dollars which was just batshit crazy i was like guys uh we're in a bubble this is bad for everybody uh and then it brought a huge amount of people into the ecosystem and then uh we were able to leverage that to learn a lot and then all throughout 2018 we started actually building uh the foundations of getting this into to market as a fully decentralized product so now we're in a position where we're just about to release the shelly release which is turning over the system from a federated state to a fully

decentralized state. And there's just a ton of innovations we made. The proof-of-stake protocol we have, Ouroboros, it does everything proof-of-work does. You have a bootstrap from Genesis property, which that basically means if you have multiple chains, you can pick the longest chain, the correct chain, without a checkpoint, just like Bitcoin does. We operate in a semi-synchronous model, just like Bitcoin does. We're 50% Byzantine tolerant, just like Bitcoin is. So we systematically built up this corpus of theory that matched Bitcoin security properties, And we did it through the peer review process. It wasn't trust Charles Hoskinson or his scientists.

We wrote a paper. We went to a major academic conference that accepted only 10% to 20% of the papers that were submitted. And they accepted the paper. Eurocrypt, CCS, crypto, and so forth. So there was like independent third-party validation that we're not saying crazy things. There's some reasonable merit behind the things we're doing. And what was really nice about what we've designed is the system is really decentralized. In fact, at launch, we can have 1,000 stake pools.

EOS is 21. Bitcoin has four major mining operations. So you're looking at 50 to 250 times more decentralized than the incumbents, which is a good point. The other thing is with Ouroboros Hydra, the protocol we're just about to publish, that's our sharding protocol. When you have a lot of these guys, they do different work. So you're no longer in a replicated system. You're distributed, which means the system gets faster as you get more participants, which was one of the original design goals. We also have a lot of other things, like we formalized sidechains.

It blew our mind that Blockstream didn't do this. This was their whole thing. They raised $76 million. They got all these great guys. We're like, oh, okay, cool. We'll just take whatever Blockstream's done. We'll modify it to work for us, and that'll be great. Then we looked, and it's like they didn't really do anything.

They said this was their whole business model. We're going to bring sidechains to Bitcoin, and all the innovation in the altcoin space will be dragged into Bitcoin, and Bitcoin will be the one chain to rule them all. It's like, great. And then it never happened. So we had to actually write all the theory out for sidechains. We created a paper called Nipipow's Instance for Non-Interactive Proofs and Proof of Work. Then we created an equivalent for that for proof of stake.

And basically we created a system where if I send you a transaction from a foreign system, I send it with a proof, and the proof does two things. One, it proves that the coins are real. And two, it proves the coins haven't been double spent, which is basically what you need to do to be able to have like clients or sidechains. So we built a whole corpus of theory and submitted a lot of papers for that. So we're bringing that into Cardano. And then finally, we just did a ton of PL research, which is why we're actually here in Wyoming. We thought about smart contracts a lot, and we realized that at the end of the day, smart contracts probably aren't going to be a world computer that replaces everything.

We go from Amazon now to Ethereum, and then we run the whole app there. The reality is you're still probably going to have server client for a lot of these things. But what you're going to do is you're going to take certain logic in your application that causes your app to be trusted, pull that out, and put it into a blockchain. Run that as a smart contract. That's the on-chain code, and the rest of the stuff will run off-chain on Amazon or Azure or something like that. So we designed a programming model that is very graceful in that respect. You write your off-chain and on-chain code in the same source file.

Off-chain is Haskell or whatever language you want eventually, and then on-chain is Plutus and Marlowe or DSL for that particular application, whether it be a financial contract or a supply chain contract or something. So we spent three years designing that with some really good guys. We hired the guy who created the Haskell programming language, and this is now the place where we're actually starting to show it off and get developers to tell us what we did wrong, the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, that process. What's next? Skrt, skrt. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com.

That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherfucking mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you.

Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to CoinMine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin.

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Kind of like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to coinmine.com. Tell them Pomp sent you and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor, BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi

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to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. What's next? Well, we got to get Shelly out, and that's all about decentralization, and that's a huge milestone unto itself. It's scary, you know? It's like having kids, and you raise them for a while,

and they live with you, and then they've gotten big enough to get a bicycle, and you're like, okay, please don't get run over by a car. So that's where we're at. And we're just about to release the network testnet this month. And in November, we're releasing the incentivized testnet. So people, when they stake, they actually make real ADA from that.

And then we'll get up to a certain critical density of stake pools. And then once we're there, we can fork the main network. And then the whole network is being run by third parties. Once we clear that, and that's a huge milestone, very shortly thereafter, we'll roll smart contracts into the system, turn it on. And then at that point, it's fully decentralized, and it has smart contracting capabilities. So it's basically like Ethereum in that respect, but just more decentralized and more performant. But then the next step is to turn on Ouroboros Hydra, where those stake pools now can shard the ledger, and then all of a sudden we get very high TPS with this system.

There's still a lot more to do on the network side and the storage layer to make it truly scalable, but that's a major milestone for us. And then kind of the last thing to do is put in the governance stuff. Tezos has been a really big leader in the space in that respect, and Dash has also been a leader in this space of having the conversation of what does it mean to participate and vote, whether they got it right or wrong, at least they had the courage to actually go ahead and do something. So there's a lot there. And we did write some papers on this. We wrote a liquid democracy paper out of Lancaster University. Bin Cheng Zhang is the one who did that. And we

created kind of a new voting system. So we created a Cardinal Improvement Proposal Process and a ballot system and roll the voting system in. And hopefully our community is able to use that. It's a big democratic experiment. For sure. One of the things that you've been talking a lot about here at the conference is regulation and the regulatory environment. Maybe talk a little bit about what the issues you see and kind of where we're going uh what needs to happen there well one of the biggest problems with bitcoin is it's blind deaf and dumb and that was by design uh and because if you're doing an experiment you're launching something you don't want to go do 90 things right you know it's like i'm going to see if smoking causes cancer and radioactive waste

we're like well if they get cancer it just tells you one or the other or both are causing that right or not or neither right so you want to design an experiment where there's as few variables as possible in a control group so you can kind of see if what your thesis is is true in case of bitcoin it was well will proof of work actually result in a decentralized system and will the token actually achieve value these were the two core features of the experiment but it never said okay we're also going to build a system that is able to replicate the world financial system and also is fully compliant with that system or capable of being compliant this was not in scope so now the fatf and regulators and these other guys are waking up and saying look we like what

you're doing and there's a lot of merit here but you got to make provisions for everybody else like for example contingent settlement so uh that's where a sends to b if and only if x y and z or whatever have happened multi-sig is an example of that you can only execute the transaction if alice and bob and jim signed the transaction but you can have all kinds of contingencies so for example imagine you have a for not-for-profit and you say uh anybody can donate to me as long as they satisfy X, Y, and Z. So those are contingencies for settlement. So it would be nice if you could bake that right into the address that you present publicly. And the only way I can send you funds is by satisfying those conditions. Maybe I have to sign it with a unique identifier. Maybe I have

to sign a contract and hash that and sign that and embed that into the transaction, saying I consent to the donation deed, all of these types of things. So that's a bread and butter of all finance nobody just sends you money for the sake of sending you money they need there's always a commercial story behind that then second we have this situation where the commerce is now divorced from the people behind it so we don't really have a notion of identity in these systems yet we're trying to figure out how do we install identity into these should this be meta to the system so outside of the system the problem is then that it becomes malleable so you can swap it and say oh that transaction actually belonged to charles and it was actually jim but no we're gonna make it

swap and make it look like it was from you. You don't get any of the benefits, the immutability, the timestamping, the auditability. So there's a lot of arguments of saying that these transactions, they need to be more than just push. They also need to be pulled. They need to have contingencies. They need to embed the story. They need to have provisions for identity. They need to be able to be smarter and have contracts baked in. And those may need to be templatable so that third parties can come in and reverse transactions or things like that. It's a big conversation and regulators are willing to have it with us example here in wyoming they're actually been very open but we as an industry have to be willing to have that conversation with them the problem with

maximalism is is that it basically says there's one god one gospel it is satoshi if there's any deviation from that vision then it's wrong and everybody else is going to have to change to accommodate us it's a very bad view and it doesn't cover things i mean i can't even do pull payments with bitcoin and that's like half of commerce right you find sign up for a subscription and every month netflix pulls out nine dollars or youtube pulls out this much money for youtube red well that's the bread and butter of most of our commercial systems and i can't even do that with this system easily so you have to concede that this is not necessarily a fit for perfect system and to say that i have to go off chain to build these things is saying now you have to centralize

your solution you don't solve your decentralized reality and your decentralized dream by by centralizing it. I'm sorry. That's just philosophically incompatible. So what we're working on with Cardano is now that we've built all these capabilities and we have more than 40 papers we've written and half of them have been peer reviewed, we know the tech works. It's more of a question of how do we steer this tech in a direction that is actually useful for people? Like if, for example, you're a small Ethiopian business that has great cash flow and you want to go and issue a security token. Okay, great. Well, you're going to live in a regulatory environment. So how do we build a toolkit for you to do that where you can comply with that

regulatory environment? And then we can go to the Ethiopian government and say, hey, we have this capability. Can you just tell us if it's legal or not? And this is essentially the idea of like taking the law and writing it into code. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then we as an industry can actually have that conversation as opposed to an individual basis. So it'd be great to collectively bargain. I can go to consensus and Blockstream and all these other guys, and we can all sit in a room and say, okay, this is what we want as an industry. Then we can collectively go as an industry to the government and say we are willing to implement this into code you just have to tell us if it's right or wrong or make changes to it and then we'll haggle for a while we'll come to

a compromise and then that code right there is signed by the u.s government suddenly you as an entrepreneur all you have to do is say my smart contracts have to inherit this requirement my address has to have this contingency built into it and now i'm in compliance not my opinion is compliance i have a basically a no action letter effectively from the u.s government saying you're doing this, you're okay. I don't have to hire a lawyer for that. I don't have to hire an accountant for that. I've completely circumvented this whole legal industrial complex that's formed to make people satisfy these compliance regimes. Second, it's super easy to globalize that because then you just pick the countries you're doing business with and you just put them right into the structure

of your contract, right into the structure of the transaction. What's the Algerian standard? What's the Mongolian standard? What's the French standard? Click, click, click. If my customer's coming from a new jurisdiction i can't say oh that's a high-risk customer high-risk jurisdiction you just say let me just grab the contract and if the customer is willing to satisfy those requirements then now they're in full compliance and it costs me nothing as a business to do that maybe my transaction fee goes up by a penny or something because there's a little extra computation but we now have a global system and if there's a problem in the contract we just as an industry go and fix it and we evolve from it we grow from it but it's all cumulative and we start converging

to global standards as opposed to this fractured system. Furthermore, you don't get sued by the regulator because you've established a mens rea and an intent to follow the law. And if they got it wrong, we got it wrong, we fix it, and then we just move on. So I think this is probably the single greatest feature of what our industry is doing is we're starting to realize that we're living in a global business environment, but we have a very fragmented, Westphalian notion of how karma should be. And we're saying we now have better tools to unify everybody and get people coordinate, cooperate with each other without giving up sovereignty. Because you're not telling Germany that they now have to correspond to be compatible with Chinese law or US law. You're

saying you get to decide what the standards are. And then I, as an entrepreneur, will now know that upfront and know how to comply with that. And then me and my customers, we have to sit down and make a decision. Are we okay with that? For example, if China does this, they're almost certainly going to put back doors in the system that will de-anonymize everything and potentially even give them custodianship over the assets. So then you will now know up front, if you do business in China, this is what it's going to be. And then the global marketplace will actually start making decisions accordingly and say, maybe I don't want them to have that. And so if countries have boneheaded bad policy, instead of just us silently dealing with it, they actually start losing

business and they start losing money. And the global market will start collapsing down on them and forcing them to change their standards. For sure. One question I want to ask before I finish up with some rapid fire questions is proof of work versus proof of stake. You've seen many variations. You've been involved in a lot of the more technical nuances of both systems and those variations. What's your take today in terms of in the steady state 10, 20 years from now, will we have proof of work and proof of stake? Will one be more dominant than the other? And is there any one variation that you're overly bullish on being kind of that dominant one? So with both protocols, you're trying to do the same thing.

So you have three things you're trying to do. First, you're trying to decide who's in charge for that particular period of history. And then that person in charge makes that block or makes that update to the system, and then the network decides whether they've accepted it or not. So imagine a poker game. You have to decide who's the dealer.

And so then the dealer is once selected, we'll deal the cards, and then everybody looks at the cards, and collectively they make a decision if they think the dealer's cheated or not. Like if I pick up and I have five aces, I say, well, there's only four on the deck, so the dealer's done something wrong and I reject the dealer or reject the block. Okay. Both systems are legitimate.

Both systems work. We've done an enormous amount of theoretical work to prove that proof of stake is a viable system if you accept its tradeoffs. Okay. The question is, given that the first step is super expensive with proof of work and it's free for proof of stake, does that alone cause a tendency to push into the proof of stake space? And my argument is no, because it turns out that that really expensive first step could be potentially very useful. So right now, we're just using useless algorithms. Whether it be ProgPow or the Bitcoin SHA-256 algorithm or whatever, they're useless. It's just digging holes and filling them back up again.

But there are projects like the Permacoin paper in 2013 or Chia or others that are actually looking and saying, can we create useful work? Or, for example, we're creating an incentive for people to store large amounts of data. Or there was a paper actually that was titled Proof of Useful Work. It came out of Berkeley. that basically says if you solve these puzzles, you're solving real-life problems. And so instead of saying we're just doing worthless stuff, you're now creating a marketplace for a distributed computation. And that's really valuable.

And right now, if you look at capacity, a lot of businesses exist from excess capacity. You have a car. You only drive it so often. Maybe you drive it a little bit more and drive people around. Oh, there's Uber. You have a house and you have a spare bedroom. Maybe you rent it out and you have some friends stay there or somebody stay there. Well, that's Airbnb, right?

You have a computer. You're not using that laptop right now. It has excess capacity. So if you have all this computational equipment, 99% of the time you're not using it, well, maybe you can monetize it through these types of protocols. And then suddenly you now have the next generation of proof of work. So if we move in that direction, I do think proof of work will stay. If we stay in the we're only doing this because it's the only logical way to select people, that's just madness. And I think proof of work cannot survive in that kind of environment, especially given that there are so many reasonably well-established academics, whether they be Silvio Macaulay with Algorand or what we've done with Ouroboros or what we've seen with a lot of the other proof-of-stake protocols, which are academically verified, peer-reviewed, and there's mathematical proofs that they do work.

And you say, well, what are you really trading off? Oh, I might have to trust a coalition of people at some point in the future to create a checkpoint or something like that. Okay. Well, yeah, you're trusting there's not a backdoor in your computer chip or you're trusting there's not a backdoor in your operating system. Are you so pathologically paranoid that you're utterly unwilling to trust anyone or even a group of people at some point to upgrade the system or do something to the system or intervene in the system when there's a problem? Meanwhile, your entire life is surrounded by people you trust every day, from the mechanic with your car to these other types of things. So I think that if that's the only – we're in an interview right now. I think that if that's the only argument they have, that there's this absolute trust, no one, just trust the protocol,

proof-of-work doesn't stand a chance in hell. Proof-of-stake is just so much better from that perspective. And frankly, you can tune proof-of-stake to have many different types of trust parameters. The other thing is proof-of-work in its current instantiation always federates. There are only four mining pools that control more than 51% of the hash power, and you cannot play that game. it's not egalitarian it's basically saying the people who have subsidized power people who can afford data centers and the people who could afford specialized asics are the ones who win

and 99.99 of the world population is not in that set of people so what you're doing is saying it's a trustless protocol but the curators of the system are not me can never be me and will live in jurisdictions that aren't so nice like china or kazakhstan or things like that that that potentially could become very problematic i just i just don't see the logic in that so my whole argument is if we find useful proof of work it will stay it'll be more egalitarian and democratic it'll be based on commodity hardware that everybody has and it's a capacity play like airbnb or uber if we can't find that then proof of work will be completely replaced with proof of stake style systems in the next five or ten years got it what uh what do you think is the

most important company in crypto other than your own well i'd say it depends on your perspective If you're talking about DAPs, DAOs, and the smart contract space, the bellwether there, the significant company is ConsenSys. They're just a huge company, a lot of money, a lot of people, a lot of stuff going on, and they've made massive and meaningful contributions to the space. We're a competitor of theirs, and there are a lot of people at ConsenSys who really hate me and say horrible things about me, but I will give them their due. They've done great work in our industry. If you're talking about upcoming exciting companies that are doing really good science,

Al Grand is definitely one of them. I have a lot of respect for Silvio Macaulay. I mean, we tend to forget this guy has the Nobel Prize of Computer Science. He has a Turing Award. He's a tenured professor at MIT. And he's kind of dragging the whole club. He's got the boys back together. It's like the Beatles are coming back together.

And he's getting them interested in our space. And if he's successful, that's going to bring a lot of horsepower on the mindshare side into our industry. So they're very important. I think there's a good custodial role from Blockstream's perspective. And they have been a very effective vehicle of ensuring people that Bitcoin is going to be around and people are going to sustain and maintain it. So it's very important. And Bitcoin, frankly, is the brand of cryptocurrencies. You know, we can't say, oh, well, I'm going to succeed, but Bitcoin is going to fail.

If Bitcoin fails, our whole industry is probably in for a really bad time. I agree with that. Yeah. So we have to be good to Bitcoin. And Blockstream has been. They've done a lot of cool things like BEC32 and Simplicity and, you know, the movement to Schnorsix to make Bitcoin far more useful, the push for Lightning. You know, these things are good for Bitcoin, I think, and they allow Bitcoin to at least continue to be competitive in its own right. So I have a lot of respect for them.

Some of the exchanges are very creative and very innovative, like Binance is always innovative. Sometimes they push the envelope a little too much, but at the very least you have to say CZ is a true entrepreneur and he's trying to innovate where and when he can. And you also have to have a lot of respect for Coinbase for being the Ned Flanders of our space. They didn't piss anybody off. They never took the easy road out. And what Coinbase was able to do was legitimize Bitcoin in our industry in ways that many companies could not legitimize. So I have a tremendous amount of respect for them as well. And I think they're always going to be here until the IPO or get acquired.

But they're profitable, and they do what they're going to do. I also like Ledger a lot. I think they've done some great work on the trusted hardware side of things. And they've invited a conversation about opening up the possibility of what specialized devices can do. And right now they're a hardware wallet, but one day they could be a lightning node. One day they could be a trusted data feed for an oracle. There's thousands of things you can do with trusted hardware. That's very magical.

So to have well-capitalized, well-run, funded companies that actually know how to ship products that are high quality to the consumer and work with us in the industry, because it's been a joy working with Ledger for their integration with Cardano, I have a lot of respect for that. And I have a lot of respect for any entrepreneur who can do these things. So these are the kinds of companies that I tend to like, and it's more meritocratic than whether they are pro-Ethereum or pro-Cardano or pro-Charles or anti-Charles. It's just, have we been able to effectively work with them? Are they making meaningful open source contributions to the space? Are they providing stability and support to our industry as a whole? These types of criteria. And the ones I've mentioned, another is Eric Voorhees with Shapeshift and what he's done there.

Eric is just one of those transformative guys. He started as a frothing libertarian anarchist who's like, Bitcoin is the only way and everything else is garbage, to the king of altcoins with Shapeshift. And it's just been a really amazing transformation. And he kept his core, but he also became a very competent businessman along the way. And he built very necessary infrastructure for our space. What's the most important book you've ever read? Well, the one that changed my perspective probably the most was Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens, and then the follow-up book, Homo Deus. Because he basically said the whole world works on narratives.

And it's one of those things that once you know what you're looking for, you see it, you say, wow, that's absolutely right. I mean, religion, economics, all these things are just social systems that were created to stave off certain things. So the old order was war, famine, and disease. And these were just the banes of human existence. There's a reason why the four horsemen represented these things. You know, and the point of governments, religions, and society was to basically create a firewall to try to collectively protect ourselves from this. So all these institutions, these fictions we constructed were to enable us to overcome these challenges. and as they die and we no longer worry about starving to death or war killing us or disease

killing us then we have new challenges that come which means that the fictions we currently have the narratives we currently have have to change so i i thought that that perspective was just so incredibly valuable you know another was house of morgan from ron chernow ron is a great biographer he writes about everybody whether it be george washington or rockefeller and he does these enormously in-depth things where like when he wrote about george washington he literally read every letter this guy wrote he went and found them and washington was meticulous in archiving them and there was tens of thousands of them uh and so the house of morgan was great because it really gave a window into how the american financial system got to where it's at because

there was just seriously no entity no person no family that had more influence on u.s finance than jp morgan's family and it started from the we're all a ponzi scheme we're all scams and this was back in the 1850s and 60s when we were just an international joke and you know nobody wanted to buy bonds from the u.s because we don't default on them we had no respect for it the english were kind of running the world financial system so if you wanted to actually be a finance guy you know like junius morgan jp morgan's father you had to go to england you know he worked with george peabody there but then suddenly there was this pivot to america especially after the civil war and it became clear the united states was going to become the world financial system and we just kind of did

everything wrong. We made every mistake from these giant trusts that people formed and these transitive boards and basically people rigging the system so they'd win to boiler rooms and other things. And the Morgans in some way, shape or form had something to do with all of it, either from bailing out the U.S. government to getting the U.S. government into trouble. They also were an extension of U.S. foreign policy for the first half of the 20th century. So if we couldn't get into mexico or the philippines or somewhere we'd get in through a bank and so jp morgan's guys were probably somehow involved like tom lamont and so forth so it was just an eye-opening book and it really said wow there's a lot more to this world financial system and these guys were touching it

so highly highly recommend that book just absolutely great another one secrets of the temple it's a book about the federal reserve system and kind of where it came from and why it operates it's a little out of date it was written in the 80s and i really wish they'd write an update to it. Anything from Niall Ferguson is also really good, like The Ascent of Money. Yeah, that's a great book to read as well. And I'm actually, I have some Medici blood in me,

so it was always fun to see that. I say, oh, wow, my ancestors were interesting people, and they were quite innovative and quite violent at the same time. So there we go. Hopefully some other genetics have moderated that a little bit somewhere along the way. So I'd highly recommend anything he has, and that's certainly a lot of fun.

But I read a lot of biographies and a lot of history books And that's what tends to consume a lot of my time. I also tend to read about great failures. Like the latest one I just finished was Bad Blood. And that's just a great story of what happens when groupthink comes into play. Silicon Valley just wanted a female entrepreneur to succeed. And they have all these models that they preach and they tell me and everyone else to follow. And if you apply those very models to Elizabeth Holmes, it was an obvious scam.

Yet somehow she was able to snake her way into getting huge amounts of funding. She knew the game. She knew the game, and she knew how to succeed within that game. And it's just a great lesson when you run a business and you're in an industry that tends to start having monolithic thought. That's where you always get into trouble. If you are saying the same things that your competitors are saying and you believe the same things that all your other people believe, we're doomed. The whole point is to have diversity of opinion and thought and kind of different approaches, and then the market decides which ones are more valuable, and that changes over time. And the Valley just let her do this.

And not only did they let her do it, she got amazing people on her board. like Henry Kissinger and General Mattis and so forth. These are people I couldn't talk to. Somehow she networked her way and got them to put their branded reputation into her system. And what amazes me, I come from a medical background. My dad's a doctor. Very simple test. You say, okay, you're claiming that your magic box can tell me things about my blood.

Great. Here's what I'm going to do. You have your magic box sit in my office. I don't need you to tell me how it works. I'm just going to put 10 blood samples through this thing, and we're going to treat it like a magician, and you're not going to be able to move and go to a different room or anything. We're just going to wait around for the results.

And you're going to tell me what those 10 samples did. And if you got it right, okay, you got something. Now let's have a discussion, sign some non-disclosures and get it done. But if you're not willing to do that, well, I don't care if it's magical or not. There's just no way to verify the claims you're making are true. I look at the same situation in our space with our protocols, like whether it be proof of stake or this. If all these people, 800,000 TPS or this or that or infinitely scalable,

they say these things, I say, great. Write a paper, a scientific paper. Here's the conferences you submit it to. If they accept the paper, then I take you seriously. It's not elitism. It's just to get there, it's a process. And then we have something to talk about. I understand your tradeoffs.

I understand your approach. I understand your theory. I kind of know where you're coming from then. I can't have a conversation with you when you say there's a wizard behind the curtain and that wizard is somehow going to moderate or control all these things and it's going to make everything great. You're going to get scammed. 99.999% of the time there is no wizard

it's all made up, it's all a scam all the way back to when Benjamin Franklin was beaten by the amazing Turk playing chess it was actually a midget inside the machine that was actually controlling it and playing chess against him it wasn't a robot in the 18th century we didn't invent

Deep Blue but this is always the scam and how they do these things so Bad Blood was a great rollout of how that failure occurred And I think every CEO, every decision maker, every VC, every investor should read that because it's a return to reality. And then when you get enthralled by fabulous claims or enthralled by fabulous proclamations of some capability, then you'll just be healthy skepticism and say that might be true. So let's talk about the process upon which we're going to jointly discover how that's true and why that's true.

What am I giving up for that? Before I end the podcast, I always ask about aliens. Believer, non-believer? Well, you know, there's the Fermi paradox, right? And there's all these other... Every mathematician brings up the Fermi paradox. Yeah, well, you're trained to be healthy skepticism. Statistically speaking, there's probably life in the universe.

There's an open question of how evolved and advanced it is. And we're certainly looking for it. And there's a lot of indications that these aliens could exist. um it's one of those things where we'll eventually get to that juncture as a species um either we'll create it or we'll find it um actually if you ever watch um the joe rogan podcast he had alex jones on and man that was a fun four-hour podcast but one of the things alex is firmly believes now is that apparently there are trans-dimensional aliens and the only way to talk to them is to take large amounts of dmt which of course got which of course got joe really excited he's like

all right dmt we're finally talking about that but i don't know you know this is one of those things i'm not qualified to talk about it's just a it's a belief thing so if i had to make a bet i'd say yes have they visited us do they have a relationship with us there's no evidence of it that's credible but it doesn't mean it's not the case so healthy skepticism but probably true yeah you pretty much articulated exactly how i think about it mathematically very likely but uh until we have the credible evidence you know you sound a little crazy if you go around saying that the aliens are out there right yeah the trans-dimensional dmt alex jones aliens that's a great podcast to listen to absolutely all right well listen thank you so much for doing this i know that uh that

there were a little rush for time but um i think people really enjoy this and uh it's super interesting to hear kind of your story and how you've got to where you are and what you're working on today so i'll have to do it again in the future cheers hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain.