This is the first episode of networks had podcast. I've been on many podcasts, I guess they've had millions of views collectively and I've probably had millions of people asking me to whenever you can do your own podcast. Well, we're doing it, okay? This podcast is about Network states, of course, but it's also about everything. We're interested from the positive vision of human Improvement to you know, obviously cryptocurrency. But also by technology drones nuclear power and
All the policies we need to actually legalized all this amazing stuff and I'm going to be talking to tech people, I'm going to be talking to policy. People are going to be talking to interesting people and giving my own commentary and hopefully, injecting some levity occasionally into the proceedings today, I'm actually very happy to have our first guest here. My friend vitalik, deterrent, the founder of aetherium here to talk to us today, about etherium about Network States, and starting new countries and also how to improve yourself as well as his
Particular lifehack one weird trick that allow them to learn Chinese in and how long was it italic and felt like three
years before I got comfortable enough to talk to people? Yeah
there you go. One weird trick to learn Chinese in three years of hard work. So he'll tell you what he did. All right, thank you very much. All right, well, we're underway. This is the first Network State podcast and obviously, you know, we've talked a lot about a bunch of things like rather than doing, you know, tell us
Bout yourself and back on all the stuff. I will assume that that's on tons of other podcasts. I think what is, maybe a little topical that we can just talk about is etherium from Concepts the present day because we just had the merge and you know, what is a theorem, after the merge, what's the future? And, you know, then what happens after that, why don't you tell us about that? Sure, as
so the ethereum project started around the end of 2013. So what I had been doing before then was
I basically finished a well not really finished but I was about five months into a Bitcoin trip around the world. This is basically something I get started in June of that year just visiting what was the Bitcoin community at the time. So I visited like the Libertarians in New Hampshire, the left-leaning anarchists and Spain they you know more, I've had enough Normie.
When community and Switzerland, and people in Israel who are working on math and covered coins and zero knowledge proof sand master coin. I had accumulated all of these different ideas and a lot of interesting
missed
Recollections of various projects that people are working on it. And what was interesting in Israel, in particular, right? Was there was this really high density of people who were
Excited about this problem of. Well, what's next, right? So we have Bitcoin for payments what is watching for, you know, Finance domain, name
systems and
more General applications going to look like in general, right? And what would a protocol that could actually support those kinds of applications or look like their first protocol, that was trying to do anything vaguely in that.
Range was a coward coins, right? Which basically just allowed you to access other kinds of assets and issue, other kinds of assets which was actually look at the right other kinds of assets on top of the Bitcoin blockchain now. But then after this there was a master coin which was a financial protocol that supported a couple of applications that were called things like, basically things that we would call defy. Today it's all
the colored coin surface.
Is Prix 2013, when people still thought all that stuff could run on bitcoin. And then I think we met in late 2013. If I recall right
before you start. Yeah, I met in that San Francisco actually, right after this, a trip to Israel, right? Where I had started actually working on Covert coins and vaster Coin and basically of right after I had started asking myself. The question like, okay, take these protocols as as they are. What kinds of tweaks can you make to them to try to?
I to make them support more things without making the protocols even bigger. Right. So I think at the time I coins and was using the turbo Swiss army knife protocols, and what I meant by that red was something like Master coin. It's supported 10, different types of applications, but it just had one transaction type for each application. You know, there was a transaction type for, like registered domain. There was a transaction type for open binary Financial contracts, there's, you know, a transaction
For make a bet on an event with this third party as the arbitrator. And I started poking at these features are trying to save up for example, 0. What happens if we collapse these three features into one feature? That's like one feature and it's a little bit more complex but it supports stores applications and it supports even more applications.
The rich statefulness
exactly. So rich people that's actually can actually came here the end, right? So
At first I was just making these tiny tweaks, then I realized well what if we made Master coin that had a future for generic to party Financial contracts where you can specify for below and then after that, finally what happens if you go beyond to party and you say okay well what does it end party contract look like. And that's when we had these big insights like well maybe it makes sense for our contracts actually be an accounts. What if it makes sense to make it possible to send coins?
To retool contracts or contract is like an actual like virtual agents that you could interact with the, you could call that you could, you know, send coins to do all kinds of things with.
And
that's where the ideas for etherium started to emerge. And at the beginning, there was ideas were phrased in the form of, well, how do we modify some of these existing systems? But then as they have a mentum around the project s of grew,
I as a more and more people started getting interested in the idea, then it kind of the ambition quickly grew. And it quickly basically became a project to create a new and independent blockchain, right? So that's kind of how things started made and I had written this big document back in December of 2013, then I refined a bit since then, but virtually November the ethereum white paper, right? And I think
Maybe even when we met for the first time, I might've tried showing it. I'm
not even I think there is VI. It was basically the big room where there was a bunch of people there and actually several companies came out of it actually including block stream or everybody came in that room and I said, who are the founders? Everybody raised their hands. And I was like, okay this is going to be, this could be interesting and where they're like there were quite a few folks on the early a theorem there was at a conference in San Francisco, a few months later where I think it was the one where it was a coin Summit or something like that.
2014, is that right early, 2014? There's like, one of the first like, sort of formal Bitcoin conference like things and I think around that time, the whole thing was coming together and I mean, I think the white paper was out by then or close to a but then I don't recall exactly when it was public around the time I think it was out by then. Yeah. And so that's the beginning, right? And how much of that early roadmap? You know, the frontier Homestead Metropolis? Randy. How much of that did you guys in your view? Did you stick to what did you
Of changing, obviously, you know, getting to prefer steak with much harder than or took a while, but it's now out there. So what, you know, it's impossible to hit something on the first go. And most people would be very happy to have, you know, with during, but what's your retro on the whole thing?
Yeah, I think what we ended up doing was
Basically, in the spirit of the original and of Frontier Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity separation, right? So that those four words, by the way, they were from a blog post that was published on the etherium blog by I think given a group to back in early 2015 in a bit before Theory and watched, right? And basically the intended definitions of those four stages where that Frontier was the launch of the chain.
But when the channel is launched, it would be launched with like, very explicit, you know, marketing and understanding among everyone that this was still a beta chain and I'll
blast them.
Almost exactly. Yeah. Well, unless the lots of things could change, you know this is the frontier, you know, the standard things that the bank was people say in every episode and then Homestead was would be a milestone of getting a little bit out of the woods of the Wild West, right? So basically saying like
Give, you know, chains run for a while and it's survived, it looks fairly stable, so it's okay to consider it a just slightly more mature chain, but then obviously still keep improving things Metropolis. Actually. This is the one difference. So originally, there was a goal that the ethereum foundation would create something called Mist, which was the etherium web browser, right? Basically, a web browser designed around the idea of a building and no use
Being decentralized applications from inside of it and it was intended to contain things like an app store and I think there were even ideas dear at the beginning of having a Delta would manage the App Store. There would be no security oriented features though, it could only happen because of the browser, they're just a lot of like really fascinated and advanced ideas. And I think most of that ended up
Not happening, right, instead. You know, we have like browser while it's so things, like, you know, metal mask, the brave wallet, and I think more and more new one system, starting to pop lately. The one thing that ended up not really happening, I think Metropolis ended up being kind of. Well, first of all, split up into three stages, right? So there's Byzantium Constantinople in Istanbul, The Three Forks that happened between in 2018 2020, right? And
Cristobal was the bigger one, it added support for pairings the cryptographic operation. That makes a lot of those. Your knowledge proof protocol as possible and then some other features that were enabled by. Yeah, the other two and then in 2020 I mean if you want 559 and that was something that was totally not predicted initially but it ended up actually being the first like really significance change to the ethereum protocol, right? Basically
the idea there was that it's a reform to the fee market. So to what what happens between you sending a transaction and that transaction getting included in a block and the process for like deciding which transactions get included. How much the miners get paid for including those transactions? What are the limits for how many transactions can get included all of those different variables? And basically, it's
The kind of economy geek explanation is that? It moves if you mark it away from being a first price auction which is no to be an efficient and it moves it toward being a fixed price system. But
One other way of thinking about it, is it adds some temporary select to the blog space. So if there is very temporary growth and demand one block could be a little bit bigger than x block can be a little bit smaller. And what these things ensure is basically that if like, users don't have to make this really complicated calculation of, am I going to pay a high very high fee and get a good it immediately? Or am I going to pay a lower fee and like a needle? So we wait five or ten.
Minutes and instead we would if you want five of nine basically gave us is a few Market where transactions would reliably get included in the next like one or two blocks, right? And then after that, we had the merge which I haven't gotten to that quite yet. But I'll kind of poke into the the future of the past here, briefly the merge would obviously switches to proof of stake. But one of the interesting side effects was that it made block times more
All right, instead of a poisson distribution where you had like, a 1/12 of a chance, I will block every second with the merge. It's like a consistent Rhythm, right? Block, 12 seconds, watchful s block and that actually meant that because of this extra regularity and block time. Blocks, what happened on average, you actually have to wait two times less before seeing the best of luck. Even though the average time between blocks' at is exactly the same. It's the
this really interesting mathematical artifacts, right? And that kind of stacked on top of you have you 1559, right? Because if you are employed 592, reduced how long users have to wait before they get included? And then the words reduced that even further.
And so the both of
those two things together like I think the effects of them both were just so visible. The difference is night and day, right? Like sending each transaction and waiting for it to get included back in. 2019 was like a very frustrating experience and today it's like click wait.
And check either skin. It's done. Click wait, check either scat. It's done, right? It's like very often a transaction gets equated with in only a few seconds. Like, I think probably you get you get a 50% chance after sitting a transaction that it'll get included in the less than about seven seconds or so, right. The only reason why it's not sex is just the probability that like whoever the next block Creator is just happens to be doing something weird and you have to wait for the next one. So you
Wife's improved. Aetherium clients improve. This is also a really important one right in 2016 there. So everyone knows about about the Dow and I think, you know, the Dow is fascinating in the Dow is kind of fascinating for a protocol protocol politics perspective, because there were all of these debates about how, you know, is immutability like an unlimited strong rule that you stick to in every situation, like, is it like a kind of Fiat? You Stacy, i period Mendoza.
Sort of thing. That's a Latin phrase for like what there? Be Justice and even though the heavens fall what the world perish? Yeah or might there be like extreme case Levites on it and you know there is a debate of like what that end up setting a precedent. And I think the answer to that actually ended up being much less than people thought right? Because a year later there was another dispute, the CIP and 999 where the yet parity team tried to unstuck their coins and like make a hard Fork to do that and the community just said like he'll do what we
Yeah. No, we actually explicitly don't want to create a precedent and or were you explicitly? Don't want the Dow to become up residence? And so they kind of intentionally what's in the other direction. And since that there haven't been really any attempts to violate immutability to anything like what happened with the towel, but
I want to just ask one question on EIP 1559 because I do remember this and I'm actually looking at again and it looks like the big difference is before. It was an auction.
Witches in. Well, first the first price auction as opposed to like a second-price vickrey auction is suboptimal but the second thing is it just increases noise and unpredictability and everything because you have a fee market and so on and looks instead that you went to a protocol set base fee so that if you pay that base for your guarantee to being included and so the unpredictability is somewhat decrease, I'm looking all set block times and they've also flattened out and the variance is gone down since the merge, it was a little bit more variance before the merge. Is that correct? Or am I off?
Us on that.
Yep. Yep, they're both both are very
correct. Okay, great. And actually, it's interesting because I, you know, I known about EIP 1559. I hadn't liked track too closely, but it's interesting to see that that combination of things is what has been responsible for kind of faster and more predictable. Transaction fee inclusion on the Dow. You want my perspective on the outside? Just watching the whole doll thing? I didn't come to hear that go ahead. Yeah. So first is during the Dow. You were the
And for those folks who don't know because this is now ancient history and crypto terms, it's seven years ago, it's 2016. When a theorem was I think Bitcoin was starting to hit congestion problems and a bunch of folks were checking out aetherium in early 2016 and it had gotten up to a billion in valuation. I think thereabouts in early 2016. There's this project the Dow that was trying to do effectively and on chain VC fund, but it was trying to be autonomous. And so on, even the name Dow is probably arguably antique.
Waited. It would be a really it's not really, an autonomous community and it's we're not autonomous organization. And so from the outside, what happened was, I think was, like, 10% or something of all eat was in the Dow, was that, right? It
was actually, it was 11 and a half million youth, which is a bit under 10% of the eith it exists today, but it was I think 14 percent of the youth that existed back
then. Okay, so it's like a big chunk and so what happened was this you know, Dow attacker, read the code and figured out some way to sort of drained the
Dow contract but there is this thing where there were like a there's like a white hat approach which could keep going back and forth and keep like undoing his thing, and that was just going back and forth, and I think there's like a 30-day clock or something before you before was like a final transaction or something like that was. That is that, right? And then you're going to get in a patch before that 30-day clock went up to stop. Those funds from being moved to marry. Am I remembering that correctly? Yep, Ballpark. And so think about that was a mirror from the outside wall.
And I was like, you know, now I have sympathy for Bernanke, because there was a systemic risk to the whole system and this sort of intervention could save the system potentially, but would it create moral hazard, and so on and so forth, or what have you? And I, I just understood in the same way that when you start a company, your CEO and you understand what it is to be CEO or you teach a class your professor, you understand what it is? And you're like, okay now I know what a smartass kids were on were on the other side, right? Being actually in the position of essentially
Banker. You're like, okay. Now I understand why, you know, they're there. Did you have those thoughts at that time? We're is that something your thing about? Hmm,
I don't think I. Yeah, years the Bernanke as an analogy, but like I guess just because those kinds of like monetary and finance issues are probably a little bit less of a primary category for me of than shirt are for a lot of the other earlier, crypto people but it definitely similar thoughts.
It's interesting because I mean, ultimately, the judge,
Education on it is that a theorem has succeeded and that there hasn't been despite significant pressure, other sort of reversal things, put into a theorem. Like, of course, there was that unfortunate hack of the parity wallet, for example, and then they were trying to get any IP in there. I believe to like, move the funds whatever. But so far, while it's very unfortunate, I don't think there has been another thing. That's like that, that is like allowing for community reversals of transactions. If that means now we have sample governance.
We're out of Homestead fully and you know, was it formally in Homestead around the time of the do
I guess? So hopes that happens in March, 2016, and the Dow got hacked on I believe it was June 17th, 2016.
Yeah. So it's still basically, it's still basically beta so that's I think a fairly good justification for beta versus prod as to, you know, when edit up. So now we're post-merge. I mean, and I was, I was just crossing my
fingers actually before we get to post of RJ. Yeah.
I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the other thing that happened in 2060 and just because I think it's, it's equally fascinating, but like 10 times fewer people have heard of it. So, okay. So the time is 2016, September 19th, and is the background of this time was that the Dow had gotten hacked months ago and the Dow hard Fork that had like be done, that kind of surgical interventions of the chains there.
Like delete the Dow coins and move them into this other place had happened about two months ago. The whole situation where the ethereum classic community rebelled and made their own version of etherium had that refused to implement that change had happens. And the entire kind of Market drama where, you know, you had Barry silbert pull-push, trying to push aetherium, classic really hard. A whole bunch of characters, kind of buying in early, trying to get it to flip etherium when
You had a whole bunch of exchanges supporting yet, hope I'll adjust a whole bunch of people really like watching. And seeing, you know, which of these two chains would win because this was the first time there was any kind of like literal crypto Civil War Between Two Chains, so that had all happened and the etc' price had, had a maximum of, you know, 0.4 es and then it had dropped again and it had dropped to think a bit below. Zero point one at the time and it
I just felt
like maybe just, maybe they theorem Community was finally on. Its way out from the being in the kind of Dow Arc of the plot of the story, but then at 5:15 a.m. Shanghai time on September. The 19th. When I was staying in the hotel, where the caught a Defcon 2 was literally about to start in 3 hours and 45 minutes.
It's I got this a military-style wake-up call like just woken up by a call. I picked it up and someone from the theorem foundation and said hey you know we have a situation, you need to come down now. So I pretty much stood up grabbed my computer, put my computer, in my computer bag. I'm gonna walked out of the hotel room elevator down. Walked over to this a room where I was supposed to go and
Since I
saw about 20 ethereum developers, gather the room. And at that time, they were still trying to figure out what was going on. Basically, what had actually happened was that someone discovered a bug, not in the ethereum protocol but in aetherium implementations that would cause it to process a particular type of transaction much more slowly. But basically yeah instead of taking like, n steps to process a transaction that it had and computational steps.
Epson it in. This one particular case, it would take N squared steps, right? Basically, because it was like each single step of the evm would add one extra thing that the called that the the node would need to worry about. And the and so the first thing you would in the first step would be to worry about one thing. And the second step we need to worry about two things. Since there are steps that you worry about three things, right? And so it would quadratic like this kind of bug, could totally have have
actually
a quadratic bug. Actually did happen in Bitcoin.
Ready. So one of the key justifications for not in what is secondary. Justifications for not increasing the Bitcoin block size back. When the Bitcoin block size debate, it happened. This was a one of these like techno work things that again. Almost no one knows about right. Is the quadratic attack issue with hashing so the quadratic attack issue with hashing in Bitcoin basically a yeah it is I think it's I think it's still is but the
Only for old style transactions segregated with this fixed it. But basically, that if you have a transaction that has n inputs, then to compute the hash that gets used for the signature. In each of the inputs, you have to Hash the whole transaction, right? It's so if you have n inputs, that each of those at and inputs data and different signatures, you have to create in different hashes, in each of those hashes contain, you know, he's kind of like the structure of all of those inputs and so each of those hashes or be size and it's so you
To have in hashes of size n in order to sign a size n transaction. So you need o of N squared hashing, right? And because Bitcoin is just like, because it was just hashing in not evm execution and because Bitcoin just has a lower absolute limits to its capacity, it ended up being I think. Okay for Bitcoin as it is like a worst-case block at that time if they get that I've taking like 30 seconds to process, but if the block size had increased, that would go up quad.
Radically right? So if the block size is gone up from 1 to 10, then the
sucks, the worst case
walks on would have gone out from 30 seconds to 3000 s, which is almost an hour, right? So, so it's not a Turk if we decision, right? It's a quadratic like, literally Bitcoin also had a quadratic execution issue, and that ended up influencing at least it's to us wide extent that they could, ultimately have it for other reasons. They swell Block versus Big W discussion in the etherium case, it was
Said it had to do with the implementation and way the way that the system hands all two recursive calls or just like long towers of calls in general. So like a calls b.call c,e or could be a calls, a calls. A, and how it creates like basically when it created a call to VM ended up copying everything and the the amount of stuff that got copied guy kept increasing with every call. So they're actually a whole bunch of these different quadratic execution attacks. So the attacker
Discovered the first one in
at, you know,
early morning, Chinatown time of September, the 19th, I think the attacker might have even intended to kind of create a nasty surprise and to basically make the etherium chain brake on the morning of Def con out red. But we ended up working, you know, really hard and really intensely. For those few hours we had by about 6:30 a.m. I think I see
Did the bug by like maybe 7 8 a.m. or so created? The patches that would fix the bug. And that's
pretty legit. That's hard to do for a subtle bug. That's actually quite difficult. Go ahead, it.
Absolutely was. Yeah, then by like 8:30, a.m. we had, I think published to the patches of people are starting to download them and that's a 9:25 a.m. 25 minutes. After the intended, start of the conference, we were all kind of confidence to the
if that everything was stable, people were running the new nodes, everything was working as expected. And that work was running fine again. And the conference basically started pretty much as it had been planned to start, right? So we had turned a in a basically, an attempt at creating a PR disaster for us. I think, you know, into something that really showed the unity and the most just the dedication.
And the competence of the yeah, I guess developer team, right. I think it's one of the other reasons why I got of wanted to tell the story. Which, by the way, is not done yet. Is that like the cord devs? Really are these kind of unsung heroes of the ecosystem, and they tend to be more introverted, and they tend to be less podcast e than, you know, myself for just a. But they've just done a lot to make is here, IAM the etherium clients faster, and to really enable, like, let's say the
The 7x capacity increase that the chain has had a sense since it launched, right? But it took a long time to get there, right? So that was the first attack and then when Defcon finished on the evening of the third day, the attacker discovered a second attack a few days. Later, the attacker discovered a third attack. There was a fourth attack. Oh, wow. There was literally this month-long period. We are, we were literally in constant. Cyber war between the get and parity development teams.
Second priority were the two aetherium clients that were functional at the time and there would be often periods. We are either guest Works in parity, do not work or parity work to get the network and a lot of users ended up switching between the two clients. So really frequently and the two teams are both just like frantically putting out fires that this attacker was starting an attacker was figuring out every single bug in
each of these
ethereal clients, very smart guy for that. Attacker was. Yeah, it is really impressive, right? And then,
Finally a month later, he discovered a bug which was thought at the implementation, but in the protocol itself, right? This was a bug you with the self-destructs of code that basically a lot of TV used to do. Some
real, basically
make the etherium state, much much bigger, using a very tiny amount of gas and that and that bug had it been left alone like it would have been fatal within some number of weeks, right? Because basically the etherium
Eight size was just bloating up and one state, the Arab states eyes bullets up too much then there was just be no way to do any kind of caching and that would make it through are even slower in other ways there. We had to do another hard Fork, another emergency unexpected, hard Fork to increase the gas costs of a couple of operations to just make those attacks. Just not viable in the future. You remember that? And that do you remember the second hard Fork that added a feature to clean up all of the junk? Some
Objects that the attacker added into the ethereum chain.
And I remember basically that at the end of 2016 in December like a theorems price had dropped quite a bit over the course of years being like a long slide down. People were demoralized after the Dow and the multiple hard forks and people thought that the this is not you but folks you know like who are in the broader crypto Community or whatever, thought, okay, smart contracts are just too hard and just had too much complexity too much attack. Surface is going to be a while.
For the sing works, and you know, much much power to them, but it'll probably take a few years, then three months, four months later, you have this gigantic rise. And it's like, you know, we should play that rap thing. You know, where the guy's like on his back, and he kind of gets up like that, you know, that means I'm talking about that. Will put this in the show at its go ahead.
Yeah, the but, you know, the, the, the driver was that was not not quite over as you said until December right? At the end of November. There was this situation where like I had to send a bunch of transactions to
To make a wrote a python script to send thousands of transactions to clear out this junk that the attacker had added into the chair into the chain. And I'm like, babe and one of their transactions triggered. Another bug that had to accidentally been introduced that actually for the first and only time, like really act proper. What actually had a consensus failure, like, same thing as what happens in Bitcoin in 2013, kind of split the chain in half. Like I was the one who sent a trick the V transaction that
Basically broke a theory. I'm in that way for the first and only time, which was one of these kind of fun stories again. But yeah. After all that the price of in dropping everyone has said, definitely demoralized and then 2017 happened. And, you know, the crazy bubbles of 2017 a happened, then 2018 happened and that's when he 90 and happens and people. When I fear, I am, were demoralized again the end of 2018 was the birth of Yuna swap, which I think was a good
Good kind of segue into the defy era and that in 2020, we have the summer of D Phi. And then there we started to be nft is and if these are probably the one thing that I did not project by the way, right? Like if you look at the list of applications that were in the etherium white paper and you look at the applications that are popular today, the big thing that's in the second West, that's not the first as an FPS, but otherwise, you know, their prediction of architecture defy. There are a lot of things, right? And then finally,
You know, this last year, 2022, the merge happened and that was Serenity, right? Serenity was always intended to be proof of stake and later on, we added on sharding. The basically some kind of scaling solution to that and you know, proof of stake has finally happened. Congratulations on. So, can I say why I
was concerned about that? I was, I was just sure I've see, you know, rooting for the success and everything was like, you know, a full switchover of the, of course, consensus had been
Tested for about a year or thereabouts, but you're moving the whole ecosystem over and it was a, everything that isn't tested is usually, where bugs arise. And so the fact that that was as smooth as it was and basically a non-event and that there hasn't been. I mean maybe there's something that eventually but it certainly nothing at the time. Nothing in that a few weeks afterwards was really impressive. It was is one of those back-end changes where the whole point.
It's a non-event, but a very, very, very difficult to pull off. So, congratulations on that. You probably have some thoughts on that whole transition over.
Yeah, the transition took a lot of work, right? Like, I think it actually surprised all of us that the transition wasn't an event to the extent that it was right because every single test run that we had attempted had at least one thing, tiny thing break in it. Like never anything bad enough that like it would have been a big problem. Had it happens on the on the live network, but it was always like
Some combination of client settings and it up and not surviving. And I 10% of the nodes dropped off one time. 35% of the nodes dropped off in that actually caused finalization zits Away by an hour. There's just like, always a couple one or two tiny things that would break. And then when the real merge finally happens, you know, everything just went extremely smoothly, right? And I think that again, you know, just is a test of its to the quality of, you know, the all of the etherium client development teams.
Works hard for multiple years, to write the software that would make the transition to proof of stake possible, right? And basically, pull off something that I think some people were describing as changing the engine of a jet while. The jet was still flying, right? It's pretty really complicated operation. I mean, it's like a lot of people. I think, definitely did believe that it couldn't be done but, you know, eventually it was done. So. So now that the Birch is done and I think
The main thing that's the left for the for in the original kind of roadmap is sharding, right? And shorting is something that we talked about for a long time, but I think the ideas around how sharding would be implemented. Have changed. It's gotten more ambitious, right? Like early versions of sharding were willing to trust honest. Majority assumptions. And basically are willing to trustee idea that neglects assume. 50% of the nodes are going to be good people, which
Is like a lot less ambitious than like, say the Bitcoin Spirit, right? Which basically says that, you know, hey, even if 90% of biters are pushing the wrong chain, you as an operator of a node, should be able to reject it right, like Bitcoin is not a minor oligarchy. It's like a constitutional system where it's supposed to only accept things that are valid and the original vision for ethereum sharding. Had been like, okay, if I know obviously, we have to trust, the 50% are going to be honest, but then,
I started being more ambitious and saying like oh can we actually make a system that supported many more transactions that a single node could verify but that was still verifiable in the sense that the system would still kind of force itself to follow the rules and where users could verify the rules are being followed. Even if a great majority of the consensus participants were trying to subvert that objective right? And there's a lot of really interesting research and what if
you think and I think fate
What percentage would be trying to subvert in that case. So not even like, what's the honest? It's not the honest majority anymore. It's honest fraction of what?
Yeah, alright. So we had like an honest minority assumption in some of our protocols that basically required, like the user, and maybe a few hundred other other satellites number 90 units
percentage, basically, or America, right. Exact? That's really interesting. Hmm. Okay, I actually, I should look at that go ahead.
Yeah. But what if the Fateful decisions
That we made around 2020. This is I think another one of these trivia that is well, known within a theory, I'm circles, but probably does. It hasn't really kind of filtered out to the yeah, you know, the wider narrative mean, mean, blacks is the roll-up Centric roadmap, right? This is basically this idea that instead of etherium itself, trying to kind of boil, the ocean with our scaling and turned itself, into this complicated, hyperscale will system.
We would
Make some changes to etherium that would make it be more friendly to people making layer to scale and solutions right solar to scale like Solutions are like protocols that try to do the same thing that etherium does but that plug into aetherium for security without doing every single thing on top of a theorem. Right? So most of the work would have an auction but just enough work would or could be done on chain that if something happens, the ethereum system would kind of keep the rest of the system honest.
Right. So one of the defining analogy is for Layer. Two is in general, is like the concrete poured, right? Like the concept of a exactly the Supreme Court is, what things are going to ultimately rest on, but you don't literally have the supreme court hearing every single case, right? You have a whole bunch of Diaz appeals courts and like a whole bunch of lower courts and then you just have the facts that the threat of a court case being possible can drive on this Behavior without
That's most of that behavior ever needing to get into a court system, right? The kind of analogy, I like it drives the lightning Network, which is that basically the only kind of layer 2, that's possible, and Bitcoin, and it also drives an interstate channels, which are all delighted that were people have bullets on etherium, as well as roll ups, which are this more complicated thing that was only discovered later on. If you're am, that are actually powerful enough that you could use Smart contracts on top of that, right? So, letting Network and say, Channel support,
Transactions and they support viewer limited. Kinds of Contracting, the roll-up, see support like kind of full-on EVMS, that are that kind of get indirectly the our fight inside that UVM. So layer twos have kind of been the theory of scaling Direction since then and since then there have been these discussions around data availability, right? Basically the Practical capacity limit to a layer 2 is
Watch your data, the etherium chain chain itself can store, right? Because one of the trade-offs of Roll-Ups is that they do require the etherium chains a store, a few bytes of data for every single transaction, like a lot less than using a theory of directly but still some amount of data. And and that's where stuff like data availability sampling an EIP 4844, which is looking scheduled to come, you know, early to bed. Reading Journal. Maybe. Oh, maybe later next.
Last year as is all about, exactly. So the real you know will predict charting is like a bit of a pain, right? Because so first you're charting and then there is dank sharding which has this version of sharding which was created by the theory and my researcher name's Dan grad and then there is Proto ding sharding which is called that because it's a stepping stone to fold a charting. And doesn't technically Shard data yet though it does Short history and computation. But it was also created by another theory and research was famous Pro.
Lambda right? So yeah, so first day of charting happening next year, and the other thing that like, I've talked to the roll-up team said, they all want to do next year is we want to start taking off training wheels, right? So the Roll-Ups and Layer Two, is that exist on a theory? I'm today, they basically all have what I call training wheels. Like some kind of backdoor that lets developers come in and like, say stop and change the protocol if they see that some kind of bug is happened and like treat.
The wheels are obviously a, you know, and affronts to the moral idea of trust Hostess, and all of those things, and nobody wants training wheels to be the status quo long-term. But basically, yeah, there were like a compromise saying, okay, people like, we want to hit the ground running and we want applications to be able to start, you know, start deploying only or tours before we can be fully confident that the thing that the thing has no bugs and so we're going to have a back door for a while and then once thing.
Is are stabilized and what's work on fidence enough and the code then we can finally start screen the back doors out. Right. And so next year, I guess some of the projects are going actually, I think might be actually taking their backdoors out. Some of them are going to be kind of limiting their back doors into going to a hybrid, right? Where a bracket or exists. But there's like, it's not like one person that read that manages it and it's not even a
Ozzy Sig with a fifty one percent threshold. It's like a multisig with an 80 percent threshold or 75% threshold with members. That are like highly distributed bits of in between a bunch of different organizations. And so it's like a halfway house between, you know, being a yeah, kind of trusted sidechain the in the style of, you know, something like liquid or in the South something like polygon today versus being a fully decentralized system, right? Where it's like you know the humans have half the
Said, the code has half the votes. It's probably one sort of mathematically accurate way to think about it. And so, like the senate in the house, if you want to override the code, you know, exactly like if the, if even a majority of the humans are dishonest as long as like unless you know, you have like, almost all the humans are dishonest. Like, if it's just a majority then, you know, the code still kind of carry out care is today, right? But so the idea would be that if there is some political controversy
that then, you know, you're not going to,
you know, you could
see yourself getting 51% of the humans, but, you know, you're not going to get like if 80% of the humans, whereas, if it's a bug, then once that's something where it's easy to get like a, you know, hundred percent even agreement that the bug needs to be fixed, you know, not total kind of, you know, take the training wheels off and weave into the code but like a very large step toward that and actually yeah, I think one of the team's I talked to actually is more ambitious.
Even that one of the their approach is to basically say we're going to have a system where we only turn on the humans when someone submits a proof that the code disagrees with itself. So if the code can create a valid proof for something that's valid and that as an for something that's invalid,
that's inconsistent and some sushi humans. Like exactly if you make
a proof of it consistency, right? Which is much easier than a proof of incorrect. This like basically just show that it provides two different.
Great answers to the same question, right? Like you know, if like if I ask Chad GPT a, you know, who was the president of the United States in 1850 and ask it 10 times and one of those times it gives a different answer like that's that by itself is proof that it's not easy. You know, a perfect system just like even to someone who knows nothing about u.s. history, right? It's like that kind of idea. So
but this is all like I think
the details of that are still being figured out but like the thing that
What is that set on is that 2023 is going to be the year when you know Roll-Ups really come to maturity, we have 44 for the gives ropes more space and we have the training wheels on Roll-Ups like really get weekend a lot and like basically yeah we go most of the way to these as you know if you're am scale like being this kind of fully trust Alice and so not fully, trust was but you know, most of the way to being foliage, rustles the most which mostly true.
Still has a system that kind of gets us to like most of you know, we would call sharding being finished. And then after that there is a Roll-Ups going fully, trust Alice and then there is full tank sharding. And I think those things are going to take a couple of years longer. But like for me personally I think after the changes in next year like that would be the point. The first point where I would feel comfortable saying, even if nothing else happened past that point, I would be happy with aetherium right? And
To me as, like, a position. The the like my. Yeah. Like that. That's the personal milestone for me, right? Like the, you know, equivalent of like, when can we call a theory? I'm done if we really have to call it done. Well, and of 2023, right? So merge done, withdrawals done. So be being able to withdraw from the proof of stake system, you know, basic scaling done a lot. You know, a lot of basic improvements done enough, cryptography, added to a theorem that we can support privacy.
Solutions is a layer on top and you know, if we need to, we can stop there. But as you know, we're not going to stop there, right? And we wants to kind of like, go ahead and try to actually make sure that the theory of ecosystem gets support 500 million users before, you know, the bowl were 500 million users were knocking on the door actually, yet, you know, ends up happening. That's great. So, that's, you know that. Yeah. Okay. So that's that, that that's probably the next part of the future, you know, the transition from
If you rem as this kind of fear, very theoretical ecosystem, that still discovering and finding itself to etherium Bassett ecosystem that actually is, you know, tries to be useful and usable and, you know, secure and and all those things and like actually provide value for hundreds of millions of people.
Here's a question which you can skip if you want, but basically, in terms of a theorem being done. So you mentioned, you know, the trust us -, you know, some folks are talked about like the ofac compliance blocks do too.
Do you know the whole Mev issue others have said? Oh when we're going to be able to withdraw aetherium from staking? Do you have any thoughts on and then the third is basically, you know, I think Zuko has mentioned that, it'll be hard to have privacy completely bolted onto theorem if it's not there at the base layer and I think I might agree with that third one, but maybe you have any thoughts on those three or do not want to address those or go ahead
and I think they're definitely important issues. So withdrawals are the easiest one.
Like its uncontroversial, everyone agrees that it's going in the next hard Fork, which is I think expect can happen early next year on The like privacy and censorship resistance stuff. I be an it's there's definitely, like
A big bundle of problems that I think the yeah if they're American system is facing at the same time that are important, right? So it's like basically one of the things that's happened over the last year, a few years is the rise of Mev and MTV. Like one simple way to think about it is, it's like the facts that they are exist. Strategy is for minors or block proposers or
or creates the block to make even more money where those strategies are complex and require you to have complex algorithms to be able to execute on them. Right? So it's basically the fact that like being a really dumb automaton is no longer, the optimal strategy for a block Builder. The the challenge is like, how do we prevent that fact from being a source of centralization? Where, you know, let's say yes, taking ends up centralizing until like two or three pools that become better than everyone else at?
Actually implementing these algorithms, right? So that discussion started happening in around 2019 and flash floods, came out around that time and then at the same time at the same time, you know, they're definitely. Yeah, we're mining pools that were independently thinking about how like they would try to extract this extra and BV revenue is pools, so that that was one of the things that happened and the way that we ended up solving that
That problem is basically this concept of proposer Builder separation, right? Where instead of the whoever creates the blocks, the proposer being able to, or needing to figure out the contents of the blocks themselves, they can auction that off to third parties, right? And they can basically run an auction, and they can accept bids that say, hey, here's an idea I have for what to include in a block and if you include this or
You know, all like what you include this and collect the fee is that if you let me do that, I'll pay you 0.018. And someone else might say oh here's a another block that I have and if you include this I'll pay you 0.022 Edith. Read and there's like a lot of complexities around how to make that kind of Market Fair for all participants and like make it decentralized that resistance to cheating and attacks on also on all sides without the resistance or without the antique.
Cheating itself, turning into a centralization vector, but one of the things that happened as a result of this is basically that, you know, yet we ended up outsourced like block, proposers ended up, Outsourcing too much, right? Like, you know what, I actually need to Outsource the entire process of block creation. If all you want to do is to capture Mev revenue, and the problem with Outsourcing the entire process of what creation is that we've moved block creation from this.
Set of or distributed actors to this set of more concentrated actors. And more concentrated actors are inevitably going to be much more legally conservative and even more likely to over comply in the terms of what kinds of transactions they are accepting right now. Basically, we now have about 70 percent of block of the builders that are creating but that are
Ali responsible for constructing blocks that are going into the chain that are refusing to include certain kinds of transactions. Like, I've actually, you know, even like talks to legal counsel that think that they're going too far. And that they're even, you know, blocking Transit, transactions, do it acceptable to an extent where they don't need to write. But, you know, the facts that they are centralized actors, the fact that, you know, even the lots of them are, you know, based in the US, the fact that they are actors that are connected to other actors that all these things right? Like it ends up kind of
Things over to the kids, you know, to this conservative side that, you know, goes beyond what a lot of legal counseling even have you even told me as a legally necessary. And so, the good news is that nothing has been censored in aetherium, right? So, the good news, is that even the transactions of the type, that people are being most conservative about trying to censor. Those transactions get still on average, get included into the chain after about three blocks.
Right. So actually yeah, post to EIP one on basically EAP 1559. It did more to make those just to make those transactions faster to include, then the whole ibv sincerity, is there a claim so over to encode? Is there
some which is a concern Canary for a theorem transaction censorship? Like could you there's probably something there but I maybe I just don't know the site that's just looking at the mempool or and seeing that there aren't blocks, there aren't transactions with valid high amounts of fees that aren't
Get in. So the the canonical site for this
is a any of you watch dot info. That's actually the site where I pull the 74.
Yeah, I do remember this. So effectively blocks that the top right, but the censorship of fenders says censored. So it does actually claim that some of them are censoring these entities run censoring movie
relays on their validators. Yeah. But it's
improved like there's a lot something I had not seen this graph at the bottom, the post-merge dealio so
So it looks like green is increasing which is interesting and a little bit counterintuitive is it your view that that's going to continue to increase or that green is large enough that that's the free etherium for a while and it just needs to be large enough for. How do you think about that?
I think we're expecting green to slowly increase over time. Right? So by the way just like my view one like is it are we in a state? That's good enough or not? Is that one of the nice things about blocks be a transaction censorship in blocks, is that it's what I call a one event.
All right, so even if you know, you have 99% of Builders or block proposed routes connecting two, builders that are censoring that just means this, I want to have to wait 100 blocks blocks instead of one and that's still like kind of fine for them, right? Like basically if you if you want stuff to be said sturdy to have to like reach pretty much everyone but at the same time we had or you'd have to lean on pretty much everyone and get them to stop including uncensored blocks. But at the same time like you know, given how things work
I could, you know, Norm Cascades work and just all of their social phenomena, like we're definitely not head in the sand about this, right? So like just to give something concrete examples of the theory of ecosystem, being not head in the sand. One. Is that a cut multiple? You entity is announced in. I think, is in December. In January that they has started operating. No, I did see that nonsense during real.
Right, and yeah, and like a lot of never even you know, entities that are, you know, outside the US serving stay Crews that are outside the US and all the and all that. But you know, they did a launch and some people have switched over to them but it's it's like one of those slow processes because I'm it was staking is like a multi-billion dollar thing and everyone who participates wants to be here, just careful about moving.
Over infrastructure and all that. So that was the first thing. The second thing is that for the flash W team, added a setting to Mev boost that allows you to say, I'm only Outsourcing block production in those cases. When Outsourcing the blood production is significantly profitable, right? So, if the revenue is like less than .05 or some threshold that you can still make blocks yourself, if it's over .05, then you can, you know, going to Outsource and it turns out that if everyone
That point zero five, is there a fee setting then you would have a world where 40% of blocks would not be outsourced. But every of single validator would gain like something like ninety, six percent of the revenue gains that they would gain from Outsourcing all of the time, right? So this is like one of the examples of what I mean when I say that people are Outsourcing too much, and that's a setting that people are starting to use. And then in the longer term, I think one thing that we want to do is this concept of partial block auction.
So we're in basically yeah instead of it's like when you Outsource you set conditions, so you say for example, I have seen these 20, these 23 transactions and so what you create a block I want you to include all 23 of these transactions or I'm going to let you choose the first class transactions in the block, but I'm going to choose the other ones. And if you do this, then like you're still going to be able to get like 99% of the revenue from Full Outsourcing, but because 90 percent of the revenue from Fallout source,
Really comes in like the first five or ten transactions, but at the same time, you know? Like if everyone does that, then like Furby censorship perspective, that's great. Chain is going to be fine, right? So that's the bait, that's the base chain. I think the other thing that I think is worth talking about is like the application layer perspective on privacy, which I think is important but privacy is super important, but I do think that there's a there definitely are, these kind of extra legal
Challenges that have to be in a that have to be navigated, right? Like basically. Yeah. So you know, it's really do cash exists and tornado cash still exists, right? But like even if tornado Cassius is still completely? Yeah, you know, usable a ton, Sands uncensored from and etherium protocol perspective that does still in
practice. But like the legal
actions have in practice a little bit of its usefulness, right? And they've limited its usefulness.
Two reasons, one of those reasons is that it's a become extremely risky to use for as us persons. But the other reason is that if you receive a tornado cash coin, you're going to get a lot more trouble from like exchanges and the entire rest of the kind of crypto Fiat Bridge ecosystem, that needs to comply, right? Like what approach to trying to kind of deal with that is to basically say, you know we're going to make privacy a defaults for everyone and we're just going to make
It, you know, impossible for anyone to distinguish themselves from from anyone else that also try real do. So that's actually where I was
gonna go is basically that and maybe we can do this, and then we'll move on to other stuff besides crypto stuff. But it seems to me like something where, you know, whether it's commit reveal or zero-knowledge current, there's like a bunch of different Dynamics but
We're Miners. Can't see what transactions are. Including nobody can see what transactions are. Including it takes away. Mev. That's a justification for on a completely different grounds. And yours have privacy baked at the base layer where you intentionally make miners dumb pipes in a sense right there blinded to it and there's probably some clever cryptic you know cryptographic tricks you could pull to make that feasible and then you also support zero knowledge for the transactions themselves, not just the, you know, the mining process.
And so, something like that. Where the system cannot quote, discriminate against transactions because it cannot tell the difference between them seems like where you ultimately want to go or you know tell me tell me your thoughts on that.
Yes. I think at protocol level moving in that direction it would definitely be here really as you're seeing but he could do it on an L2. Yeah but I mean like at application Level I think it's more challenging, right
and
Add application Level, I think they like, I mean, I know this is a very controversial Topic in day, you know, people have, you know, all kinds of opinions on this. And I think,
Like my view on, this is probably a little bit more willing to compromise then some of the purists, which has that. Like even though, like I think that the etherium chain, should I cook should absolutely have likelier. One censorship resistance as the hill of dies on and, you know, if it has a choice between, you know, censoring on L1 and, you know, even like a
A 50 percent chance of getting killed a like it should even take a 50 percentage that take the 50% chance of getting killed because once creative or what's credible neutrality is of the chain is broken, then what's the point? But on the application layer, like, like first of all, you know, I think, you know, there are, there are legitimate concerns, right? So like to know, it is true that a very large portion of the inputs to 380 cash ended up being these large-scale defy hackers. You know, it is true that there are a lot of
Large-scale criminals, who are using these, using these systems and who would use of these kinds of systems. If they ended up even be kind of becoming much larger Unchained, which one of the largest criminals
is maybe supposedly the North Korean government. So, which state government was one of the largest criminals had just got it, keep going
a very possible, you know? And but it's and I think just also from a philosophical perspective, right? Like, like, if I had
To choose, you know, what would the right kind of place to be in terms of financial privacy? Like, there is this? So there's this slogan that, you know, even I think I want the, the cypherpunks originated like 20 or 30 years ago, which is like what we want is transparency for the powerful and privacy for the week, right?
Yeah. Like surveillance but from below. Right? Exactly. And I think
like even outside of law enforcement, use cases like, you know, people appreciate the facts that they can do kind of.
Of Open Source on channel, let X and luck track, the crazy billion dollar stuff that's been happening inside of f, t Axis or you know what, some of the other large exchanges, your viewing or whatever, right. So I think what would be what would be nice? You know it is a world where there was something approaching complete anonymity for small transactions and you know very high privacy for medium transactions. But we are larger transactions and especially transactions that
that, you know, huge amounts of people don't don't even, you know, wants to make an attempt to mix themselves in with don't necessarily have that same level of privacy and the interesting thing, right? And the interesting thing about zero-knowledge photography is that it actually lets us do this, right? So here's like the simple way to do this. So imagine a version of tornado cash. We are when you withdraw from tornado cash, you make one proof.
Which is proving that you know you have a valid coin, that's positives. The system that you haven't done you and you haven't withdrawn yet which is the thing that's being proven now. But you also add in another proof which proves that you are not one of. Let's say twenty three addresses that like Che analysis or some collection of organizations decided, you know, our large-scale possibly North Korean hackers. Right? So like USA users decide to say, hey, I'm willing to mix myself in with the
Brando's but I'm not willing to mix myself and with large-scale defy hackers and contributes a large-scale DIY hackers anonymity sets, right? And if let's say yeah, ninety-five percent of users take this option. Then the anonymity said of the worst, you'll see if I have a current reduces by a factor of 20, right? And so that makes like privacy for large-scale defy hackers much smaller without affecting privacy for everyone else. And like, the really nice thing about it is that it's incentive compatible, right?
Has like you as a user. You know Hugh wants to I think prove that you're not a large-scale. Do you find hacker both because you know you as a user you know I think morally don't want to support that kind of behavior and because you as a user don't want to get this mistaken for a possible DUI hacker and you know get a higher suspicion score whatever because of this right? Have
you seen the ending of The Thomas Crown Affair? It's the it's the scene where they all are wearing hats and they're indistinguishable from each other. And I think what I just
I just, you know, Zuko's talk with as well but it's not a private transaction to privacy set, right? The that pool in which you can. So I think, you know your comment there are just made me realize that privacy is actually a collective good. That a group can choose to give a member or not. It's not that it's not just a technical thing. It is that because obviously, there's cryptographic kinds of privacy where you can't invert a function. You don't determine
I wrote something like, you know let's say you Hash a document, you can't just invert that doesn't matter how many people around it but a collective privacy does exist as well for some use cases and think about that as a tool that you can dial up or dial Down based on consensus. Interesting. Just, it's just interesting point I known about in the context of Z cash, I just haven't thought about it in the context of something that the members could selectively do. I actually, you know, in ring signatures, that's more common where people are choosing who's part of the Ring, right? But I just hadn't seen it in just this particular context, which is interesting.
Acting. So do you want to switch gears for a second? We talked about crypto for about an hour, we'll spend one more hour on other stuff. All right, so second big question. First, we question was basically, what's going on with the theory? Mm, which we know about the history, what we know about, you know, what happened with the merge and with all the stuff in 2016. And you know, how does it theorem actually become a final product? How do you get past? You know, the issues with low-fat compliant, Miners and how do we increase freedom?
How do we get past the withdrawal issue? There's a pull request or, you know, there's going to be a hard Fork on that early or next year and then how do we add more privacy? We talk about all that stuff. Okay, so now Switching gears, here's a big question, ready? All right, so italic you have, you know, as I've said many times we've started new companies, we started new communities and you yourself have started. A very important new currency. So if you could go one more level, what new country would you start? And
Why?
Hmm.
so, I think it's
Importance to approach that question not from the kind of little r p point of view, okay. Like I wants to have a country because countries are cool, right? It's like this like it's actually important. I think to kind of dig down into, you know, what do you think country break it into its constituent parts and which of those constituent parts do you need to do or do we need and what security know which of those parts and what combination are valuable for people in the context of
I mean, I'll being just out of the grand old here of 2022, right? I mean,
lat the serious version is, what is the single biggest problem in the world that you'd address with that new country? Or would you for example, disagree that there would be a single biggest problem as per our discussion the other day? Maybe you can go into that.
Mmm, right. So
I think one of the ways and it's a kind of break down our country, right? Is that there is the social network and there are the legal in jurisdictional properties, right? And I mean Prost, possibly, a third one is like physical location property is right. So like, for example, if you know, even if, you know, you decide that the legal environment environments and even cultural environments of like, you know,
Dubai. For example, as is perfect for you and like, which like I personally, you know, don't think. I mean, I think there's a lot of a lot of upsides definite. But also, I see a lot of downside, so they're there to right. But like the, the really big one is climate, right ads? Climate is not their fault and climate is not
It's kind of something that definitely has been, you know, unfairly allocated in a lot of in a lot of ways. And there's a strong case that climate is kind of being unfairly reallocated with global warming. And they get emissions that are that are happening. And how that's kind of maybe good for Canada and Russia and Norway, but, you know, not very night, a good for a huge number of other people, but climates like the third one, right? So one is social network to is jurisdictional property.
is and three is climate
and the lives of the laws of the land that
Right. Exactly. It's funny because, you know, one thing, when I talk about this with people, I think most people would go immediately to how do you get the land or okay? We need to write a constitution, right? Applause. And I think that the people is actually the most important part because, you know, laws are boundary conditions, you know, in the sense of your, there are things that are mandatory or forbidden there. There, the edge cases. Typically, you don't usually run into a law in your day.
The basis, you know, like as you're running around and and the land also you know it's hard to get land and you might just start with the community and then you can afford land rather than vice versa. So I'd always being, you know, that's a big premise of the narrative. I think those are two. I don't quite call them false doors but their traditional ways that people have started things or thought about things that are perhaps a little less applicable today. The counter argument would be something like code is very similar to law but you're writing code all the time and I think the difference is
If the machine doesn't do anything unless the code is telling it to do something, but the human does something, unless the law tells it not to do something. And that's like, I think a difference in terms of code versus law. That's a difference between code. I know I like less 16 code is law but that is one difference in code law. Anyway go ahead, you're saying so all those three things climate you thought was or land was a big thing. So for those folks who have bad land you would do x, what is X? I
think one way to look at it.
One way to kind of separate out like to what extent. Yeah, look what properties needed of jurisdiction is to think about the difference between starting a new country and start in the new city, right? So, a city is also a social network and cities are also very climate dependent, right? So, yeah, I don't know if you've seen the charts and Maps, but like, there's, that's a really annoying fact about the us. And this is how one of the reasons why. So
So many people end up moving to California, is that? California is like literally the only place in the mainland us that has what a lot of people would call a pleasant climate, right? So if you look at like number of hours of sunshine, California scores remarkably. Well if you look at, there is a statistic number of pleasant days, like someone actually tried going through this. They defined a pleasant day as like a day where the temperature doesn't to go error somewhere outside of like I think it's 82.
84 degrees and the average might be like between 12 and 20 years something like that and there is no Rainer, there's no rain and there's no snow on the ground like California just like beets out all the other parts of the bay no idea us there like there is a huge tax to being in California, right. Like there's a I mean, first of all you know regulatory issues and kind of you know, the whole famous thing where like pretty much everything that's said based their needs to have
Have, you know, some kind of a warning label saying that it's, you know, may contain traces of something that make it that may contain traces of causing cancer or whatever. But then there's the other one that I think is so much bigger for a lot of people's lives as the cost, right? And cost is
low 40s,
expensive, real estate in California is expensive and there even is this kind of pathological effect where
The content, the combination of building restrictions and property right? Of Rights rules and like a whole bunch of aspects of law. Basically me. And that like, there is this, you know, funnel where huge amounts of the just basically,
The the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem essentially gets really heavily and you know, de facto kind of taxed and Sands kind of blood sucked by California wind odors
would love is dead weight loss also though because landlords would prefer to actually just build more, so it's like laws that are just causing them to jack up prices because they can't build more units. It prefer to do on volume, any of them. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, you're saying
exactly right. But despite this, you know, if you're a heavy drinker,
drag on the doing things in California, there's like it's still a huge Network effects, right? And we've just been seeing how much of it uphill battle. It is to for projects to, you know, real relocate to other places. I'm actually I think I crypto interestingly enough has been possibly the one Frontier tech industry of the last decade that has managed to really be really a not be California Centric, right? And maybe there is a couple
Others like maybe you know, bio as some California and some Boston. And but I feel like crypto is like scores crypto scored better on decentralization than a lot of the others. But like, AI very Bay Area focused, you know, VR from what I can tell seems pretty Bay Area focused, you know, meta is there apple is in Cupertino, you know, Google's that Google's. They're like, it is a huge attractor and part of that is just that work effects and a
Wrong initial Network effect leading to even more Network effects, but part of that is just like the climate being closets, right?
So what coming back up? So so then how would you relate that to say to if you're starting a new country you are addressing climate how, right?
If you start to get you a country or a new city, right? So this is where we have to kind of unpack things, right? Like one is that like climate is just an important property, right? So of, you know, whatever kind of
Person physical thing that you wants to start.
And
basically, if you're starting a new X, then the thing that you have to create from scratch, has a network effects, right? Like you're basically paying a large Network effects penalty from the beginning. And there are people who I think are willing to pay the network effects penalty because they want a different kind of network effects, they're willing to sacrifice quality quantity of network, to get quality of network, right? But now that Network effect is one thing.
That's being like sacrificed or at least kind of radically reimagined out the door as far as like what the client needs are. That's that's one of the two factors is going to judge. We are he wants to base yourself and you know do your wants to be in an existing country. Do you want to you know be in a big country do you want to be in a small country as you want to be in a particular part of the world? I think other things that I would add to climate because like even though they're not technically climate but they're still kind of features.
That are given to us by the physical world, time zones are a big one, right? So, if you watch the like a remote work for American
companies, it's much easier to be in Argentina
than it is to be in a Europe despite those two being equal distances from America because you know in Argentina, you have and you know what? In America in general you have time so incompatibility, right? So there is a lot of those deciding factors that come from the natural environment. And then there are also
these deciding factors that come from the law, right? And so, basically, the question is like, what, what is the benefit that you're trying to achieve? And what are the things that you're willing to sacrifice? A lot of people don't really have that much fancy stuff that they wanted that they need to do in terms of in terms of law. For example, write like for a lot of, you know, people and projects actually that the big law that people.
Dull sometimes don't realize that is Allah, but that they was to ask that they wants to escape, is that US immigration was right? Like the US and a lot of other wealthy countries they do have, you know, quite restrictive immigration, a lot of ways and like the tragedy is that, sometimes it's pathologically restrictive and that like people who, you know, try to go in the front, door can apply for visas and all that. Like, in India. I think it takes like what 900 days to get an appointment. There's something crazy.
Be like that. But on the other hand you know if you're willing to take the route of you know jumping fences a bunch of times then like sometimes that's even easier than you know. Take it is an architecture a
nickel in the sense of like the law is enforced on the law-abiding or the law is enforced, but only on the law abiding and is not a forced on, you know, it seems so illogical. That's not it's like those who are habitually, law-abiding are have the book thrown at them for small immigration things. Yeah.
But well you are
The gratian why I like is like it really is a huge drag on. I think like a lot of difference. It's also not letting any on the high-end
Talent. It's basically just dead weight loss across the whole system. It's not, it's not smart. Yeah.
Right. And it's one of like, it's one of those things that's like, potentially Asia, like a 2x or 3x tax on, many groups of people's ability to operate. Even if they're doing some completely
normal thing that right? And the thing is, it's one of those things where basically, but
Different groups. It's not simply about making immigration law, harsher. As some people think it is because what happens is that it's just those laws are just enforced against those people who are, who are not the folks that are. It's not like the guy who came across and shot somebody, you know, it's a person who's filling out, you know, paperwork to be a programmer. But anyway, so we kind of got off track a little bit here. So, climbing and cost. I mean, the one thing about climate just for a second or land is
And I would argue potentially at least for a new country, the more desirable land, the less desirable and and the reason I say that is the more desirable and the more contentious it is for people to try and get it. Whereas, if it's something that's godforsaken middle of nowhere, like wood burning man is built on, it's easier to build on it. If your goal is freedom as opposed to a pleasant climate Pleasant climate, I think is like the very hardest thing to get. Because it's so broadly appreciated and so mimetic in a sentence. So you might have to suffer
/ a bit, you know, land wise in order to, you know, get Freedom.
Yeah, I think that's. I think that's very possible, I think. But I think the bigger lesson from all of this right is that there are ways to improve your situation in terms of law, right? So like, for example, there are lots of countries that are visa-free to Chinese people. There is a and unfortunately smaller number. But definitely still a significant number of countries that are even Visa free to India. Be able. I mean, India itself cities
The India people obviously, but at the end then there are countries that are just easier to get visas for right. Like there's you know, countries that have Visa regimes but, you know, they're not indians or not, going to have to wait, nine hundred days to get one. But at the same
time, like if you have
to be willing to sacrifice something, right? Like the hard thing in the world is to find kind of like actual Alpha like to find to actually find something which is
Like further along the frontier along, all the dimensions that people care
about his preacher optimal of some kind, you're trading off a for be
exactly the easier thing to do is to try to assist a, get a better score on Dimensions. That you care more about by sacrificing something on Dimensions, that you care less about either, because you have like, your, you just are the kind of person, or you're more, or you have some trick for like, tolerating more equality on those Dimensions or because you have, like some different path for getting those same things, right?
And I think the big thing, like
one of the ways to think about the like Network, the starting you city or start a You country genre is that. It's basically, the genre of saying well, what are the things that you can get if you're willing to completely sacrifice on network effect because you're going to bring your own network, in fact, right? If you can bring your own, what there's a lot of you get a lot of options, right? So for example, over the last year and a quarter
One of the things that I did is I am intentionally spent more time that I usually do in like, a very small towns. Right.
Tell everybody about it because most people don't know about.
Okay, yeah, so so small. Bird is an island 1000 km. North of Norway. It is officially part of Norway but there are international treaties that have existed for about 100 years. That say that anyone from the world is legally allowed to Commonwealth are open, borders act. But it's so
forbidding that many people don't actually exercise.
Right. Exactly. So the hell
largest city in svalbard is a town called one European. It has a population of about 3,000. Its allotted to it is 78 degrees north but interestingly enough, the climate is somewhat less inhospitable than it seems, right? Because basically that entire region, like all of us can zadavia benefits hugely from the Gulf Stream and the Gulf Stream makes all of those regions. Significantly, warmers and like, lots of stuff at comparable. Lotta to, if you look at say,
A trump. So a city in Norway, 69 degrees. A lot of tude the lowest temperature is, there are like actually not much worse than the lowest temperatures in Toronto, which has 45 degrees latitude, but the latitude there is much higher than small bird. Like when I was there in September, the temperature is like between minus 5 and plus 5. So like actually, you know, you Yorkers can totally
sit ups, do it - 5 and +5, I guess that's the doubt. At least, it's not like too bad, right? I
mean, it does, it definitely does get
And like, in January, for example, right? But so, you know, there is a reason that hasn't grown to more than 3,000 people, but it's like it's less bad than a lot of people think, right? And there is a town of 3,000 people and that town has a large supermarket and has a post office. It has a hospital, it has an airport and it has one of the best sushi restaurants. I've been to in a while.
Okay, now it's going to have lots and lots of people visiting there.
Forget to have 100,000 people,
right? I'm gonna fit like I think marginally I do better somewhere to my yang more people coming there, right? But it's definitely, you know, and encourage people to just like go and visit and you know, if a canvas is for a longer time like, you know, given up to two weeks or so just to get a feel for a look. You know what? It feels like to actually live in this kind of place, but it's interesting how even in a town of 3,000 people like that kind of infrastructure. You can get, right? Like you have a super
Could you have a hospital? You have sushi.
If you do the
math, then 3,000 people basically means that you have about 30 people per year level, which means that so long, you're being also has a school, right? And at 30 people that's enough for, like one or two classes per grade, so it's actually surprising like, hell. Few people need to put a civilization enough Network effects, to, at least, half of the book to always have the boring Basics, right? But the one thing that you can't get with 3,000 people,
Oil is, you can't get like people that are organized around particular interests, right? 1/3. That's for like work or whether that's 40 bucks for for you know just like social interaction reasons, right? And
I've often thought about how the early American colonies only about two and a half million people at the time of Independence, something like that. You know, the Greeks very small population at the time. I think Rome was only like a million people. Yeah. Or something like, I mean, these are much smaller than we think of and not roam the entire Empire. But I think the city of
In the Roman Empire was like a million people at that time. I might be wrong but I will check that in the show notes. Yeah
they'll kiss was felt like the thing that's fascinating, right. I said 3,000 people is like actually yeah it's totally viable from that standpoint like I think as a residential 3,000 persons found your main risk is getting bored. Right. And it also you have a risk of, you know not having not being able to find a good job. And one way to answer that is to basically say we're only going to cater to remote workers and remote workers.
Only going to grow from here. And other way to answer that is basically through the same channel that we can answer the being bored problem, which has. Well, let's look at the one type of town that already exists. That has a small population that is still very interesting for people too often spend large amounts of time. And that's the University Town, right? So we have something like Ithaca pin, Upstate New York population, 30,000 home of Cornell. And
You know, if you care about any of the academic topics, so that Cornell specializes in then like, you know,
you're you're
not going to be bored, right? And so if you like really concentrate, and you really try to create a network effect around specific kinds of people, then you don't, you don't even need 30,000, like even 3,000 is going to be enough, right? Like if half of those three thousands are people who are into, what's a crypto or
I'd say a longevity research. You can create an environment that's like gives people enough of that that with a surprisingly, small smaller size, right? So then you know what do you get for that, right? What are the things that you get is, I think cost savings, right? Another thing that you get is like, the right type of network effect, right? So, you or different type of network effect. You sacrifice on quality and, or you sacrificed on
Today and you get quality cost savings are also huge. Right? Like one of the big things that I think has happened over the last 10 years, is that prices have increased in the u.s. significantly more than they have increased in a lot of other club you're talking about this. I don't
have a graph of that. I'd love to. I think that's true, but I'd love to see that, I agree. But go ahead.
You know, I that's actually something that I haven't checked yet, right? But I can't just like it feels true for my, for my personal experience in, even Switzerland. I think the price.
Of like tea and Starbucks has increased very whether little or like maybe even not at all over the last over the last 10 years which I thought was fascinating, right? So costs are huge and the cost difference between being in the US and being in basically. Any other country is like getting to be pretty significant at this point. Well I think to be fair it's always been significance but I think what we're seeing now is lights quality of different. The same time the and you can earn outside, right? But it's like at the same
Solid is Right, a significant right. One thing is that a significant cost difference is staying. Another thing is that now you can earn outside and more generally like the quality of life difference between being in a major sensor and Anne's being and you know what gets called a kind of quote periphery location,
the cost of increases the benefits of decreased and so they're coming closer together. Yeah, good.
Exactly. Right. So, that creates a big opportunity, right? So cost is 1 and then, you know, eventually into law is another one and
that was an interesting one because I think it's it's one that a lot of people don't think about it and it's easier to not think about if you're in a situation that feet that is fine like that feels to you as being normal, right? Because if you're just an average American and you know you're doing some completely, you know, door be industry, that's you're not going to feel, you know why as like as
In a large drag and it's and it's even easy for you to get into the mindset of believing that. Oh it what if someone does come up to them and tell them? The law is a big drag. Well possibly, they're doing something wrong and they have something to hide, right? And what's interesting is like the further away, you get from like that kind of like privileged rich, country context the and like, I think it's even more important to kind of talk about the rich country part, right? Because
Like even the privilege a discourse that exists with a rich countries. It tends to photo like at least in my view. It focus a lot on underprivileged people within those rich countries but there's also this entire matter like much larger. Mass of people are in the world around the world that are not even in those rich countries, right. And I think even the US, and even progressives in the u.s. often still have, you know, what's de facto very much and it's out of sight, out of mind to mentality toward their, a lot of those people. But
The
further away you get from, you know, being in, in a US citizen of a rich country, the further away you get from being in a guide of average industry, the more, you start feeling these kinds of things, right? So obviously the crypto space I think has Felts regulatory pressures. I very keen away from the from the beginning, but in 2022, I think I caring about the law like really universalized in a lot of ways, right? In the sense that like there.
A lot of countries like a lot of non us countries and even, you know, Auntie Western countries that have historically been authoritarian. But the political geopolitical environment for the last 20 years has been this kind of Fairly stable one and fairly friendly one where even in the authoritarian once the authoritarianism kind of felt theoretical and it's like oh, you know, if you personally aren't somebody who look really cares about criticizing the government and like why would you even
Do that one. I'll just focus on your family then you're not really feeling much right? You know. Yeah, you know, focus on the family, you know, enjoy the enjoy, the local culture, enjoy the trains and you know,
it doesn't look
that bad in the normal case from like that kind of cultural standpoint but like in 2022 in a whole bunch of ways the authoritarianism became real, right? And it became something that even really heavily touched the lives of
Normal people and it's something that just overnight created. A whole bunch of basically homeless Nomads, right? Like I personally have multiple friends who in 2022, it just like packed up left their country and they're just jumping around. So they're not really clear where they live
and these in a lot of
those cases. These are even people who were not that worried about the political environments of where they came from before, 2020 to it's right? So,
On the one hand, you something like I've got a
visual analogy, you may or may not agree with. This is like, for example, when you're driving on the highway, your speed limit, could be minimum, 40 miles maximum, 55 miles per hour. And that's like a, you know, it's a bounding box that you have to be within your V has to be within that, right? And you start acting that to every other set of laws and essentially regulations in the law are a bounding box where you have to remain within that right, Steve greater than this, you know, not less than
in this, your, you know, bank account balance. At a certain time, can't be over this or under. This are in that sermon. I don't, for example, building cannot be more than this High. You probably cannot be more than this low, that kind of stuff, right? Multiply that across thousands, hundreds of, thousands of laws, all the laws. So, you have to sit within this box. And most the time, most your environment, which your life is configured to live within that box. So you're so in the box that you don't even feel the edges,
But then sometimes like in Toy Story 2 or really recently those edges suddenly like move and they kind of put you outside of that box where what was totally normal suddenly becomes abnormal and your you know, looking around you're like, how did that happen? I thought I was just totally in the mainstream and then this just sliding of walls, got you outside the mainstream. And I think that in many ways, what we're we do in crypto is for the powerless and the power user in different ways. They're pushing the limits like the power list.
Wants to hold down to a bank account. And the power user is pushing the limits of what a bank account can even do and sometimes they're the same person or the same empty like like finances, both absolutely a power user of money but I'm sure early on maybe now but you know, they have like it's less called regulatory issues or would have you right? Like they you know well reported you know I have no beef with by any chance whatsoever just saying sometimes it's the same person the same time, they're not necessarily destroyed categories. And so that reminds me of what you're
Saying which is these walls on this box that people took for being static became Dynamic. These constants became variables
right? Like something like I think up until two thousand that and that's when he to you just like had to be either. One of those people who situation was that you were in a beside a wall or in a corner, or in a corner of the room or you just had to be an explorer that will def frequently touch against them but like yes in 2022.
Walls moved. Yes, and exactly. And
so, so I'm bringing that back to the start a new country thing, right? So if you could start a new country, how would you? So, you know, we talked about the climate aspects when we talk about cost. So and now we're talking about law. So it seems like we you try to do is hyper deflate cost or you know obviously I know I'm poking on the sink is, I've thought about this a lot and you know but you know what is would you would it be aetherium based I assume either lay India, right?
Is there some funny etherea? I don't know what would be the would be the land if the dollar is the currency. Well, it doesn't actually conjugate it quite that way, right? You might have Germany and the Germans but the mark doesn't quite conjugate. So let's say you've got a theorem, what is the theorem Land? Look like right? And, and is that related to this? Yeah, it's
right. It's a good question. I mean, I think one of the questions as like what actually makes sense to create as that you lands in the other question is
What level of tired should have through aetherium, right? Because I think on the second question, like one of the things that I do wants to be careful about is like not assuming, you know, more agreement between people that actually exists and you know, not basically like I want to avoid getting into the intersection of activism trap where, you know, you start by creating a community around one cause and then, you know, you start kind of like adding on more and more of these sex.
Coalition partners that have their own causes that, you know, they're they're good at expressing in your language. But then a lot of its time when you poke into the details here, just ends up getting stuck in a mindset where like the, you know, the intersection of all the causes actually only appealed against what the people
are, who are against what you're against. But they're not for what you're for. That's the tricky part where you will win the war but you won't win the peace, go ahead. That's
exactly right. So yeah. So what extent like some
You know, a new city or your country started by Theory and people, like should even Market itself as being part of a part of the etherium verse, or even being a central part of the etherium burst, right? Look, there are stewards different like like to what extent, like I think it would be, it might even be good to be careful about creating the impression that if you're an ethereal person, you have to like this other thing. Like I think it's big enough to have its millions of people using it.
So,
Exactly. Like I think there is even you know, virtue in kind of you know people who are in multiple movements. Like basically, yes a like saying that it's okay to be with me on one thing but not but not the other thing on the second question, right? I think the answer is maybe understand, but at the same time I like I do think that there's huge momentum momentum within the etherium ecosystem, but for wanting this kind of thing. And so I think
But the crypto world and the AJ and the theorem world are definitely like a natural place to start. And I think are just that inevitably going to be big parts of, you know, any new country that's or or any you city that gets graded, right? So,
it's, you know, there's about 300 million depending how you count it, but like coinbase and bindings alone are a good chunk of at least 300 million crypto users worldwide, who hold at least some cryptocurrency. And I kind of do think of them as an intuitive.
It country because, you know, they all need to kind of accept each other's coin, right? And so they have to have in a sense of bilateral relationship where it started kind of currency and network first. So it is a good group of people early adopters somewhat risk tolerant that could Pioneer something like this? Even if they aren't all pure 100% aetherium or what have you there, likely certainly know about it and hold some. So, I think it's not a bad analogy, or at least it's a, it's a predicate for it. It's not.
Molting.
Right. And you know, I think of one good analogy for this might be like something like forecaster, for example, right? So this actually gets to another topic that I think is important which is that one thing that I think Network States and social networks have in common is that especially looked at just to be able to get them started. It's not about the institutions, it's not about the technology, it's about the people, right? Like if if you imagine five, clones of far Caster, where I would say, one of them is run by Dan Romero.
Another of them is run by let's say a and American trans social justice activist. A third is run by let's say an Indian person. A fourth is run by let's say some Eastern European ultra-nationalist and a who by the way he likes pick one and thanks to bitcoin is the only coin and a fifth is
Run by like some fourteen-year-old in in Hangzhou that just that, you know, happens to be a gay interested in let's say you like West African philosophy and has somewhat you know really crazy. You have a fusion ideology that for whatever reason they can convince that he can convince a significant fraction of a Chinese people to or Chinese Generation Z or generation a to
it's been no one else, right? Like those five forecasters are going to
look very different. I've a concrete, a concrete example for you during Shear chat, is it is that third example, it's an Indian social network that is non-english. And so there's a Hindi channel of Bengali Channel, you Malayalam Channel, kind of the channel and so on, right thermal Channel. And so that's an example of something which is Twitter like, but looks very different than
Actually, because forecaster is a theorem functionality built into it. So, therefore, it's like the Intruder. This has, it's just partition a different axis, you wouldn't have thought of, okay, which Indian language, do you speak as being a primary axis for far Caster? But it is for this, right? Whereas forecasters. Like, which n of T? Is you hold? So just like moving on a different axis, go ahead.
Yeah. Right. But I think the larger point right is that like the, the root Community is important and I think this is a lesson that I think I kind of intuitive for a theory and
itself, right? That's like the different one of the differences between like web to and web three. I think is that like things like Facebook, they just tried to scale the world and reach out to everyone, right? And things in the crypto space and things in the network State space and things in. Even let's say the radical democracy is based like they're they are more rooted in specific communities and they do they are I think it kind of more respectful of the idea that like well sometimes
Work. Ethics aren't positive Network effects. / - right there are people who are negative value to other participants, especially when you create like products or ecosystems, where the interaction between the participants of. Yes,
I think it is. It's like I'm saying, like laws meant for a virtuous people and, you know, like I'm paraphrasing but I was like the early the founding fathers said, you know, we can write all this stuff down, but it's meant to deal with things in the breach. You have to basically be good, you know. We're like you have to be
Virtuous. So it's kind of like a, the structure is something that expresses the communities will, okay? So basically we've got about, you know, 15 ish, 10 minutes left. And so, just to recap what we talked about, well we talked about a brief history of theorem, from concepts of present-day, we covered the merge in the Dow hack and ofac and privacy and a bunch of other things. We talked about, you know, what? New country you'd start and addressing problems.
Like climate and caution whether the theory and people would be there, you talked about, actually the really interesting place as follow barred. Anybody can go to and how what? Open borders would actually look like, in real life. We have, we have an empirical example of it should be on the cover of a bunch of books. I may be ill will be changed by that attention and I wanted to maybe touch on one last thing. Which is, you know, we talked about how to improve the world. We've talked about how to improve etherium. How can people improve themselves? What should they
Read, watch and listen, what online courses, what should they be doing? You know, like how would you advise people to do to level up? Sure.
So I think I have one of the reasons why this is a tryst ectopic is that it's a not even entirely separate from the Network's State topic, right? Because to of Yuri surprising extent, I think like learning and motivation are very social, right? And they like being really successful in those things actually depends on.
Having the right social environment and I think this is one of the key reasons why, like, for example, you know, of course, Sierra and the various moocs have failed to completely replace S, Stanford to the in anything, like the extent that a lot of people were predicting like in one. Aspect is definitely just like credential as I'm in the facts that the books. Don't give you a fancy diploma, but I think the like the social elements to learning and motivation is the other really big.
Big one. And actually it's like the question of like, what you country? What I start like, that might even be part of the answer, right? Like I personally, I would start with Charlie before our country. By the way. I mean, I would like a city, locate a city located in a country that has enough of the right. You know, law properties to get the
80,
the 80 20 of that, right? But like like trying to like actually, you know, tweak the route of
Of the window system like ago at the Sovereign level. Like that's both it's a very difficult that it's a very challenging project and it's just like all kinds of international diplomatic risks that you don't really want to get into unless you're a fairly big, right? And so I think you know working with existing countries is just something that's going to realistically, make sense for projects are going, I think going into the future for a while, right? But starting in your city in but and at the same time like having the country
Acts to the extent that you're creating a network effect in a country that that would, otherwise not have that Network effect. But one of the things that I would add in, there is definitely like have a stronger emphasis on, like, education as a part of the culture, right? Like imagine going through your entire like your living experience for your entire life being a University at ten at ten percent intensity. Right? So naughty University, at hundred percent intensity
You know, deeper than 10% of ten percent intensity have like very easy and like very socially available opportunities that constantly, keep learning new things, how strange it
is. Because basically sorry. I mean, to cut you off, but like the, it's like buying a car. A college is like, buying a car not budgeting for maintenance over your life. The entire cost is up front and then you have no gas or oil change. And then people are like oh I studied him like study for four years and doesn't remember any of it is extremely expensive. Install of ostensibly.
Ation that is has zero maintenance associate, you know. Don't. Anyway. Go ahead. So I'm agreeing with you
warning the I think, especially in the fast-changing world that we're in, like it really is something that should be a lifelong process, right? It's like, and especially once we, you know, solve longevity, I think I forget either Aubrey de grey or someone else talked about this, that like, historically, the pattern has been study work, retire. But the new pattern might be study work. Retire. Study work. Retire study. Work-study retire.
Work, retire, study, work study and but the other approach of course, is still like really integrate that you more and like studying should and not even necessarily he had be a phase which would just be a regular part of your life, right? But so, the social aspect is important, right? And I think like, one of my number one advice is to like probably young people and all people everywhere is to be intentional about the social environments and, you know, it's a have to have friends that help you.
Bring out the virtues that you want to see in yourself. It was something that I just think that's so hugely important threat like your there's just all kinds of subconscious ways that which your behavior changes for the better when you're around people. So adult it's funny
because the way to prove that two people is just actually AI prompts. Like the prompt is so insanely important and so you're just getting effectively prompted in a sensory fashion by, okay? Yeah, right there. Lifting weights, I should probably go and do that too.
As a small example our oh they're studying math. Oh yeah let me take a look at that. So like the prompts that you surround yourself with both digitally and physically. I've like such an influence on you and that and one of them is like your Social Network is such an obvious thing, but people don't usually think about it.
Exactly. Yeah, but I think you know, until you can you know, until we have multiple of these established intentional communities and all this, just whether they're, you know, creating new cities or you could or you country is or you know,
Oh you Bitcoin monasteries or you know, whatever people in that camp are trying to create or whatever. It's things that you can do while you're by yourself. Yeah, I think what motivation as the number one problem is, I think one of the key lessons that I've learned and there are like, less not social ways to get that to, right? So like one of my personal experiences right us that. Like, I've used that Duolingo for a while. Let me and Ivan, you know, use that as one of my key always too.
Kind of practice on my guest Spanish for a while. Have you know also experiments it'll some of the other East Asian languages with it too and it's like the way that the app prods you into just trying to like interviewing at least one thing every day and the way that the app makes you like even feel the fear of you know, losing a multi-hundred de streek. If you are decide to go away from you like,
It's stupid. And it's like, so obviously, you know, gamified in a way that even seems a little bit trashy, but like, for me, it works somehow like it though there are limits to it, right? So like one of the easiest things that logistic kind of go down the path of the only going particular that I found in that other people have found, is that it pushes you to optimize not for the game of knowing the language. But for the game of winning, Duolingo, right? Like, for example, sometimes Duolingo gives you a task.
Like, translate this sentence and like, maybe about twenty percent of the time, you don't even need to look at what's at the top of the screen, like the adjust sentence in Spanish or whatever, you just like, go down. You look at the list of words that they give you to select from, and they're just, obviously is one sentence that you can go in English, you can just rub from those words. And so you look at the bottom of the screen, you just like tap that sentence in your done, right? And like you've won the game but you haven't for actually learns any Spanish, you know. So I do think it's like importance to mix other tools. I mean I can actually tell you the again
Path that I took to learn Chinese. So so at the beginning I started with Pam has or that's Pi M SLE you are. It's the set of online course but basically audio courses, right? So, it's like a 30 minutes, like this course that for and they have 90 of them ready to go through them and it gets you up to a very basic level, right? So,
I think different people might have different experiences, but for me, personally, you know, there's this kind of on there's this stereotype that exists online that like, it's possible to somehow pick up languages just by like you know, going into a country and eventually kind of pick up words and obviously, two year old kids can do it and possibly extroverts can do it, but I totally can't write. Like if you just like stuff me and say China with no training possibly? Yeah. After even after 20 years, I would not like, you know, quote pick up Chinese from zero, I would just be miserable.
Oil. And but so for me, personally, you know, for the first stage of learning languages like, you know, you need the structured stuff. So I used Pampers or I also used some flash card app store in the characters. And then once you get above a certain point, there's like a certain level of like, medium comprehension where that's the point where you can start picking the language up from. Right. So before medium you know you start with the you know the podcasts I did pay.
So, I think I did a Chinese pilot and a couple of others. Once you get past that points with these. Yeah, flashcard apps.
Then you go like for me
personally I, you know, and I actually spent like a total of about one and a half years in China and you know sometime in Taiwan and sometime it's a in Singapore and just like a lot of time talking to just like other Chinese friends that I had outside of China X and it's once you get to that level then
you actually can just like keep learning by just talking to people, right? So talking to people and this is a ironically enough, actually, there is one particular way in which Chinese is easier than languages. Like, you know, German, for example, which is that, if you try to speak in your in English too, or if we try to speak in broken, German to someone in Germany, very often, a very quickly switch to English.
So you don't get those training wheels in China.
Like this might pop, right?
Exactly, you don't get the training wheels, right? But like in Chinese. Oh no, you know, there's lots of people who barely speak English at all, and like there, they'll be happy to try their best to understand you. I'm actually Spanish as well as well. It's like, I think, in maybe in Spain and a bit more English speakers, but in my view, deep Latin America, you know, definitely lots of people who are as English is very bad and you could definitely have and get your Spanish up there especially
Specially. If you try writing like past, the other thing that I did in China is like you just do like walk around the city and you look at street signs and the street signs, they all have the name of the street in Chinese characters and then the name of the street and pinion, right? That gives you the pronunciation. And so you just like, look at street names and you passively learn a whole bunch of characters just like as part of your life, right? So like basically, yeah. So to get from like zero to mad, you know, you do the podcast. So you would do, the flashcard apps, you do, the
Here is structured courses and then to get from bid to hide. That's one like picking out things up and have the more social approach.
That's a good combination. So, basically, if you're an adult to summarize, if you're an adult, don't just start with immersion. Do courses, to bootstrap yourself to that basic level. Get your bios up and running, and then you can kind of assimilate content. If you're two years old, you might just be able to be dumped in, right? Exactly. Yeah, it did
for technology that for, like, things like cryptography, for example, I wonder,
Of my lessons has been the importance of learning by doing right. Like if you just, you know, if you just read and listen, there's just it's just so easy to kind of go, you know, in one ear or or one eye and out the other. But if you actually make yourself build the thing, that's the way that you actually kind of get the knowledge into muscle memory, like you, you work with the concepts with your brain, in a much deeper way.
You're going to Shams outlands, it's basically like I very similar.
Shams islands are pretty famous in India. Basically these yellow outline books where they just have solved problems. Just go straight to solve problems and so you just go straight to the exercises and it's like relatively minimal instruction. Just go straight to exercise just like just start working out, not reading about working out, you work out, you know. And that's similar to this, where basically, by coding coding, it by building it and then trying to break it. You understand it in a way that just Theory alone reading about, it doesn't get you something
that's actually fascinating. Like if it's right, drugged
The idea of teaching people even without contents by. But by just the like repeatedly giving them exercises that are like one inference step away from the previous exercise that they solved regardless of I'm you know what, specific tool you years? I think if you weren't if you want to learn about snarks, build a snark. If you wants to learn about how a theorem Works built in a theory map, look at implementation and get it to pass some of the tests or maybe even get to a point where it passes all the tests and then if you want to
Or learn about like homework encryption building up, limitation of fun working corruption, right? What if you want to learn about AI then like actually yeah you know build a neural network that's like you know, at least powerful enough to do some like basic job of recognizing digits or whatever. Right. That's I think. That's one of the things that helped me in 2011. I went through it. Some the machine learning course on, I forget what the the there.
Is one of Udacity and what and Coursera that was one by one was by Andrew, right? Once my spouse with run one was by Andrew Aang and there were very Hands-On, right? We're like you had to actually Implement in a lot of, like, things like a star, search, search algorithms, and like a bed. So, you know, multi-layer neural networks and all of those things. So, actually implementing a thing and just like, gives you this, a very deep and onions a Hands-On understanding about, like, what the thing is. And you
How to work with it. It just gets into actions that you can to get by just reading a textbook. So highly, you know, encourage taking an experiential approach, you know. Definitely, it's the know I think there is it's the equivalent of like the Star Wars. Like it should be kind of Jedi tradition where you're supposed to build your own lightsaber, right? It's do or do not. There is no try. Except for the exam where call Patricia try.
By the way, you should act, okay? Would Implement. That's a good one. That's a good. So lesson, you know, build your own people laws and and the land, you know, sacrifice quantity of network effects. Go for Quality, you know, get the, get the right group of people, you know, be modest on what on What, especially, especially at first, you know, provide a focus on the public roads motivation. If you want to learn about things, then, you know, go and build your own lightsaber and
I think awesome. Yeah lots of stuff for people to do.
Thanks for coming on vitalik. And this is the first episode of the Network's a podcast.
