Unchained - Vitalik Buterin on Whether or Not Ethereum Is 'Blowing It' - Ep.112

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

At the first Unchained Live, Vitalik explained why he thought it was "inevitable" Ethereum would lose some of its lead, when he would be upset if Ethereum were overtaken by a competitor, and whether the Ethereum 2.0 road map was too long. We also discussed why a strain of Ethereum maximalism is emerging, how the foundation sets its funding priorities, whether or not the community should adopt inflation funding for development of the blockchain and why he thinks the MolochDAO experiment likely won't garner much investment. For the full summary, go to http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2019/03/26/vitalik-buterin-on-why-ethereum-has-lost-some-of-its-lead/. Thank you to our sponsors! Quantstamp, the venue sponsor for Unchained Live: http://quantstamp.com/unchained Columbia School of Professional Studies, the networking sponsor: http://sps.columbia.edu/podcast CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unchained Episode links: Previous Unchained interview with Vitalik Buterin: https://unchainedpodcast.com/vitalik-buterin-creator-of-ethereum-on-the-big-guy-vs-the-little-guy/ Unchained episode about MolochDAO: https://unchainedpodcast.com/molochdao-could-this-decentralized-autonomous-organization-help-ethereum-scale-faster/ Zcash interview: https://unchainedpodcast.com/zcashs-zooko-wilcox-on-why-he-believes-privacy-coins-will-be-used-more-for-good-than-bad/ Unchained interview with Glen Weyl and Santiago Siri referencing radical markets: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-blockchains-can-help-create-little-democracies-everywhere/ 0x interview: https://unchainedpodcast.com/will-warren-of-0x-on-why-decentralized-exchanges-are-the-future/ Augur interview: https://unchainedpodcast.com/joey-krug-on-how-augur-is-like-any-other-tool-ep-79/ Dharma interview: https://unchainedpodcast.com/nadav-hollander-on-how-dharma-could-create-new-forms-of-debt-ep-80/ Compound interview: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-youll-earn-interest-on-your-crypto-with-compound-ep-82/ dYdX interview: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-dydx-allows-you-to-take-a-short-position-in-one-token-ep-86/ Unchained episode on MakerDAO, part 1: https://unchainedpodcast.com/rune-christensen-of-makerdao-part-1-how-to-keep-a-crypto-collateralized-stablecoin-afloat/ Part 2: https://unchainedpodcast.com/rune-christensen-of-makerdao-part-2-how-dai-stayed-at-1-while-eth-crashed-from-1400-to-85/ Unconfirmed episode about superfluid collateral and echoes of the 2008 financial crisis: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-to-earn-money-on-collateral-in-defi-and-why-thats-risky/ Unconfirmed episode about Uniswap: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-uniswap-quickly-became-one-of-the-most-popular-dexes/ Dfinity interview: https://unchainedpodcast.com/dfinitys-dominic-williams-on-how-its-blockchain-nervous-system-is-not-an-ai-ep-78/ 100th episode of Unchained featuring a poem about crypto and the podcast: https://unchainedpodcast.com/100th-episode-past-guests-and-listeners-take-over-the-show-ep-100/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first unchained live sponsored by Kwanstamp. Thank you for joining us. And now, please welcome to the stage, host of Unchained Laura Shin. Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to have you all here at the first Unchained Live. Your no-hyped resource for All Things Crypto is on stage at Pulitzer Hall, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. for those who don't know, Unchained is my weekly hour-long podcast that covers all things crypto, and in a few months it will be three years old.

When I started this podcast, I never ever imagined that it would become something big enough where I could hold an event like this. So I really, really appreciate you all for listening to the show and for coming tonight. It's also really meaningful to me to be doing this event here at Columbia Journalism. school because I came here for grad school 11 years ago. And at that time, kind of like my podcast, I never imagined. I would someday be doing an event in this very building. And hilariously, until tonight, my main memory of this particular floor in the building is that on the night of graduation, my friends and I all had a dance party in the room at the other side of the hall. So now I'm making new memories in this space. Want to advance your career? Columbia University School

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Quant Stamp is a full-stack blockchain security company that helps you ship safe code. For unchained listeners, we're offering 5% off a smart contract security audit until the end of June. Head to QuantStamp.com slash Unchained to claim your discount. Our guest for today is one of Crypto's biggest stars, one of its biggest leaders, who himself started in this piece as a journalist. Please give a warm welcome to Vatolic Boutrin, the creator of Ethereum. Welcome, Vatalik. Thank you. Good to be here.

Thanks for coming out to New York for this. I really appreciate it. So I'm going to jump right into questions. Normally in journalism, if you're an editor, they say you should give your comments to writers in what's called a nice sandwich. And you could apply that concept to interviews, but unfortunately I'd have to dispense with the nice parts in the beginning because I really want to get to the meet of the conversation. We have a very limited time. So my first question is kind of like a question that's actually for you and for the audience. And actually, what we're going to do to tee up the questions, we're going to play a video. And it's a video.

I think you've probably seen it. and some may have seen it, but for those who haven't, it's a video of Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures in conversation with two-star Jane of multi-coin capital at the Multi-Coin Capital Summit. And I think Fred's view here is representative of a lot of people's, that it's not just his opinion. But you can see he has kind of a lot of emotion

about where Ethereum is right now. So for the audience, my question for you is you'll watch the video, and then we're going to go to this website called Slido, which is sly.do. some of you may have actually pre-submitted questions there earlier, and you'll enter the code Unchained, where you can answer this poll. And the question is, you know,

do you agree with what Fred Wilson is saying here, which is Ethereum losing its lead? So again, that's SlidoSly.org, and you'll enter the code unchained to answer the poll. So let's play this video, and just for context, at the beginning he's talking about strong executive leadership. And we do that a lot for our companies. Ethereum needs that, right? We know that Vitalik is not CEO.

Vitalik is an evangelist. He's a brilliant computer scientist. But, like, Ethereum should be more like a company, right? Like, you look at what Eos is doing, and you look what Eos doing is doing, and it's like, you know, if Ethereum was doing what Eos was doing, they'd be crushing it, but they're not. And they don't have enough money.

They don't have enough developers. They don't, you know, they're not, they're go to. market strategy is non-existent, like they're not behaving like a company. And if all of us who own Ethereum could go to Vitalik and say, you know, look, this thing you've got going in Switzerland, it's not working, fire these fuckers who don't know what the hell they're doing, and put somebody great in there who could help you build this thing into a monster. Like, that's what we would do.

I don't know how to do that. Like, you can't, like, there's no mechanism to do that. That's painful. Just sitting there holding the asset, just watching them, whittle it. the value away and you're like, God damn it. You know, I know what to do here. You know, just look at it. Every great company has done this.

Just do that. And they don't do it. And it's hard to get them to listen, right? Because, like, first of all, who do you have to convince? Right. In this case, like, maybe it's metallic, but there's a whole decentralized group of developers, et cetera, that need to be convinced.

And, like, this is exactly kind of the question that we're trying to think of is... Well, if they think, that whole group thinks that they're killing it, then they got their head up their ass, okay? They're not killing it. They're blowing it. They have the lead.

And they're blowing it. And it's just like, it's so obvious what to do and they're not doing it. So, okay, if you are in the audience and on the live stream, go to sly.do and, you know, vote for this poll.

But we're not going to show the results Because what I want is I want Vitalik to give us your response to what he's saying in this video. Yeah, I mean, I guess, first of all, like, if Bitcoin was run like a business, would it have succeeded? And I feel like we kind of intuitive, we know the answer. So, like, it's definitely a structure that works for some things. But, like, blockchains and cryptocurrency and all those, all of those things that come with that package, it's just fundamentally, kind of so much more and kind of so different from a traditional company or a software product. So I'm really not at all sure that like that kind of

of model is anywhere close to the right model. So in terms of like what our model is, right? Like, we've definitely had these discussions inside of the foundation and there's definitely been people from time to time that just said, yeah, we need to go in with guns blazing and fire those bastards and then get the 40 people in and stick them in the middle of some Nimbutopia in Silicon Valley

and get them to pay $10,000 a month of rent, get them to work for 16 hours every day, rah-rah, raw, raw, six months, and like we got Ethereum 3.0, man. And, like, no. I mean, the, like, I would, say rather that Bitcoin succeeded in large part because it adopted a model that's very, very different

from that. And we've been adopting a model that's very different from that. Though, I mean, at the same time, look, one of the things that we did is for our 2.0 strategy, right? We have this approach where the foundation is not the thing in the middle that's building everything. The foundation is, it is being a hub for things that need a hub, like, for example, writing out a hub and writing out the spec, and specifying it, bringing it to completion. But then the work on making 2.0 implementations is, you know, distributed among, you know, prismatic labs and lighthouse and consensus and these other companies. And, you know, these other companies internally can be kind of structured in very different ways. And they, you know, some of them could be based in one place, some in another

place, they might have different kinds of people in them. And really, if even a couple of them succeed, then, you know, at least the softer implementations of Ethereum 2.0 exist and it's developed. And from a scaling point of view, you know, like as some of our community members in public have said, even if Ethereum 2.0 is never developed, there's Ethereum 1.X, there's ZK. Roll-up, there's channels, there's plasma. And... But, yeah, but so you were kind of taking issue with his framing of, you know... Yeah, like, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there, like,

there is a kind of focused and deep approach to doing things, and there is a broad approach to doing things, and we definitely are explicitly taking the broad approach to doing things, and I'd argue it's, like, a very good one for things like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But so just because, you know, we've got this poll going to, and I'm just curious, do you feel like Ethereum is losing its lead or no? Is that just... And it's definitely lost some weed to some extent. And I think that's just because, like, if you're first, I mean, it's kind of inevitable and unavoidable because Ethereum, like, Ethereum, like, really was the first, the general purpose smart contract thing to try to do. anything. And Bitcoin, for example, is the first cryptocurrency. And originally, as far as cryptocurrencies go, it had 100% market share, then went to 95, and then now it's around 51. And as

industries mature in markets grow over time, there's more projects and more projects, like try to do different things. And that's, you know, people who are in overtime that there's, like, more different models that you could try and. there's different projects that are trying different models, and that's part of the, that part's an inevitable part of the process. Simply because the space is so new? Yeah, because the space is so new and because the space is just becoming less new over time. All right, so let's just quickly look at the results.

I'm just curious to know. So, okay, so actually people mostly strongly disagree. That Ethereum would say, okay, so good. That's good, because from some of the behavior I'm seeing on Twitter, I wonder. about that, although, honestly, to be fair, this is probably an audience, is very friendly to you. So one other thing that I wanted to ask, though, about this kind of competition aspect is, like Ethereum has always been kind of very unicorns and rainbows when it came to other blockchains, like you had Zcash and Eternity and perhaps even other blockchain teams at DevCon

4. But, you know, at the same time, we're seeing this new movement, I guess, really in Ethereum, where recently Ethereum Core developer offers you. showed and tweeted, Pocodot delivers what serenity ought to be, changed my mind, and he was attacked on social media and actually driven out of Ethereum. I've had other people express anxiety to me about Pocod, presumably because it could make Ethereum one of like many parochines, you know, instead of Ethereum being a launch pad. There's also worries about substrate. I mean, there's all kinds of things going on. So right now, you know, here we are. You're

trying to build this thing that it's not going to be done for a couple of years. Meanwhile, PolkaDot and some of these other potentially competitive blockchains are either launching soon or have recently launched. So do you worry that your roadmap is too long compared to where they are in their development? And I would say, first of all, that pretty much every project is generally optimistic about what they say they're going to do. So, like, for example, even, you know, the Bitcoin side chains. Remember back in 2014, like three months after the initial announcements when Bitcoin side chains were the thing that was going to kill Ethereum. It was like the first of the, no, it was like the first of the Ethereum killers. And like people were saying, yeah, Ethereum doesn't need to exist anymore.

And then now what do we have? Well, there's like one side chain, which is basically like a permission consortium chain between exchanges. So it's like things definitely, like, things definitely, like, All of these things are harder than they seem. And even after launch, like, things are harder than they seem. And, like, a lot of the problems that we see that are also problems that all these other projects are going to see. So you're not worried about, like, Pocod or so. Like, like...

And I'm definitely not worried about them kind of, you know, replacing Ethereum or any of those kind of more extreme versions. Like, basically, because... I do think that, like, building, like, Ethereum isn't just, like, a technical thing. There's also an ecosystem to build out. There's tools other than a blockchain. There's a community to build. There's all these things that, like, do really take a significant amount of time. And, but why do you think this, like, strain of Ethereum maximalism is emerging?

Like, literally in my way over here, I saw that. Taylor Monaghan had a tweet about it earlier today, too. Like, why is it happening and what do you think of it? Hmm. It definitely, like, in general, I think, I forget where I made this comments, but it might have been in some conversation with Tyler Cohen or somewhere else. I made this comment that people are at their most evil, not out of greed, but out of fear. And that was, it is probably true that, you know, there's a new wave of, like, people making noises about how they'll basically kill Ethereum. and there's, like, that does lead to, like, people who, uh, being afraid and be, and people

kind of taking, taking that not too well. And I mean, that definitely isn't something, like, I definitely really want to wish and hope that the Ethereum community can kind of find a, or a way to interact with these other crypto projects that are, that are emerging. That's, uh, not kind of or not Ethereum maximalist or not maximalist in general in the kind of horrible ways and connotations that that word has. Though, I mean, at the same time, there's also this kind of other opposite current where people are, I think there's some people that are worried that because we have this kind of anti-maximalist culture, that basically is the reason why, like, in the Ethereum

space, like people just immediately call, like, basically call other. community members out for being maximalist, which isn't something that happens at all in many other crypto communities. And like basically there's this kind of countercurrent where there's other people who basically believe that the anti-maximalists are kind of being played for chumps, like they're playing cooperate when other people are playing defect in the prisoner's dilemma. And like that might be true sometimes, might not be true sometimes. but it's something that we need to kind of probably carefully and consider and evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

But so what is your take on competition? Like, would you be upset if there was another, you know, competing blockchain that took the lead? Like, how would you personally feel about that? I'm curious. It depends which blockchain. Like, I think, like, I mean, you know, like I'm not afraid to, like, shit on projects, I think are terrible. right? So if Tron overtakes Ethereum, then first of all, continue to believe it to build on Ethereum because I believe that the world and humanity needs to have a decentralized platform. And second,

I will have lost a certain amount of hope for humanity, but not all, not nearly all. So if it's some more, I mean, if it's some like very reasonable and very competent technical platform, then ultimately I hope to find ways to have positive sum and collaborative

relationships with these projects as much as possible. And I feel like the Ethereum community has shown that it's capable of doing that. For example, it's had a very positive relationship with Zcash pretty much since the beginning. It's, you know, relations are even warming with Ethereum Classic recently.

I don't know if you've seen the recent Peace Bridge projects. There's, I mean, even Bitcoin Cash, like, tends to be fairly friendly, especially now that it's basically kind of exercised its big demon within. I'm talking about Craig, right? Yes. You see, I'm not afraid to criticize. Yeah, so I guess, like, the ideal outcome for me definitely is, like, I've said anti-maximalist things in general, like, when the maximalists were just Bitcoin maximalists. And I really do believe, like, do believe in my heart that, like, I want to see an environment where, like, different approaches to things can thrive and prosper, and, and if Ethereum can win, and other, projects that do interesting things can win to. And if we can find that way, I think that

really would be best. But like if that can't, and if that, if that can't happen and Ethereum, like, ends up just being much less, much less relevant because people switch from it to other technologies, I'd definitely, like, much rather it be some, like, some competent technical chain than, like, one of these scam projects. All right. So one other thing I wanted to ask about this video was back when this was circulating on Twitter, somebody tagged you in some tweet related to it. And Preston Van Loon of Prismatic Labs, which is creating a sharding client for Ethereum

2.0, tweeted, or he responded to it saying that he and others on his team were struggling to deliver because they still had to work these full-time jobs. And for those of you who missed it, Vigeluk wrote back Yolo and sent him, sent Prismatic 1,000 ETH, and then that was what enabled them to quit their full-time jobs, or at least Preston, and he runs Prismatic full-time now. But, you know, so I saw this happen, but also we've got these Ethereum core developers that have been telling me, you know, they're working on some of the most essential aspects of Ethereum, but they're underfunded.

Sometimes their salaries are at like maybe 60% of what they would be if they were working at a startup as a developer. And even with a startup, they'd also get equity. And meanwhile, they watched the Ethereum Foundation give, you know, like $4 million to Starkware, which is a competing blockchain. So how do you- Starkware is not a competing blockchain. Oh, okay.

No, it's just, it's a company that's just building ZK. Stark technology. Oh, okay. But is that still like something that you would give a higher priority to compared to some of the core Ethereum teams? Because for them, they feel like, whoa, where, you know, how are these funding priorities being set? I think, I mean, those are definitely very reasonable questions to ask. I think it's also important to recognize this sort of in the context of the history of the foundation and its kind of funding capacities and some of the inefficiencies in its funding capacities.

So like for example, you know, we had back during the sale, we had $18 million. And that $18 million is quickly turned into nine because we weren't able to turn into cash quickly enough. and just because of a kind of quite spendy culture that some people in the foundation had early on, the nine kind of whittled down to one fairly quickly. But then fortunately, you know, the Ethereum launched, the foundation had its ether. And that made it adopt this kind of very careful and cautious attitude toward funding, like pretty much funding anything. And so our expenditures were pretty low, but then the ether price just suddenly shot up by a factor. of literally more than a thousand.

And like our norms definitely didn't adjust kind of as quickly as the realities did. And then there was another correction. And at the start of last year, we announced this big grant program. And the goal of that was to basically, it's kind of like a triage project

to just identify the biggest categories of things that were not getting funded that just needed to start getting funded. So some of the earliest stuff included, the L4 State Channel stuff. It included some of the ETH2 client teams. It included some plasma projects.

It included some other things. It included these big academic grants. And those things really did need to be funded. And now more recently, of course, there's this, you know, the price went down by a factor of 10 again. And in part because, like, we, didn't end up, kind of getting out of hand and, like, actually adjusting or spending up by a

factor of a thousand. Like, we, you know, have not had to do any rounds of layoffs. We hadn't, I mean, we haven't had to, kind of do any of those things. So some of this is, like, kind of organizational, like, it sounds, like, I saw you tweeting about how people could be paid via smart contracts in a very flexible way. Maybe that's something you guys should look at. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely kind of internal experimentation happening. Like, the, like, part of the benefit of this sort of Ethereum core foundation structure that's not a corporation that we've developed over time is that there's a lot of kind of little projects and little experiments happening inside of them. So, like, I think, like, AFSA's team, like some, like some of them have been getting paid and die.

And then there's people getting paid with these, like, much, with these channel mechanisms, there's, you know, then there's grants, there's salaries, there's, like, all of these, you know, different scales of things. There's trials, like what we call it hack, turn chips, and a bunch of other things. But just, you know, to go back, like, you know, in general, I feel like, from what I've learned from some interviews is that there are people working on this who feel like, hey, how are these priorities being set? And so it sounds to me like there's probably room for improvement, at least from their perspective.

There definitely is, though I think, I mean, like, I don't, whoever said that, I don't, I don't know their specific situation, but it's also important to remember that, like, especially, like, during the periods where, like, you're adjusting downwards, like, the, if, if nobody's complaining, that means you're overpaying, basically. and that's Yes. Yes. Well, okay, so let's keep talking actually about this specific topic because there's been a new development where, as you probably know, there's this new decentralized autonomy organization called

Malik Tao. For those of you who missed it, my episode that came on on Tuesday was great about this, like super interesting. But essentially Malik Tao is a Dow where members will be voted in and upon acceptance they receive these shares that give them the ability to vote on different proposals that will help further Ethereum 2.0 development.

What's your take on Molokdale? It's definitely an interesting experiment. First of all, I'm really glad to see people in the community and taking charge and just making these independent pushes to kind of promote the push Ethereum and the Ethereum ecosystem forward in the different ways that they think makes sense. I think that's valuable both because we have the benefit of these different philosophies getting tried. It also means that if the Ethereum Foundation does have institutional constraints a lot of the time,

like these other organizations or Dow's or whatever don't have them where they have different constraints so they can kind of fill in some of our gaps. So I think all of those things are good. the one big kind of challenge that I see is that ultimately these kind of non-profit DAOs are still like just basically a way of organizing charity spending and they can provide some improvements but ultimately this kind of public goods problem that basically people are throwing money into things that benefit way more people than just themselves. themselves. And so they're, like, unless they're really, really altruistic, they're going to put in kind of far too little money to actually, like, basically far, far less money than kind of would be, would be optimal. If everyone sort of had every, you kind of had everyone's interests in mind, then, like, basically, like, the Dow by itself doesn't just magically make these, like, public goods problems and tragedies of the comments go away. And so the, like, there's definitely, and I'm very grateful to all of the people that have.

contributed to Molok Tao, but at the same time, the Molloktale by itself is still, and I don't expect it to, you know, balloon into, like, be, like, EEO-sized, like, pools of money that can go and do, like, the kinds of things that people that want us to have EOS-sized, like, EOSized their spending on it wants us to do. Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's true, because, like, the actual Dow was something where people were expecting a return, but this is a lot. But this is like, again, it's going to have that free rider problem where, you know, other people in the community will be like, okay, they want to put their money into fun E2.0 development, fine. Have the confidence that your decentralized system works as intended.

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Learn more at ciphertrace.com slash unchained. Ciphertrace is securing the crypto economy. Looking to take your career to the next level, at Columbia University's School of Professional Studies, you'll find full-time and part-time master's programs in high-demand fields, like applied analytics, which includes a blockchain election. and enterprise risk management. Flexible formats let you complete your degree online

or through a combination of online and in-person study in New York City or San Francisco. Advance your career. Accelerate your impact. Apply now for fall 2019. Visit sps.coma.combea.edu slash podcast. But one other thing I want to ask about was there's this other idea floating around, which is inflation funding for development.

and Zcash doesn't, whereas 20% and the block reward goes to fund such a development. What do you think of that idea? Yeah, and I did read the EIP, I think was at 1867, some number in that range that was released today. It's interesting that people are starting to discuss it. I mean, I think probably two of the big challenges to that. I mean, one of them is kind of just political,

which is the community, I think, hasn't fully decided, like how it feels, about the governance making subjective economic decisions on that level of subjectiveness. And so, for example, the Bitcoin community would definitely be hard against this sort of thing. Like, they'd even be hard against redirecting parts of the existing block reward, even if it keeps the cap to things like this because, you know, they would say, oh, it's centralization, it's taxes, and like, these things are evil and all that. Now, on the other hand, you have projects that take the opposite extreme.

and basically just use on-chain governance to push out inflation rewards the projects. And I've written articles about how this can easily, like this is just fundamentally not incentive-compatible. It can lead to plutocracy. It can lead to cartels. And I think it might even be possible to make a kind of almost a mathematical theorem that basically says something like in an anonymous system, it's impossible to create. create a system that funds public goods without creating a system that rewards cartels.

And the reason is that there's just no way for an anonymous system to distinguish between $10 million of coins split between 10,000 people that are struggling to overcome freewriter problems versus $10 million that are split between 10,000 accounts that are all owned by the same cartel. That's just one guy trying to funnel more money to themselves. And that's, you know, in the case of Eos, for example, you know, we saw the, you know, we saw these scandals about you got these delegates and then they're voting for each other and then

they're voting in exchange for payments and all of these things that kind of technically break voting systems if you analyze the economics. And I do worry about that kind of capture if we make a system that's kind of formalized in the

wrong way. Now in the middle there's... Basically it's like gamifiable. Yeah. I mean in the middle there's like Zcash but then Zcash is interesting. is interesting. It's definitely, like, big, big props to them for just doing that and being proud of that and saying, like, yeah, you know, we got a 20% death tax, you know, what's up, man. And that, I am very proud of them for doing that. So, you know, great job, Zuko. But on the other hand, like, they clearly haven't solved the problem of, like, where to allocate the money.

because right now they just basically just have this centralized allocation pool that goes to the Zcash company, it goes to these individuals and these other individuals and they have hard forks and then these hard forks they can

decide to reallocate the pool but then what process did they use to decide and so it is it's definitely very far from kind of the ideals that a lot of people see cryptocurrencies having and I mean

like that's not definitely very far from saying Zcash is bad or anything. It's still a big, it's still an improvement over no funding, but, you know, centralized funding is still, like, it would be really nice if there was some decentralized process for achieving the same thing. Now, in terms of decentralized processes, I mean, I'm a big fan of, you know, Glenn Wiles, like, like, CLR, a quadratic finance mechanism. Yeah.

Can you describe that for people? he was on question too by the way that was a great episode you guys should listen to that yeah so basically the idea here is that it's a kind of expand on one of Glenn's earlier ideas which is quadratic voting

which is a method for voting which takes into account the end of the strengths of people's preferences and under certain conditions you can prove that like basically if A wins a quadratic vote over B then A is on balance, like, basically A makes people altogether happier than B would.

And the way that liberal radical subsidies work is that you have this mechanism where anyone can, like, put in a pool, put in some money toward projects. And then for each project, there is a set of people that put money into it. And then the way it works mathematically is that you take each person's contribution, then you take the square root of each person's contribution, then you add all of those square roots up, and you take the square of that sum, and you take the square of the sum of the square roots

is bigger than just a regular sum, pretty much always if there's more than one contributor, so you have some, like, central funding source, like basically cover the difference. The way that it works kind of more philosophically, like, you know, you might ask, well, why square roots, why squares, why sums, is that you can think of it as a mechanism

that, like, basically, through the amount of money that each person contributes, kind of measures, like, basically how much they care about the project, in a certain mathematical sense. And then the mechanism itself imagines if there existed a kind of virtual agent that cared as much as all of the contributors that care put together, then if how much and that virtual agent was the one that had a lot of, money to contribute than how much money would they contribute. And that amount is going to be is always going to be more than the amount that people contribute in isolation because this

kind of virtual agent that cares as much as all the contributors put together is sort of one agent and doesn't kind of have free rider problems with itself. So it's like it's really cool math, but the general principle is that it's this way of like if you have a point, of money that is kind of designated toward funding kind of public goods as a category, then it allows you to choose like which public goods to fund and how much

in a way that is kind of credibly neutral, like credibly and of not biased towards specific organizations. And would you think about using that to experiment with, you know, inflation funding? Yeah. And so we are, you, uh, Bitcoin is using it right now. And I think it started in the first

round, in my opinion, went really well and it started second round recently. The main impediment I see to just pumping Ethereum inflation directly into a CLR is that CLR does depend on some notion of identity. So basically the reason is, once again, like, how do you distinguish between 10,000 people that are suffering from, like, a free rider problem versus 10,000 sock puppets of the same, the same, like, rich guy? And, like, fake accounts are really easy to get. Like, if you have a phone right now, if you go to buy Ax, B-U-Y-A-C-C-S-com, you can just, like, buy piles of Gmail and Reddit accounts. Like, just go ahead and look and try. Like, it's...

Like, it's something you've tried. No comment. No, like, the points, like, basically... Like, it's importance to kind of not being naive about this because, you know, we're, like, there are... Regardless of what any of us, like, know there's, no, there's, no, we're trying to do. There's entire industries of people who, like, spends their lives, like, as a, as a full-time job, like, figuring out how to, like, grab up these accounts and automate them. And then if they rely on cell phones, then they have those cell phone racks and they hook them up and, like, they simulate, like, clicking buttons.

and, like, I mean, this is like, you know, there's PR firms that do this. This is like basically a, there's crypto teams that do this. Crypto people. There's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm, what, like, did hacking team do any of that? I mean, I have no idea. I don't know.

I don't know. But, I mean, yeah. Basically, the point, the point is that, like, if you don't have an identity system that's robust, then, you know, you. Eventually, you're going to have, like, a guy with 10,000 sock puppet accounts taking over this kind of system and using it to drain money. And so this does depend on a robust identity system. And it also depends on collusion resistance, which is the term I use for mechanisms where you don't have the ability to prove how you participate it to anyone else. And the reason why that's important is because if you don't have that property, then you can really easily bribe people to participate in some way with smart.

contracts. Like you can, you know, like if you imagine for, like, for votes, like it's, like, the idea of buying votes is probably familiar to people, but this applies to like any kind of mechanism, right? Even like with a CLR, for example, right? Like if, if I throw in $10, then I get, like, $10 square root 3.16, whatever, and then square again up to 10. But then if you were to throw in $1, then my $10 gets square root at $3.16, add to you. yours 4.16 and then the result would be somewhere between 17 and 18. And so then like your $1 adds seven point like somewhere between over $7 to the total pie. And so that would mean is that if you could prove how you voted and that was malicious, then I would bribe you with $3 to throw

$1 into the pot. You would earn $2 and I would still earn more than a $5 profit. So like these attacks exist and there are worldwide industries that are dedicated to exploiting them. So we need to be careful. All right. Yeah. So all this, if you ever end up implementing, it sounds like it's going to be way down the line because I know there's other things on your to-do list that are higher up. So let's move on. One other thing, so we were talking about Malik Tao. One other thing that came out of this interview I did with Amin who founded Malang Tao, Amin Soleimani, by the way, for those of you who don't know him. He, believes that the Ethereum community should put a greater emphasis on the price of ether because of its

role in securing the network, especially under proof of stake. And did you see that Delphi digital report? Yes. Yeah, that was super interesting. If you guys missed a incredible report, but basically, they talked about how the upgrade to Serenity would rely too much on fees and that kind of put the security of the network at risk. And they showed how, like, a number of scenarios, it really wouldn't be very profitable for validators. So do you think the price of ether is important? And how much you think about that while you're designing the protocol and working on things like fees, block rewards, staking, inflation, etc. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be, like, really candid because that's the right thing.

I think, like, a lot of the, at least some of the earlier kind of rhetoric of, like, especially veering on the more extreme side of, like, the price not mattering at all came. I mean, in part, it was kind of countersignaling to, like, distinguish ourselves from other crypto projects that just care about that just do like pumping and lambowing way, way too much. But another thing is that it's, it was about kind of minimizing legal risk by basically saying, you know, like basically trying to kind of make the project seem, like, seem more distant from like something that would be covered by financial regulation. And I think more recently it's,

Like, I think at this point, you know, it's like people and regulators know what cryptocurrencies are and they know that it's good. You know, they have a price. They can. There's a cryptocurrency. These prices go up and down. And there's these networks. And these networks, you know, you can build applications on them. And these applications provide a lot of value to people.

And they, like, even. if people try to claim the price doesn't matter at all, they're totally going to see through that, right? So it's, like, I definitely... So how much does it matter to you? It definitely, I mean, I can tell you why, like what things are clearly important about, like, why the price being higher rather than lower, for example, is good, right?

So one of them is obviously security. So if the price is zero, the network can't be secure. And that's true in proof of work or proof of stuff. stake. Another reason is, obviously, that there's a lot of projects who in the ecosystem that hold cryptocurrency. And they, um, either, like, and if the price is higher, then they'll have more money to do things that they want to do, right? And like, these are things that are just obvious and you can, like, it's just obvious from looking, from looking on the internet that crypto projects hold a lot of their money out of their money in cryptocurrency and they'll be

better funded if prices go up. But from a network point of view also, I know security is just an important thing. Like basically if prices drop to zero, then there's no way that security can happen. So I think in terms of kind of descriptively explaining like why people do care and it's a, it's obviously a combination of those things and then there's people that hold cryptocurrency and they want prices to go up. Yeah, sometimes I think that's what the maximalists are. Yeah, definitely.

But I think, like, those are, I mean, like, especially the kind of security or a concern is definitely just a totally legitimate technical argument. And there are members of the Ethereum community that just say that, you know, ether is a cryptocurrency and they want it and we want it to be more of a cryptocurrency. and that's something that, like, the Ethereum Foundation, you know, like, as if it's become clear, kind of doesn't even have, kind of doesn't have a monopoly on Ethereum messaging or even a hegemony on Ethereum messaging at this point. And that's a, like, that's, I mean, that's a kind of direction that, you know, people like Mollockdale and

other groups are going to promote, then, like, even, like, there's not much that we can do to stop them even. And so. So, so, so I have to. I wouldn't do another poll. So if you guys want to take out your phones and also for you on the live stream, go to again to sly.do. And I just want to ask you this question, do you think Ethereum developers

are focusing enough on the ether price? And we'll just look at the results right away because I'm just kind of curious to know what the community feels about that. Oh, okay. So we've got a lot of don't cares. That's interesting. Oh, but, hmm.

So there is more, there's a little bit more yes. there are some people who just are like, I don't know. But don't cares. It's interesting, yeah. I mean, don't care, no, no.

Well, there you have it. So there's all these critiques out there. It's so interesting. And the, yeah. It is really interesting, actually. I think it's, like, engineering for you, for economic,

I think also, like, if it depends on, like how you kind of ask the question because there's a difference between, like the thing that I am absolutely opposed to

is like for just engineering for pumps for the sake of pumps, right? Because that's just a short-term strategy that's fundamentally dishonest. The thing that I'm

definitely in favor of is like not doing stupid things that would lead to the price going to zero. So one example of that would be just like having an issuance of like 100 million ether

every year. year, right? That would, like, regardless of what other consequences that has, that would clearly, you know, drop the price to zero and that would clearly just be terrible. So I want to, I want to actually ask you about something somewhat similar, because obviously we've gone through this recent bubble, this ICO mania. I've heard you express relief that that's over. But I'm just curious to know, like, how do you feel about the fact that a large part of Ethereum success came from the fact that it was used as this launch pad for the ICO craze? that's definitely true to some extent it's I mean to some extent though like ICOs or something that just was is going to happen on some platform regardless of like what platform it ultimately was and you know before Ethereum there was

master coin and other things happen in other things happening on Bitcoin then before Ethereum launched there was made safe and there were all these other projects that were launching and they were using like kind of Bitcoin-based second layers. So I feel like that boom would have happened regardless of what platform it ultimately would have happened on. And it's definitely a kind of complex situation that's had a lot of costs and benefits to it. I mean, one of the big benefits is just a lot of interesting projects getting funded.

And, you know, there's a lot of big Ethereum projects that had to be. token sales. There's a lot of projects that did not have token sales, but that had tokens that launched in other ways. So Maker being one example. And the fact that they have money for development is, I think, like, if you're just a good and useful thing. And then what about the fact that there were that whole other, that whole other space? Yeah. I mean, that's like, that's definitely one of the biggest costs that there were these projects that were just scammy. There were projects that were marketing just way over the top and excessively there were projects that would run up beside me, like take a, just take a selfie, run away, and then claim that, you know,

oh, I took a selfie, like, founder of an engine queue coin took a selfie with Metallic Buder and please buy our ICO. Right, or like, you were an advisor. I even was listed as an advisor. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that I'm like, apparently an advisor for, I mean, there's also, I mean, even, you know, my 10,000 Instagram accounts. They're all scams. There's, yeah, and those are definitely, like, very unfortunate things.

And if there was a magic wand that could have, like, shut them all down, that probably would have been better, but, you know, magic ones don't exist. Speaking of things that shut things down, so I want to ask you, over the past year, the SEC, said in various ways that either in its current form is not a security. However, from the way they phrase their remarks, it seems that they likely would consider the Ethereum crowd sale as violating securities laws. Are you worried about an enforcement action against you or the other founders?

It's something, so far we haven't seen anything suggesting anything like that happening. I mean, we definitely have like our lawyers and legal teams and they're definitely watching the situation closely, but so far we haven't seen any reason to be worried for ourselves. And is that something you stress about at all? I would say no, and mainly listening to all errors in legal teams at this point. All right, so I wanted to just go back to what you were saying about Glenn while.

You know, here you have created this $15 billion ecosystem, but from somebody who, you know, is trying to cover what you're doing, I definitely know you have your hands in a lot more things than actually just Ethereum. And when I recently interviewed Glenn, he actually said that you're his closest collaborator. So what are you doing with him and how does it relate to your work with Ethereum? Yeah, in terms of what I've done with him, I've sent him in a review of radical markets. I wrote a review of radical markets that's still sitting there in the big long 5,000-word thing on Vitalik. dot CA. I worked with him on the liberal radicalism paper. I reviewed some of his recent posts on

why I'm not a capitalist, why I'm not a statist, and like of all of those other things. In terms of kind of concrete items, those are probably the biggest, but I guess more generally and I'll actually be touching on this topic a lot in two days because I'm going to radical exchange right after this. But it's, I view the kind of cyphorpunk tradition and the radical exchange tradition that Glen Weil has created so quickly as being, and of two definitely different movements, but that are still kind of ultimately going after fairly similar goals. And the way that I would describe those goals are as being this attempt to kind of synthesize

valuing, you know, things like freedom and openness and kind of systems where, and if everyone is on an equal footing and there's no special privilege with an understanding of the value of community. And in the, as far as kind of understanding the value of community goes, like, that's definitely not a kind of universal in the cryptocurrency space by any means. right but that's like there's definitely things that

of Ethereum space has kind of cultivated that are almost a reaction to things that other that other people and other cryptocurrency communities have said you know there's people

that literally go around and saying things like oh you know there is no like insert coin name here community there's just a bunch of people that happen to use the same coin and that's what matters

and like I consider those kind of ideas totally crazy And that's something that, so like I feel like, you know, there's the kind of cyphorpunk tradition, especially, you know, 10 and 20 years ago started out as something kind of very individualistic. but then as it started moving into money and moving into cryptocurrency and moving into these other watch-chain applications, it's started to realize that, like, for example, even on a technical level, like, money is a much more inherently social thing than, for example, like, ends-to-end in crypto messaging. And so, you know, that's, and because of that, you just, you know, it's unavoidably have to deal with proof of work, proof of stake, soft forks, UASF, hard forks, governance, Reddit censorship interfering with governance

and like this entire mess of messy human issues. And like coming up with ways of kind of dealing with that, mitigating and minimizing the worst of it, like trying to benefit from the best of it, is a kind of journey that the part of the kind of cyberpunk community that's kind of made its way into, in both Ethereum and other communities as well, like including Zcash

and including in all of these other parts, project probably in you know even though I disagree with their approach including like the the project's doing on-chain governance and so forth as well and then on the radical exchange side you know you have people that are like basically you know see things like Brexit and Trump and all of that and that are basically kind of dissatisfied with like pretty much every kind of major major political trend because they all kind of miss different parts of the picture and are trying to kind of come up with a new approach that like satisfies the kind of ideals of what a lot of people wanted and like out of capitalism for example and even out of socialism but does them

but does both like both in a way that and at least as they perceive avoid avoids the pitfalls of both of the earlier approaches and so like there's this. definitely a lot of kind of common strands in terms of people's goals, but there's common strain, there's kind of differences in terms of people's approaches. There's differences in opinions. So like, for example, Glenn, you know, he has this line where he dislikes blockchains because they formalized property without formalizing individuality. And that's whereas in our space, you know, we have Andreas Antonopoulos writing this article a couple of years ago where he literally says against identity and reputation systems. So that's one example of like

one of the biggest probably wedges between those two. But there's, you know, if they're not literally the same community, there's always going to be wedges. And it's interesting to try to kind of navigate these two different approaches and see what they can learn from each other. So one other thing that I want to, because I mean, this is like, when I look at what you're doing with Glenn, it sort of feels like you're kind of branching out just from Ethereum to, you know, trying to do things in the wider world. And when I look at sort of where things are going in the wider world and how that intersects with cryptocurrency, I feel like I'm reading a lot these days about this fear about the future of work, you know, automation, robots, AI. And there's now

these proposals around things like universal basic income. And, you know, here we work in the space where we have like digital money and ways to dispense of it. So, so, so, or to disperse it. So how do you think blockchains will affect the future of work for good and for bad? Yeah. I think, I mean, first of all, if we want, coming up with better solutions to this whole identity, reputation and more generally formalizing community is definitely something that we need to have more work on if we want to have more high-impact blockchain applications in these areas. Because, like, without that, you know, you can't distinguish 10,000 regular people from one rich guy with 10 million. dollars and that's just going to limit you in so many different ways so but if you can like you solve that problem then potentially you could make a lot of progress so and i think in the shorter term like the main value of these systems isn't so much in kind of formalizing like specific new

mechanisms that entire large portions of society will be building on instead of corporations or governments or whatever. I think in the near term, the thing that's more viable is basically blockchains as a way of making it just easier for more people around the world to kind of connect into the global economy and also easier for different existing projects to kind of interface and interconnect with each other more. So one of the end of pitches that I talk about is the idea that you can see that people are starting to explore this very concretely in the gaming industry, this idea that you have like a bunch of small companies that and that there's like there's a big incumbent and then there's some small companies and the small companies by themselves have a hard time.

but then if they can create some kind of common market or interoperability between them. So in the case of gaming, moving out or trading assets between games and the case of something like financial systems, there will be these different projects, like different wallets or different providers or whatever being able to talk to each other. And by doing that, they can like basically share network effect and kind of stand up against larger monopolists without, you know, themselves kind of coalescing into a monopolist. And I think that's a path that's also in a very socially valuable. But then in the longer term, like as more things happen on blockchains and as maybe things, we have more data sources, we have more kind of formalization of things like reputation and identity and community, then some of these kind of grander and more idealistic visions can also kind of start seeing, start to see the light.

And we can really use watch chains as a platform for just experimenting in. and very different ways of people organizing with each other. So I think those are definitely all kind of good consequences. In terms of consequences that I'm worried about, I mean, near-term just the whole, like, the dark side of the ICO mania, basically, and kind of in a more generalized sense also like scams, hacks, thefts, like all of that side is definitely, it's definitely an issue that I think we could be doing more to try to kind of

fight, mitigate and fight off. I was listening to just other podcasts. I think it was Software Engineering Daily. Haseeb Qaray. She did like an essay where he just read it and it was amazing. But it was funny because he was saying that he feels like in the crypto space, we're sort of learning all the lessons that the traditional financial system already learned. And that's why they have all those regulations in place.

And so it's just funny. But actually, that is another question I want to ask you about. And I think this will be our last question, actually, before we do some Q&A. We've seen this fascinating defy trend that's been taking off in Ethereum. I'm a little bit obsessed with it. Like, for those of you who didn't notice, I did zero X and Dharma and D-YD-X and compound and MakerDA. I'm super interested in all this stuff. But some of the ideas that are being put in a place have the echoes of the financial moves that led us into the 2008 financial crisis.

So what's your take on that? I don't know if you saw maybe one to two weeks ago on Twitter, but there was this one project that was promising like 5X leverage with crypto-based derivatives. And I like went on there and criticized them. And like eventually, I thought they had like some pretty reasonable in answers to my critiques. But I think even still like it's important to do things like. like that and kind of set the expectation that, like, we're not here to build things that break. And I think, I mean, having the doubt happen, like, so early in the history definitely had some positive effects because it's definitely kind of did create, like, a necessary sense,

um, a sense of kind of fear and caution. Though, and now it's been almost three years and, like, it's, I mean, that, that, you know, that, that's definitely not something that's going to last forever. So, yeah, and I'm, like, I'm definitely watching the, kind of, the whole DFI space with, kind of, with interest and fascination. And, I mean, I've been, like, very supportive of a uniswap, for example, all the way through, hi, Dan, stand up. Unconfirmed, last week, that was a great episode.

Yeah, I've been, I mean, you know, like, things, things, like, make. It's just a project that's useful and that's so refreshing and great. Things and auger and so forth. But on the other hand, something will break eventually. Actually, I mean, there's two kinds of breaking, right? So one kind of breaking is the kind of breaking, the financial systems breaking that people are more familiar with, which is, oh, you have these derivatives and then, you know, because people underestimate the fat tails, suddenly things all go in one direction at the same time,

then some things break and then go bankrupt, then other things that depend on those things not breaking, also break, and you have these cascades, and suddenly, like a whole bunch of systems, just fly wild way out of people's expectations. The other kind of things breaking that I'm also worried about is smart contract code risk. So, for example, this was another case of actually myself criticizing our own community on Twitter which I, by the way, I do think Ethereum should criticize other Ethereums, both on Twitter and other platforms. Like, it's definitely healthy to, you know, have the kind of antidotes to the extremes of booster culture and all that. But basically, where I am, someone was trying to

say something like, oh, you know, why don't, why doesn't pretty much everyone, like, take their money out of their bank accounts and put it into, like, die earning interest on compounds, because that pays better rates. Like, why would you not just get a free 3%? And I'm like, excuse me, free? Like, you really believe that contract has, are you really that, that confident that that contract has less than a 3% chance a year of having a bug in it?

And, I mean, I honestly don't know how to measure the chances those contracts have bugs in them, but I, there is definitely, like, I think more people, far too many people that round those risks down to zero. Yeah, well, I was going to ask you about that because, you know, more than 2% of all ether is locked up in MakerDAO in these collateralized depositions and, or I just worry, or I just wonder, do you worry that that could pose a systemic risk to Ethereum, like if there's a bug, or also there's this regulatory risk because the SEC has

been making noise that perhaps stable coins like MakerDAO could run afoul of regulation. Yeah. And from a kind of contract security point of view, I mean, I'm a kind of, I'm, there's definitely kind of reasons to be more optimistic this time around like basically because Maker Dow does seem to be

like doing things much more slowly and methodically than say like the Dow did and you know it's it's it's taken them a really a long time to build everything out and launch and like you know like some people have quibbles

with their like variable naming styles but otherwise like it's still like on balance it seems and it does seem like they're doing things well but at the same time you know the risk is non-zero and it could happen and ultimately if you're doing a system that's interesting the risk of things breaking is always going to be non-zero

on the legal side and ultimately a big part of that just as a question to a question for the maker-dow team But going beyond that, like if a very large class of things that people want to do on Ethereum can get ruled to be basically legally impossible, then that's definitely going to be a very significant loss to Ethereum. And ultimately, I think it's also important to note that Ethereum's value is definitely not limited to one sector. Like, even if this financial stuff doesn't happen, there's still ENS, there's still, like,

And I made that tweet storm a few months ago on non-financial applications of the Ethereum blockchain, where I talked about things like certificates and key revocation and identity and all of these other things. And I think all of those things are valuable too. And it's, like, the system is definitely going to be kind of keep on evolving and keep on being used by someone, like no matter what happens, but there's definitely things that we can do to minimize the risk that people get hurt in the meantime. And I definitely, you know, strongly support, like, everyone in the community taking it on as a common responsibility to do some of those things. Yeah. Well, I think that's a perfect place to end. It's sort of like just sort of where we are

in the system right now. So we're going to actually cue up our first video question that was pre-submitted by listeners. And this is a super fun one. This comes from Ben from L.A. of those of you who listened to my 100th episode where listeners contributed, this guy wrote and recited a whole poem. And it was like a few minutes and it was all about crypto and my podcast. I mean, it was amazing. So if you have not listened to the episode yet, his poem was a true masterpiece. I highly recommend you check it out. And he submitted a super fun video for today's recording. If you then, Vitalik B, had a lamo time machine to join the early cypherpunxie. what advice would you give

Satoshi? Wait, I was just trying to tell is this thing mixing back to the future in Star Wars metaphors? So, what advice would you give Satoshi? Um, GitHub.com.

slash Ethereum slash ETH2.0 dash specs. Are you serious? Like, you would say this is the advice I'd give Satoshi

like build Ethereum 2.0? I mean, I do think it's a good architecture and that's what like you might as well build a good

architecture as being the first thing. I mean, otherwise, I think, you know, if we want kind of

smaller and more concrete one-sentence things, then I think, first of all, like, Satoshi had a really hard job because he just could not have predicted, which way the ecosystem would have went, which way the, just the fact that it would turn into anything

more than a science experiment and all these other things. So I think, like, on a technical level, at least kind of suggesting a path that opens the door to upgrade ability to, like, to proof to, to proof of stake and to, and to, and to, like, to kind of more powerful virtual machines and all these other things. By that, do you mean some sort of, like, governance mechanism? Not a governance mechanism, I'm just a kind of, just a technical design that makes it easier to upgrade. So, from a kind of social point of view, I mean, definitely.

to pay attention more to the more to the governance layer as something that could end up failing in getting captured. Like I think, I mean, Satoshiag basically just disappeared and kind of kind of handed it off to Gavin and then things went from there and then they're going to spiral out of control a few years later. And I think actually, ooh, here's a good one. Set explicit norms in writing. so like for example and set kind of in explicit direction in writing so for example

one of the things that we did for Ethereum early on is we said you know we are going to do proof of stake in charting and we've said that even all the way since 2014 and 2015 and that helped because it like basically

creates this community agreements that you know yes Ethereum at this time is a chain that technically evolves and you know yes this is rough like this the spirit proposals that change it in the spirit of those ideas that are saying should be adopted. And I think that kind of social contract of technical improvement and like even possible of technical improvement in particular directions is something that that has ended up serving us very well.

And it would have also, it's probably also possibly prevented situations that could have otherwise let's arguments that could have let the stagnation. Like you could have been the key, if those things had not been said, like there could have been a much larger contingent basically saying, you know,

hey, screw per mistake and screw sharding, let's just keep the chain exactly as it is. So let's go in some totally different direction. Right. Yeah. So I think trying to set a more explicit kind of path for future improvements is definitely something that he that could have probably very significantly improved the outcome.

Like I can tell why he didn't, right? Like when he launched the thing, even in the white paper or somewhere it said, you know, when something like when the system is launched, like the rules are set in stone forever, which ended up totally not being true. but you know, this is what you would say if you were someone who just thinks that it is going to be a science experiment and not a multimillion dollar cryptocurrency. Yes. Okay, so let's, we'll do the second listener video. Hi, I'm Chandan Lotha from San Francisco, part of the coin tracker team. Thanks, Vitalik, for taking these questions and Laura for organizing.

My question has two parts. One, what do you think is going to be the first mainstream use case for cryptocurrency? And second, what do you think about Facebook's and information? to create a stable coin and messaging apps like WhatsApp. Thanks. Ooh. So for the first one, I would say, like, things I am kind of near-term optimistic about include, first of all, in the decentralized finance space.

Second, of all, I am gaming. And, like, I do mean gaming as in, like, video games, not as in, like, a euphemism for casinos or whatnot. Third, on the non-financial side, like identity, credentials, key revocation, and all of those things. Just even, you know, like the HTC phone, like with social key recovery and all that, for example, like has made me more optimistic that things like that could be done. Like, basically, it seems like there are kind of platforms that are launching that could just, like, employ these identity solutions. For

plus possibly an interesting one I got mentioned from the community is parametric insurance. So this is basically insurance that says if some extreme weather event happens, then pay me

$500. And this seems like the reason why it's interesting is because, you know, first of all, it's very useful, and it's particularly the sort of thing that would be useful in thing, like, developing environments and economies and, like, generally kind of under-financial-included communities and all these other, I know, groups of people that, you know, we have ultimately wants to help, but also because it's, like, clearly actually implementable, because it just all that it requires is a day. data source and you know now we have oracleized we have augur oracles we have all of these other projects that are trying to make oracles at kind of different levels of you know centralization and decentralization spectrum so the tools are totally there to build it um so and you know there is this project called hurricane guard.io that's been like actually building out the thing and the team like I think one of them is based in Puerto Rico the other two are the other is a base

somewhere else. So I do hope to see more things like that happening. And then from there, I guess we'll see you. And Facebook coin? Yeah, Facebook coin. I honestly don't know enough about it to be able to comment. Okay. All right. Well, we'll do the third video then. Hi, Laura. My name is Frank Huttley. I'm from the UK, where I run a blockchain consulting service school and FH blockchain consulting. I've been a big fan of Unchained for some time. My question for Vitalik is, what would be taught at Vitalik Boutre at University?

So the sound on this video is a bit low, but he asked what would be taught at Vitalik Boudre and University, which is a cool question. Because you didn't even go to college. Yeah, no. The, hmm. I mean, I guess, like,

expand like there's different ways to interpret the question because there's like things that people should learn in general but then there's things that more people should learn

but if literally everyone in the world focused on them that would be a disaster but like my goal is but really not necessarily everyone needs to learn all of them um I

like one way to answer it is to like just say you know like the things like cryptography and economics and all of the things that like the technical things

of this particular space but I think that's almost not a very interesting answer because like you can teach different things but it matters in my experience it matters more how things are taught and I feel like there's ways

like society is definitely society's tools of education are very far from perfect and there's ways to improve them that at least I feel like I've been trying to kind of pine do for the space for the spaces that I happen to kind of be more of an expert in but there's but they could totally be expanded to other spaces as well so for example even when I was a bitcoin magazine writer I quickly seized upon this kind of seeming like seeming gap that we have where on the one hand we have like popular science articles that are just terrible to the point of being.

incorrect. On the other hand, we have... I used to be a science writer, just FYI. Not all popular science, I'm articles. On the other hand, you have, I mean, all offends in a different group of people, which is basically math papers, which tend to, and like, computer, anything written in latex, even Wikipedia, like, that category of things, which just tends to seemingly just, place zero or negative value and comprehensibility.

And then, you know, you have that and you have that. And there's this wide gap in between of things that are basically materials that actually just actually tell you what's going on and actually like semi-regorously explain things and like show, you know, here's, like, here's the actual math. Here's how the thing works. And now you can understand how the thing works to the point where you can build. it, but do so in a way that also is actually understandable and is relatable to people who have not taken the exact same series of university courses as the author. Wait, so I'm going to have to stop your answer because we've got a bunch of questions that you all submitted on Slido, and we're running out. So I'm just going to ask maybe one or two.

The top voted question is a fun one, though, which is, who was your favorite troll in the Ethereum ecosystem? him. Ooh. Can I say Kevin, fam? You know, maybe I'd have to go with the same.

I actually wrote an article about him before I was even into crypto, so that's just kind of a we have a history, I guess you could say. All right. Next one.

What is the most promising Eath competitor in your eyes? Ooh. I know. You guys should all be journalists. Yeah, no.

I mean, In terms of, like, things trying to do, like, general computation, I mean, I tend to find DFINITY pretty technically competent. I've... For those of you who didn't hear, he was also on my show. I don't know if he would use the word competent to describe that interview, but, anyway. Yeah. You know, Dominic Scott, like, really great stuff on, and things like threshold signatures.

and distributed key generation. And, like, he does really contribute, like, definitive does, like, really contribute to, kind of the leading edge of the space. And that's something that I really respect. When I was learning about, like, the beacon chain and all that, I was like, oh, this sounds like DFINITY. Yeah.

So I think there's a lot of cross-elination. And I, we don't want to use the word competitor. We use the, yeah, possibly euphemism, possibly, but possibly, kind of aspirational term sister network. Okay. All right. So, we are basically,

out of time. This is sort of a weird place to end where we're talking about divinity, but it has been so fabulous having you. So thank you so much for coming. To learn more about Vatelic and Ethereum, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. This first Unchained Live was a massive undertaking. I want to thank Vatolik again for agreeing to be grilled by me on stage and also flying out here. I'd also like to extend my gratitude to Columbia Journalism School for hosting us. I'd like to thank our venue sponsor, Quant Stamp for helping to make it happen. I also want to give a huge shout out to my event coordinator, Cynthia, Helen.

Cynthia, back there. Thank you so much. She went above and beyond in every way imaginable to make sure this event was a hit. We have a short turnaround time, and she really threw herself into the work and endured a lot of unexpected and last-minute surprises. And she really took care of everything so I could focus on this interview. Big thanks also to Rainling Gola Polly, Stephanie Blyer, Stephanie Cohen, Liv Bear, Brittany Newman, 80 catering,

Caitlin Buckley and Tracy Ballin. And let me just point out, this was an all-woman team. Totally unplanned. If you have friends, you missed out on the first Unchained Live, let them know they can check out the video of the live stream,

which will be at Facebook.com slash Unchanged Podcast. If I can, I will try to also download this for the Unchained Podcast website because I have been getting tweets saying, I already deleted my Facebook account, which I should have thought of before. You know, I'm new with this. If you are not yet sign up for my email newsletter, go to Unchainedpodcast.com right now to get my thoughts on the top crypto stories of the week, plus previews of exclusive podcast content.

And for the true early birds, my book is coming out in two years. So keep your eye out in 2021. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Rayleigh, Gall and Polly, Fractable According, Jenny Joseph, and Danielus, and Rich Struffolino. For those of you in the live audience, please stick around. we're going to continue the cocktail hour. And for everybody on the live stream and also here on the audience and also on my podcast, because we'll be releasing that there, thank you for watching and listening.