The following is a conversation with Charles Hoskinson,
founder of Cardano, co-founder of Ethereum,
and a mathematician who's one of the most well-read
and knowledgeable people on the technical side
of cryptocurrency that I've ever spoken to.
Quick mention of our sponsors, Gala Games, AllForm, Indeed,
ExpressVPN, and ASleep.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that Charles
is not just a mathematician or cryptocurrency innovator,
but also a Colorado-based farmer of bison and mushrooms,
a gamer, a fisherman, and a world traveler.
When I asked him if he has a nice professional picture
of himself, he sent me a picture of him in Mongolia
with a hawk on his shoulder,
meeting the Mongolian president.
That to me pretty much says it all,
speaking to the humor and the intelligence
of a man who's bold, innovative,
and does not shy away from a bit of fun
and a bit of controversy,
which makes him a fascinating human being
to explore ideas with.
I do wanna say, in terms of ideas,
that at least to me, cryptocurrency is much bigger
than just a way for a few Americans to make a quick buck
through meme-driven speculation.
It is technology that enables freedom from oppression
from suffering in the world, because money is power.
Mongolia, for example, was a reminder of that for me.
Next day, after talking with Charles,
I spoke with Wyoming Park, who's a North Korean defector,
and who spent time in Mongolia as many defectors do
in her and their escape from North Korea.
Her story, the story of North Korea,
the story of atrocities throughout the 20th century,
committed by Hitler, Stalin, and others,
is a reminder that the world is full of darkness,
but it is also full of beauty and love,
and it is a world worth fighting for
in every way we know how.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast,
and here is my conversation with Charles Hoskinson.
Let's start with a fun question.
If we're living in a simulation,
what programming language do you think it's written in?
And maybe from a software engineering perspective,
what do you think are some of the design principles
that it operates under?
You know, there's a lot of really lovely papers.
One came out of MSR, the Autodidactic Universe.
Did you have a chance to see that?
Oh, you gotta read it.
It's like April of 2021.
It's just brand new.
But basically the idea is that the universe
is like some sort of giant self-learning system
that can self-evolve, almost like Nomek.
And then you have Wolfram running around saying,
hey, we can come up with like very simple rules,
and we can reconstruct all of reality
at some arbitrary point.
So I have absolutely no idea what's right.
I look at it kind of like a formal system,
and I say, well, if you're stuck within the system,
it's hard to actually understand
that you're inside the system.
You know, it's kind of like an object language
to a meta language, and you know,
there's this thing that is outside of it,
but because you're constrained and limited
by the simulation, you can't really understand
the nature of the thing that's outside of it.
It's almost like Minecraft.
You can build these redstone computers within Minecraft
and simulate and emulate things within it,
but you really can't go outside of that environment.
The people outside of it can formally prove
that it's correct or whatever,
but the creatures inside of the system
can't hope to perfectly understand
and improve something about it.
Well, also, the question is, it's a computation question.
You know, does P equal NP?
Because you'd have to be able to emulate all of these.
How long will it take?
Yeah, exactly.
And so I have no clue what type of language
it would have to look like,
but it would probably not be anything
we're used to at the moment.
It'd have to be something else.
And we'd have to have some more fundamental resolution
of the relationship of these formal systems
and how they get extended.
So that's like a 22nd century question instead of a 21st century.
Do you find the Stephen Wolfram idea compelling?
It's a very different way of programming,
which is you set some rules,
you set some initial conditions and let it run
and see what happens.
Yeah, and it's not a new concept.
I mean, like the Santa Fe Institute's been doing that
for a long time and you can use it for economic modeling
and you can show that in certain cases,
there's this concept of simple rules
evolving into a complex system is somewhat more predictive
than trying to build a complex top-down model for things.
And I guess there's some analogies, these things in AI
where you start with some simple things
and then somehow it just figures stuff out
in its environment over time
and much better than if you actually tried to model it
with prologue or something like that.
So that is exciting
because you get to just do a few things,
let the thing run and then see what happens.
And that's a lot of fun.
In fact, it got so exciting Wolfram came to us
and he said, hey, let's do an NFT marketplace.
So I said, what do you want to do?
And he said, I got all these universes to sell.
I said, okay, well, that's going to be fun.
So we're going to set up an auction system
or something like that with him.
And I think maybe end of this month or next month,
we'll figure out how to do NFTs on Cardano
with Wolfram universes.
So as soon as we can sell one, I'll give you one.
And then then we can all just claim
that we're living in some sort of Wolfram simulation.
I don't know how much money I have,
but I'm going to give everything I have to get rule 30,
which is one of his universes that he's created.
One of the ones, one of the first ones
where he discovered some interesting complexities.
I think world 30 is turned complete or is that 45?
I can't remember which one.
You know your stuff.
Actually, I'm not sure if they proved anything about rule 30
in terms of whether it's turned complete or not.
But there's fun competitions on it,
which is trying to predict something about rule 30
about the way it evolves.
And so far, nobody's been able to do it.
Just like looking at the middle column,
try to predict as the system evolves,
say anything like conclusive about the future
of the system as it evolves.
It's fascinating.
It's both beautiful that simple rules
can create that kind of complexity.
And it's also sad that we can't like make perfect sense of it,
like perfectly predict the future.
Even though it's all simple and deterministic,
we can't say something conclusive
about like when the thing will end.
When will this little cellular automata
like evolve in a certain way
and then nuclear weapons will be invented
and they blow each other up
and then it'll just be this empty 1D cellular automata.
Well, doesn't that make it fun though?
Yeah, it's fun, but when you're trying to create
and we'll talk about something that operates the economy
and the way humans transact and cooperate
and fall in love and work together,
then you'd like to be a little bit more formal
and try to say something conclusive.
If this entire universe is just cellular automata,
then being conclusive is kind of hopeless,
generally speaking.
And the hope is, I guess,
that there will be pockets within the cellular automata
where you could be predictive,
where you can formally show that something is true
and then you can rely on that,
you'll be resilient and all those kinds of things,
even though the rest of the thing is a giant mess
that's unpredictable.
Didn't they call that Laplace's demon?
Yes, I wonder what the demons up to these days.
Okay, thank you for entertaining me with that.
But sticking on philosophy,
you've also mentioned, among others,
that Bertrand Russell and Saul Kripke
are two of your favorite philosophers.
Maybe you can comment on what ideas of theirs
you find insightful and also what to use the difference
because you're both an engineer and a thinker.
So what to use the difference between philosophy
and computer science?
Yeah, so yeah, there's both a deeply human element
to both Russell and Saul.
And then there's this, of course, amazing work
that they did in the late 19th and 20th century.
And you can't really talk about Russell or Saul
without also mentioning Wittgenstein and Tarski,
because when you actually look at these guys
and you put them together,
what they were attempting to do
was increase the level of precision we had
and analyzing both formal languages
and also language in general.
And so Wittgenstein makes no sense at all to me.
So there's amazing people out there
that somehow can parse that, but...
He doesn't make sense to himself either.
I think you're right about that.
However, Kripke has Kripkenstein, you know?
He has his whole building on that, right?
And he built a whole higher,
and at least there I have modal logic
and I have the little boxes and I have the diamonds
and I can do a computation
and I can kind of reason about things
that our people are saying.
But it really was all just about precision
and the nature of truth, precision
and the nature of necessity and possibility.
And the magic of these statements
is that you can then start getting a better understanding
of basically how far a formal language can take you.
And so that's the work of it.
And David Hilbert also did the same thing.
And in Russell, he got his career
started working with Alfred North Whitehead.
He was a logician and there was this whole desire
in late 19th century mathematics to formalize mathematics
in a completely new and better way.
And they started with geometry
and Hilbert's geometry was like a complete system,
although recently we've discovered
there's a few holes in that.
But for the most part is complete
and the axioms are independent and they're consistent.
And they said, oh, well now we can do this
for all of mathematics.
And Russell and Whitehead wrote this huge set of books
like two big books, Principia Mathematic,
a thousand pages and the conclusions one plus one equals two.
So they linked set theory and arithmetic and logic
all in these beautiful ways.
Then little by little as we entered the 20th century,
logicians started chipping away at this idea
that you could actually construct
a complete system of mathematics.
First with Girdle and then later
with the work of Turing and Church and others.
They said, oh, you're not complete, you're not decidable.
And so suddenly Russell was left in this really bad position
where his early life's work was basically forgotten.
So he had to kind of reinvent himself.
And so he went into ethics and he went
into different fields of philosophy.
He became just Titan in analytic philosophy
and he was also a great pacifist
and he was just a phenomenal writer.
You know, if you read Why I'm Not a Christian
or any of his other attacks on metaphysics, you know,
he said, look, I can only deal with the world I'm in
in the senses that I have.
And if I can deduce it, I believe it.
If it's outside of that,
I really can't make meaningful statements about it.
And he said it in a lovely English prose
that you would expect of a man of his stature.
Now, Sol Cripri, it was like the complete opposite.
This guy's really down to earth, dude,
not aristocratic at all.
And, you know, he was one of those guys
that just could have done anything
because he was so, he's so brilliant.
I guess he's still alive.
I think he's 80 something.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, he's getting up there, man.
But I mean, literally when he was in high school,
he wrote these papers and logic and Harvard contacted him
and said, hey, could you teach graduate courses at Harvard?
And he said, no, I really would like to finish high school
first before I go and teach grad school at Harvard.
And so this is just one of those guys
that you can see through his work
that he can think deeply about anything.
It's like the Galois philosophy.
And he chose to try to clean up a lot of the messes
that Tarski and others couldn't resolve.
He said, let's really get serious about the nature of truth.
Let's really try to resolve paradoxes.
Let's really try to build things in such a way
that the work that we leave behind
can actually be built upon
and it's not thrown away every 50 years or 100 years.
And it was the same for Tarski, he comes in.
He says, we mathematicians love this concept of truth,
but yet we've never really created a nice rigorous definition
that doesn't have paradoxes embedded inside of it.
So he had to invent meta languages and object languages,
all these notions and so forth.
So I really like those four if you think about them
and there's a lot of great lessons.
And where it's relevant today is you have human beings
and you have computers and they're trying
to understand each other.
And computers live in the formal world
and human beings live in the natural language world
and those bridges between those two are still
not completely clear.
And so a lot of the work that these guys were doing
in the 20th century, 19th century
had nothing at all to do with that,
but gives you hope that perhaps a bridge can exist
between those two worlds.
And maybe there are some nice tools
for that bridge to be built upon.
And maybe that in some way will allow computers
to better understand us.
I mean, they've even created languages,
natural spoken languages that are completely ambiguity free
like loach bond and things like that.
What?
Yeah, right?
Loach, J, B-A-N, loach bond.
It's based on a language called log land
and it's a spoken language that's equivalent
to first order predicate calculus.
Oh, interesting.
So no ambiguities, it's logically consistent.
Yeah, loach bond.
But can you still have fun in it?
You can get very...
Can you write poetry or what?
There's people who actually write poetry in loach bond.
I'm gonna switch to that and start tweeting in it.
Yeah, there you go.
So there's a lot there and they're just fun
to study and think about.
And unfortunately, if you go down that rabbit hole,
you'll spend way, way too much time
and there's diminishing returns.
Now, the second question you asked was one
on theoretical computer science to, I guess, engineering.
Philosophy, no, no, no, no, no.
So first step, you said humans and computers.
So theoretical computer science is theory
of the computer and philosophy is the theory of the human.
And then we can dissect different stuff about the computer,
but in terms of these two worlds of the theory of the human,
which is philosophy and the theory of the computer,
which is computer science.
What do you think is the difference?
Like, as we try to bridge that gap, as you mentioned,
what is going to be the biggest challenge?
Like, can we formalize love?
Can we formalize music, art, poetry, all that kind of stuff?
Or is that a human nonsense that we need to get rid of?
No, I don't think it's human nonsense at all.
I mean, there's even attempts
to create algorithmically generated music.
And the question is love just strictly a chemical phenomena
or something like metaphysical about it
or transcendent of some sort of formal system.
I mean, computer science is just saying,
hey, we have this notion of computing.
We have this brain that we've constructed,
this formal system that we've built.
And given that we have it, what can we do with it?
And so some people worry about the roots
of the tree of knowledge,
the great Yigrazol of computer science.
They worry about the roots and say,
how far can we grow them?
And let's keep adding these new models of computation.
And other people worry about the trunk of the tree
and some people worry about the leaves of the tree.
And the more advanced the field gets,
the closer and closer it gets
to the people who constructed it.
Us, we have better image processing.
We have better ways of handling speech to text.
And we have better ways of computers
kind of understanding the intent
of what a human being is saying.
And then the question is, well,
how will a computer understand love or poetry or music?
Well, it'll understand it the same way we understand it.
You have to get a computer to grow up to a point
where it can learn the way we learn
or as close to it as possible.
Then you just expose it to the things
that we were exposed with.
And then at some point,
the computer will start creating things.
So the question is, well, how do you quantify creativity?
And I have no clue about that.
But it's a-
You make it into an NFT and see how much it sells for.
That's one way.
Yeah.
But basically, yeah, there's so much of a subjective.
And that's a fascinating whole area
of that I'm fascinated with this human robot interaction
is how do we create compelling experiences
that are subjectively compelling,
whether it's art or just two humans talking
or two humans interacting in some kind of way
to maximize the richness of the subjective experience.
And I think that could be an optimization problem
that could be solved.
We're solving it all the time.
Right.
Human civilization is constantly trying to,
we're constantly trying to impress each other.
When we're younger, trying to get laid,
Right.
Whatever, fall in love, impress your boss at work
by all the awesome stuff you do.
I mean, we're trying to optimize that problem
that's purely, for the most part, is subjective.
Right. Did you ever watch Blade Runner 2049?
Yes.
Yeah. Did you remember the whole relationship
between joy and K?
Did she really love him, the hologram or not?
Was it like fake love or real love?
Fake it till you make it, is my view on love.
No comment from Charles.
So let's go to the difference
between theoretical computer science and software engineering.
Or, I don't know if you draw a distinction,
but if we look into this computer world now,
is there a difference between theory,
things you can say formally,
and the pragmatic implementation of that theory
into actual systems that people use?
Yeah.
Which I guess we'll call software engineering.
So, you know, the engineer, they're obsessed
with the domain of, well, what do you wanna accomplish
and who are you accomplishing it for?
So they live in the world of people,
if they're good engineers.
And they say, okay, what's the experience?
You know, how are we going to use this?
Why are we going to use this?
What's the commercial application?
What's the non-commercial application?
And you collect all these business requirements.
And once you've done all of that, the better job you do,
the more self-evident it is of how do we apply
the toys and tools of computer science
and other such things to actually resolve that.
And the point of theoretical computer science
from the software engineering domain
is it can tell you kind of where your guardrails are.
It won't make perfect programs
and there's no such thing as that,
but rather it can give you a good notion and sense
that your program has some desirable properties.
Like maybe you can prove that it can terminate
if you're dealing with total programs
or maybe you can prove you'll never have a buffer overflow
or you'll divide by zero somewhere or something like that.
Some event won't occur
that'll cause a catastrophic failure in your system.
But there's always this combinatorial explosion
between what you can test and think about
and what you can actually code.
So the stuff on the left-hand side
lives in a different cartonality, a different universe.
There's something significantly larger there.
And the tools on the right-hand side,
we have property-based testing and these SAT solvers.
We have all this great stuff here
in formal methods land and computer science theory land,
but there's only a small subset of things
that they actually give you good answers about.
So the balance of the two things is basically saying,
well, what do you care about
and what are you okay throwing away?
That's the art of engineering
and building these types of things.
So in cryptocurrencies,
we deal with these complex distributed systems
that have cryptography and game theory and Byzantine actors.
So the balance there is saying, okay, what can't fail
in that system?
And that's the kind of stuff
that you want to apply as heavy a tool set as you can,
because when that stuff fails,
you either have the loss of billions of dollars,
privacy or potentially even life,
depending on how these systems get adopted.
But then other things, what can fail?
Is it okay if the block doesn't get made every now and then?
Is it okay if your latency goes up
or your network suddenly becomes asynchronous
and you disconnect from it and you have to restart
the computer or something like that?
That's probably okay.
It's an inconvenience and burden to the user.
And if you actually try to chase that tail,
you'll end up spending 10 years chasing phantoms and ghosts.
And meanwhile, the whole world moves on.
So it's really figuring out those balance of the two.
And what's really beautiful is that the formal methods tools
have gotten so much better
over the last 20 years in particular,
mostly because of incredibly high investments
from Microsoft and Google and big universities,
because these guys are building these gargantuan systems.
If you look at the Googleplex
or what Amazon has or others,
and they have so much value, so many users,
so many things going on
and no person can keep that in their head.
And so you're talking about systems
may have 10 million lines of code, 15 million lines of code,
millions of nodes connecting,
faulty processes happening all the time,
hackers breaking in on a regular basis.
So when you're trying to model all of that,
trying to ask yourself what formal guarantees
and properties can I get to simplify this system
as much as possible?
So instead of the applications of formal methods
slowing you down, in many cases,
it actually massively reduces your debugging time
and your ability to find where errors occur.
In some cases, you can't find where errors occur
inside these massive concurrent systems.
And you say, well, where are cryptocurrencies going?
We're talking about just the same thing,
but we're talking about a much more hostile operating environment
where instead of it running in a pristine data center
in California somewhere, it's running on your cell phone.
It's running on your mom's phone.
It's running your dad's phone.
It's running on some computer in Mongolia
that may have good internet on Tuesday,
but not any other day.
So when you live in that kind of environment,
you really do need to think carefully
about a whole new class of protocols.
And then you need to think carefully
about a whole new class of tools and techniques
to test the reliability of those systems.
And you need to separate the world and say,
what is high assurance and cannot fail?
Because if it fails, people lose money.
And what is low assurance?
And it's okay if that falls apart.
The other thing I'll mention is there are
perverse financial incentives in our industry
because the reality is when something blows up,
the people who built those things that blow up
usually get paid up front.
So what they're focusing on is time to market,
speed to market, and getting tokens out
and getting them liquid.
I mean, then people come in, they buy it,
but if there's a nisiant bug in some DeFi protocol,
it'll probably be discovered six months later
or something like that.
It blows up who suffers, the users.
They already got, the people that created that
already got paid.
Exactly, that's why you pay the guy
who makes the break software for your train last.
And you make sure he writes the train every day.
So that's that you're basically describing
the complexity of a distributed system
that's fundamentally game theoretic.
And like, if we think about turtles all the way down,
it's humans all the way down.
I mean, at the very bottom, it's still human nature.
Is there something you can say
formally about human nature to try?
You said you can't,
there's certain parts of the system that can't fail.
Some people talk about nuclear war in that same kind of way,
that there's this game theoretic construction
of mutually assured destruction that rhymes.
See, I'm a poet.
That system can't fail
because we're gonna blow everyone up,
but you can't formally say for sure it's not going to fail.
So like, you're basically trying to chase,
like statistically reduce the probability
that these particular critical aspects will fail.
And then you test, I guess,
by deploying in the real world at small scale
to see where things go wrong.
Yeah, it's a great question.
And the problem with game theory and mechanism design
is that you can develop this concept of a rational actor.
And I don't think in my life,
I've ever met a rational actor.
There's a rational actor on Tuesday,
but any other day of the week, who the hell knows?
And there's even, I think there was a book Freakonomics
and there's a few of these things
where it just shows again and again
where people behave in ways
that are against their best interest.
So then you have these protocol designers
and they say, well, we need an honest majority
for this thing to work.
And they say, okay, well, we'll create this incentive model
and rational actors will behave with that incentive model.
And I say, well, the individual won't do that,
but the firm, the government, the entity will.
The problem with that is we have a lot of counter examples
where the system was actually behaving in weird ways.
Like we almost completely eradicated
the human population twice in the 20th century.
Once during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And again, in the 1980s, there was a Russian colonel
and they installed a new satellite system.
And it said, hey, the Americans are launching missiles at us.
You need to turn the key and launch all the missiles
in the silo.
And he said, oh, that's not right.
That doesn't seem right.
And he was reprimanded for not launching the missiles.
So in both cases, a single person stood
against the systems of superpowers
between us and nuclear annihilation.
So in general, we're really bad
at building these types of things.
So what you look for instead is say,
can the system be self-correcting?
It's not about avoiding a problem.
It's more about, can the problem be resolved?
And that's how nature engineers things.
It gives you an immune system.
It gives you the ability to heal.
If a rainforest has a fire or some catastrophic event,
the ecosystem will find a way to patch things up.
So it's a better question of how do you align
the incentives over the long term of a system
where all the actors within the system,
when an event occurs that disrupts it,
have an incentive to push it back
into a healthy, productive, useful state.
Which is going back kind of to that complexity theory stuff
that we began with and a little bit about,
how do you handle modern economics?
Like for example, we knew this coming
into the COVID crisis that there would be
catastrophic economic disruption
throughout the entire world.
In the developed world, it was print lots of money
and hope to God it works.
And the developing of world is try not to starve to death.
Over a hundred million people were pushed
into acute starvation.
So acute hunger, it's a terrible situation.
But every economist knew we were going into that.
So the question is, how do you restart the system?
How do you realign the system and so forth
and make sure that it doesn't collapse at some point?
So it's an imperfect, inexact science.
And that's actually one of the things
that makes our industry so much fun,
is that these are kind of like micro experiments
for the macro. In the years past,
you never got a chance to experiment
with monetary policy.
I mean, it's like every 20 years, 30 years,
they'd have some conference,
usually in a cool island like Jamaica,
and be like, okay, let's go talk about monetary policy
and like amend the Bretton Woods Agreement.
And these would be nation states, invitation only.
And now you have over 8,000 cryptocurrencies floating around
all with their own monetary policy and their rules.
And it's very Darwinian, a lot are dying,
some are succeeding.
Anomalies happen like doge coin.
And you say, God, is this temporary, is this permanent?
Why doesn't this horrible thing die?
And then other things you think would be absolutely successful
and just take off and be in the top 10,
don't really get as much traction.
Like Al Grant is a great example of that.
I mean, Silvio, he's incredibly bright guy.
Every time I go to MIT, we have dinner
and his work is legendary
and it's just beautiful and elegant.
And he literally has all the people.
He went and hired Tal Robin and she got an IBM research
and Craig Gentry, the guy did homomorph encryption
under Dan Bonet's there.
There's all these amazing people on that team
and they have money in the VCs.
So you'd say, okay, that's a contender.
But if you look at market adoption,
Ethereum Classic sometimes is above it.
And other things are above it.
So it's-
And then there's this weird Darwinian evolution
produced doge coin organism that's just like stomping
all around, evolution doesn't make sense.
Exactly.
But maybe it's worth a problem, not evolution,
because the market's the market and you can scream
and cry and pout and stamp your foot
and said, this makes no sense,
but that's the way the world works.
There's plenty of mountain climbers
that didn't want gravity to apply to them.
And it's the same situation here.
There's plenty of people in these marketplaces
that had the best of intentions,
the best team, the best technology.
And for whatever reason,
they didn't get that adoption.
So the question isn't the local,
it should be the longterm and will the system over time
converge to a state that actually is useful
and meaningful to society and actually solve problems for it.
And that's what we try to figure out is,
how do we perturb these things in a way
to kind of push them in that direction?
So before we go into this fascinating
Darwinian evolution of cryptocurrencies,
let me ask you sort of a basic programming question.
There's a fascinating aspect to your work with Cardano
that use Haskell to build the infrastructure,
but even stepping back more looking at this landscape,
another place where Darwinian evolution operates,
looking at this landscape of programming languages.
You as an engineer, you as a philosopher,
both what programming languages do you think are interesting
and more practically what programming languages,
if you were to advise students today, should they learn?
Yeah, so there's the pedagogy of learning how to program
and to express the theory of computer science.
Like you have to learn how to write algorithms,
you have to learn what data structures are,
you have to be able to do analysis of these things.
And that probably the, I think the debate is over,
Python is probably the best language or JavaScript
to get started with, because they're very useful.
The libraries are amazing.
There's just tons of online materials.
Even MIT is now teaching their introduction
to computer science and Python.
And they used to do Lisp.
I mean, these guys were hardcore.
I still love Lisp.
Oh man, it's great.
These are your father's parentheses.
They're elegant weapons from a time long ago.
But that's a great starting point.
And it's not about falling in love with a language,
it's just falling in love with computing.
It's about falling in love with having a dialogue
with a computer and thinking about,
well, how would I solve that?
How would I interact with that?
What does this need to look like?
Functional programming is what we've chosen to use
for Cardano, mostly because we're living
in the academic world.
We've written 105 papers, and the problem is
you have to translate that work into code.
And the gap between an imperative language
like a C++ or C and these academic rigorous papers
is extremely large.
And so there's gonna be a lot of semantical ambiguity
between those two.
And what I mean by that is that you might end up
implementing a wrong thing.
You might think that what you've built is the paper,
but the computer's not going to tell you that
because the paper's written in pros
and maybe typed up in late tech or something,
but there's no proof chain, evidence chain
that you can show that there's no ambiguity.
When you look at a functional language,
you're a little closer to math.
And so as a consequence, the translation of the papers
that we spent so damn long writing
and writing proofs about and so forth
to code is much smaller.
Now, the downside is these functional languages
tend to be a bit more academic,
and they tend to have not necessarily the best windows
support and the libraries aren't so good.
And also they tend to be a little slower
when compared as a whole on average
to languages like C, for example.
So it's really a question of, okay,
what are you designing for for version one?
Are you designing for performance
and are you designing for developer accessibility?
Are you designing for correctness
and are you designing for a high fidelity representation
of the protocol?
Okay, so Haskell was chosen as kind of the version one
because we knew that the kinds of people
who think about that are also the kinds of people
that would have an easy time reading a paper
like a war of oris and working their way through all of this.
And they would do a pretty good job
running a formal specification
and then translating that into running code.
Then once you have that, you have a blueprint
that you can actually reason about, maintain.
And if you really wanted to,
you could then turn that into a Rust code base
or into a Java code base.
Going the other way around would be kind of pointless
and counterproductive.
The other side of it is that Haskell code
or functional code tends to be significantly more concise.
And I actually have a real life example of that.
So if you take a look at Mantis,
we implemented a full Ethereum node in Scala.
It's only about 14 or 15,000 lines of code.
And you compare that with like C++ Bitcoin,
I think that's 120, 150,000 lines of code.
So it's almost 10 times smaller.
And so less code, less to read.
And you tend to read code significantly more
than you would read write code.
So it's always an advantage for a maintenance,
understandability, documentation, and others of things
when you have more concise code bases.
And also it's a lot easier for you to apply
stronger tools to a functional code base,
like static analysis or property-based testing
or these types of things than an imperative code base.
But the thing is, it's almost like a religion,
it's like say, or language, it's like saying,
what's French versus Russian versus English?
Everybody has their adherence.
They say, oh, they have the best poetry here.
Russian, yeah, it wins.
There you go, always, Russian.
Everybody has their favorite tools
and their favorite languages,
but it just comes down to what problems
are you trying to solve
and what problem domain do you live in?
If you're inventing new protocols based on science,
you're gonna take the time to write a paper,
go through the peer review process.
As you've done personally,
and you know how hard it can be to get into a conference
and go through that and get your ass kicked,
then you also have to apply the exact same level of care
to the engineering side in terms of implementation of that,
or else you will make a mistake
and that mistake will probably be an exploit in the system
that destroys the security properties of the system.
So we really had no choice,
but to go to some notion of functional.
The question was, what's the Goldilocks language?
Do you use a hybrid language like Scala and Fsharp
or Clojure, where you still have some connection
to understandable things like.NET or the JVM?
Or do you go to an overly academic language
like Idris or Agda or Isabel?
And there you can really dial up the correctness
and write all kinds of crazy proofs.
But by the way, it's like the seven people
who write your code, they go on vacation a lot,
you'll never get anything done.
So Haskell kind of felt like a nice middle ground
between those two where we needed to pull into the left,
we could, if you wanted to pull into the right,
you could as well.
That said, it's really amazing to see
what the hybrid languages have done.
If I was a new student in computer science
and I said, learn any language to grow your career from,
Scala 3 is probably the language to go with.
Yeah, it's great, because it's like,
you want it to be like Java, it's Java.
And it looks kind of like a Java program.
You want it to be like Python and scripted
and you use a REPL, you can do that.
You want to go hardcore dot dependent object types
and do like weird proofs and stuff in the functional,
you do all that.
You have access to all of these things.
And Martin Edersky is a brilliant guy.
He's done some phenomenal work, basically,
because he was one guy who created the JVM
and he's worked on compilers for over 20 years.
He did a lot of really hardcore work
in trying to build a concise, nice, modern language
that does a little bit of everything.
And it's got great applications in data science and in AI.
And it's also heavily used in modern companies
like Netflix uses Scala
for all of their microservice architecture.
Yeah, so that's a great language.
And it's easy to pick up and it's easy to hire people into it.
You just find these Eastern European guys
were Java programmers for 10 years, 15 years
and they got tired of making $20 an hour.
So they picked up Scala so they can make $35 an hour.
And they're really good at it.
And that's a great gateway drug
because you have a quick check in Haskell,
you have Scala check in Scala.
You can also do model checking.
You can also go and use a TLA spec
and make it work with Scala and so forth.
So it gets you a little bit of everything
and you can then move around that entire design space
in a beautiful way.
So the recommendation is maybe
if you wanna go vanilla, you go Python and JavaScript.
When you're getting started.
It's getting started.
That'll get you everything.
You can do web scrapers and anything.
It's just fun.
All this experiment with drugs
and undergrad that's where Scala 3 comes in.
It's a gateway drug to then potentially
more hardcore functional languages like Haskell.
Do you think C and C++, C++ still has a role?
No, I think Rust is completely a place to need for them.
Go and Rust.
Those are the two twins of Doom.
I mean, Google created Go just to get rid of C.
They hated C that much.
And then Rust is just a phenomenal language as well.
Hate can be a great motivator.
Let me ask a question from Reddit on this topic.
We're going depth first today.
As a developer, why should I be incentivized
to create Cardano-based applications?
What is on the Cardano developer roadmap?
Any other language?
I guess this is the key question I want to ask.
Any other language support other than Haskell?
The example this person gives us,
TypeScript, Go, Java, Python, et cetera.
Also, have you considered a yearly conference
focused on developers?
Yeah, we saw the Plutus Fest.
And we did the first one in 2018, 2019.
I can't remember.
And we were going to do one last year, but then COVID hit.
So we'll bring it back and we'll probably do it annually
at the University of Wyoming for their hackathon there.
And in fact, it just so happens that coincides
with the Gogan Summit.
So we're doing that, I think, the third week of September.
But yeah, it's great to do an annual conference.
You can bring a lot of cool people together
and you can do hackathons and awards and so forth.
But to the question in particular,
Plutus is like any other language.
Plutus Core, you can compile things into it.
So it's entirely possible to write a Scala
to Plutus Core compiler or a TypeScript compiler
or something like that.
But I'm a big believer of separation of concerns.
And we don't live in a single chain model anymore.
So you have a situation where you probably
want to have different execution environments
and different chains.
So you have different virtual machines there.
And that's why we worked so closely
with the University of Illinois
or about a champagne, Kugori Roshu's team
at runtime verification.
What they did is they said,
let's start with something very familiar, LLVM,
which has been around for a really long time.
They happened to have created it there with Apple.
And let's take that and translate that
into the blockchain space.
Okay, then once you have it,
then it's very easy to modify compilers
of standard languages like the Cs and C++s
and other sort of things that do compile to LLVM already
and have them run there.
So that's a different execution model
than what we tried to build for Plutus,
which focuses on correctness.
Okay, so then all you have to really do
is say can both of these models coexist
within the same ecosystem?
Cause then you kind of,
and I did a video, it was called
like the island, the ocean, the pond.
And the basic idea was say,
you have an island where everything's perfect,
Calypso lives there, life is great,
people feed you grapes every day,
but maybe you can't do everything on the island.
And the ocean's big, it has everything,
but the ocean's got sea monsters and sharks
and Bodhi McBoatface and all kinds of crazy stuff.
So that's what yellow is about.
It's basically this,
bring LLVM into our world.
And at some point in the next three to five year time horizon,
we can bring modern programming languages in,
but they're gonna come in with all their flaws
and their warts and their problems.
And then the pond was the idea
of the Ethereum virtual machine.
There's some network effect around it
and there's some great tooling
that's a materialized and evolved.
And it's not clear if that's the standard yet
or if like MySpace or BlackBerry
or all these other things, it'll fade away.
Well, if it becomes the standard, okay,
don't fight nature, just support it.
And the same thing that gives you the ability
to bolt on the LLVM will also give you the ability
to bolt on the EVM and they can run with their own models
and they're encapsulated, bulkheaded, separated systems,
but you can move ADA applications,
information between those two systems.
And so your main chain will always stay
somewhat conservative and have the minimum viable amount
of expressiveness required on it
to do all kinds of interesting things.
And also for interoperability,
be able to talk to all kinds of interesting things,
but it's not trying to be everything to everyone.
There's never gonna be an ice cream store in the island.
You'll have the grapes and the beautiful women,
but no ice cream.
Now you're just like distracting me with the ice cream.
So just for, because we'll throw around a bunch of terms
for the record, what is Plutus?
So Plutus is a programming language.
It's kind of a DSL that we built on top of Haskell.
And basically we wrote it after spending
about three years thinking about all smart contracts.
We were trying to figure out like,
what is the ideal language to express a smart contract?
And then we started thinking, well,
what is a smart contract?
Is it the whole application
or is it just like a sub module within an application?
And usually it's the latter more than a former.
You can build a self-contained program like a script,
but usually what's happening is you'll have it
like a video game, let's say World of Warcraft
or something like that.
You say, hey, maybe I want to actually create gold
in World of Warcraft that's actually a currency.
Okay, so I'm gonna issue a token.
Well, and then maybe I want to create some mechanics
behind how people are gonna trade that amongst each other.
So that would be like a smart contract layer
and issue an asset.
So you have this centralized server running
and proprietary software controlled by a single company,
but then you've opened your application up
to a broader world.
And what you've done now is added a blockchain layer
and the blockchain handles the accounting of that asset
and the spending policy of that stuff.
So that is a much smaller program
than what Blizzard is doing with World of Warcraft.
So the point of Plutus was let's create a language
where you can write these small to mid-sized programs
and have a high degree of confidence
that they behave with correctness
and also they give you deterministic results
on the consumption of resources.
You can run things locally
and you actually understand what it costs to run
and that doesn't change when you deploy it on the system.
If you dial up the expressiveness of the system
and like Ethereum does
in these big mutable account systems,
the problem is you have to have global state.
So whatever you test locally
doesn't actually necessarily translate
to what you've deployed, okay?
So we spent a long time asking like,
where's the Goldilocks zone?
Bitcoin script was too restrictive
and every single time Satoshi tried to dial it up,
it led to mega problems.
Like there was a beautiful thing
called the value overflowing incident in 2010,
which led to the creation of billions of Bitcoin.
They had to quickly clean that up and sweep it under the rug
and pretend like it didn't exist.
But that was mostly because of an issue
with how the scripting language was implemented.
And when you look at Ethereum,
it's like this pure game of stomping down these skirmishers
where every update,
there's something they have to change or tune
and then it's not clear how you shard such a model.
So we said, let's build something that's in the middle of this
and that's what Plutus basically is.
And it's really designed to play very nicely
with off-chain infrastructure
as much as on-chain infrastructure.
So you can look at all those different examples,
whether it's Wolfram wants to auction off their universes
or Blizzard wants to issue an in-game currency
or you're Uber and you wanna start putting
peer-to-peer dynamics inside your system,
you're gonna gracefully connect to that on-chain code
and it's very clear how those two things connect together.
Just so happens, Haskell's really good for this.
They have template Haskell
and it makes it very easy to embed domain-specific languages
and it makes it very easy to wire your Haskell code
onto off-chain infrastructure.
So in the future, you'll be able to have your off-chain
run a node or the job of virtual machine
or a dot net application
and they'll just be this beautiful interface
and then it can talk to all your on-chain code
and that's written in that DSL
and you have a high degree of assurance that it's right.
Is there like a Hello World program in Plutus
that reveals the beauty of this balance
that you're referring to, sort of a simple
but not too simple Einstein idea?
Yeah, so we did do our first Hello World program
actually today, because we...
Yeah, I heard about this.
Yeah, but there you'd want to have the whole round-trip.
So you'd like to have an interaction
and I think a video game would probably show it the best.
Like if we could re-implement crypto-kitties
or something like that on it
and you have this off-chain infrastructure
and you have your GUI and your front-end,
it's running on your phone or a browser
and most of that lives off-chain
and then but your crypto-kitties,
they'd live on the blockchain.
The whole round-trip end-to-end
with relatively low fees and low latency
and high availability of service, it never goes down.
That would probably be the best thing to do
and we'll have something like that by August.
It's pretty easy to build this stuff.
So what kind of off-chain interactions
are supported with Plutus?
What are the limits you want to put on the thing
so it doesn't get chaotic?
That's the beautiful thing.
When you have a less expressive model on chain,
it means you can do anything you want off-chain.
So you started talking about smart contracts
but let's zoom back out
and ask the big question here is,
what is a blockchain and what is a cryptocurrency?
So a blockchain is just a ledger
and really it has three nice properties.
Your timestamped, you're immutable and auditable,
either in a global or a local sense.
And so there's all kinds of things mankind has invented
where it's really important
that when you put some information down,
it doesn't change and other people can see it
and that you know when it was put down.
For example, a property ledger.
So when you buy a land
or you have rights associated with land
like mineral rights or water rights or these things,
you'd like to transitively see how does it go
from Alice to Bob to Charlie to Jim and so forth
and what was the state of these things
as they were transitioning?
So how much did they pay?
When did it occur?
Et cetera, et cetera.
The metadata that follows that.
Okay, well normally these types of ledgers
are so important that they're managed
either by governments or regulated entities.
And the issues are that while they can be efficient,
they're generally brittle, the political manipulation
and they're brittle to geopolitical events.
For example, when Syria fell apart,
the very first thing ISIS did is they started saying,
hey, the ownership of the land,
it's gonna fundamentally change.
We've decided that this guy over here
now owns all these things.
And then when peace comes,
like how do you unwind all of that,
put it all back together?
So the power of a blockchain is that it gives you
a transnational way of sorting all these details out,
putting all together in a place that you know
that even if it's inconvenient to a very powerful actor,
that it will still stay preserved.
This is an asymmetry we haven't had as a society.
Usually kings and empires,
they have the ability to decide what's true.
And then suddenly you have this asymmetrical thing
that is above them,
kind of like a synthetic laws of physics.
And once something goes in there,
you know that that's there, okay?
So that's the first part of it.
The second part of it is that it's auditable,
meaning that instead of saying only the high cleric
or the president or some very special club of people
get to see what's going on,
suddenly now all the people
can actually see who owns what where.
Like imagine a tax system where the public club
just leaked the taxes of all these different billionaires
and said, well, how much do they make and how much do they pay?
Well, imagine a tax system
where that's just done by default
or other social systems
where this type of information is put in by default.
So it's tremendously useful, this type of structure
and all kinds of things, medical records, supply chains,
you know, just a good thought experiment is
I travel a lot of into 52 countries in the last five years.
Imagine if I got sick and Zimbabwe,
you know, I hit by a car or something
and I'm unconscious and a Zimbabwean doctor
calls my doctor in Colorado and says,
hey, you know, I need all Charles's medical records.
You know, he's unconscious right now,
but I need it to treat him because he's quite ill.
They'd say, who is this person in Zimbabwe?
I don't know you, I can't give you his records.
I need his consent.
Oh, no, he's unconscious in the hospital, can't do it.
Well, a broker system that would allow
the movement of medical records
would be an example of what a blockchain could potentially do
in the foreseeable future.
Cryptocurrency is just an application
that runs on top of blockchain
because it turns out that when you issue property,
you also can issue tokens of value.
And then you could have a monetary policy,
it could be inflationary or deflationary,
you know, demarrage where it decays over time
or whatever have you.
And the very same mechanics that would ensure
your property records are secure
or your medical record access is secure
could also be applied for the ownership
of the cryptocurrency.
And again, you can either be completely transparent
and everybody can see what everybody owns
and that's what Bitcoin does,
or you can be as opaque as you seek to be.
That's what Zcash basically attempts to do.
It says, hey, let's keep these things as private as possible.
But they have relatively the same mechanics
in terms of those properties of auditability
and time stamping and immutability.
You know, things won't be reversed, you know,
that people aren't gonna manipulate the time stamps
and you can audit at least enough
to know that the ownership is right.
But the way, if you think about physics and the universe,
the universe has figured out a way
to update the ledger of physics in a way
where like a lot of people can be updating it
and it stays consistent.
Is there something you can say about the task
of updating the ledger when a bunch of people are trying to do it
or a bunch of entities are trying to do it?
That's the whole point of a consensus algorithm.
So whatever ledger you're running,
there has to be some mechanism to decide who's in charge.
And that's what proof of work does
and proof of stake does and all these other systems.
And you break them down to basically three steps.
And so we'll use Eve for kind of step number one.
Hi Eve, how are you doing?
And we're gonna use Wally for step number two.
And I need the monkey, give me the monkey.
What's the monkey's name?
Daisy.
Daisy the monkey, okay.
I like Daisy.
Daisy is a very confused monkey.
It's partnering its own mortality, just saying.
Right, and so anyway, the first step is all about
basically deciding who's in charge for that moment.
So blockchain is just a sequence of events.
The heart has to beat, the metronome has to click.
So somebody has to be in charge.
And so generally you have this notion of a resource.
So there's some pool of resource out there.
And it can be a token, and in that case,
it's a plutocratic system and that's what proof of stake does.
Or it can be computation, but there can be other resources.
But computation is what proof of work does.
And so you make so many hashes and then eventually
somebody wins and that person who wins is now the person
who basically gets to decide the order of transactions
and put them all together from their perspective
in the system.
Then once that person wins, they'll make the block,
that's step two, and after it's made, transmit it
and it gets validated and accepted.
So actually it's quite fortuitous you have the magnifying
glass because at this stage people are trying to decide
is what I'm looking at correct or not.
Now there are other ways to potentially conceive of this,
but this particular model gives you
a kind of a way of thinking of all consensus algorithms
in one setting.
You can be Algorand, you can be a classic BFT protocol,
you can be Paxos, you can be RAFT,
you can be proof of work, you can be proof of stake.
It's always the same idea.
You have to find someone or some group to be in charge,
they'll reach a consensus on order,
they have to then do some work,
change the state of the system, update it,
and then the network has to accept that that's valid.
So even if this process works well,
this side will say oh you created a Bitcoin at a thin air,
you're not allowed to do that, so that's rejected.
So there's checks and balances and guards all the way through.
There's a meta question of fairness in all of this.
So the proof of work people, they're kind of a cult
and they say that this is the only truth
and everything out here, any other resource
is not legitimate or valid and there's not a lot
of evidence to that but that's what they believe.
The proof of stake people, the downside and weakest
they have is it's a plutocratic model.
The more ownership of the system you have,
the more control you have over that system
and it suffers from the same thing
the shareholder models suffer from
whereas you may maximize short-term gain
over the long-term viability of the system.
So a really cool question is can you build systems
that are multi-resource?
So instead of just pulling from one resource
to select who wins, this 25% of the time
and maybe this 25%, you can do that.
In fact, the cryptocurrency space did that a long time ago.
There was a cryptocurrency called Purecoin in 2011
and it was a hybrid proof of work proof of stake.
So some of the blocks were made with the token ownership
distribution and some of the blocks were made
with proof of work but you could keep adding,
you could put in like, hey, I want hard disk in my thing.
Can you put Permacoin in or something like that?
So create incentive for hard drives
and then you can say, oh no, I wanna do like a human system
like a proof of merit.
Oh my God, now we're up to four
and you just keep adding.
And each of these pools will have different adherents
and actors and then you can actually balance out
the whole thing.
So as opposed to having one cult, you have many cults.
Exactly.
And they argue.
And the cults argue with each other
and we call that a government.
By the way, not all cults are bad.
Physics is a cult too.
And it's sometimes bad.
It's honest at least.
Nature is a cult.
Nature is metal.
Check out the Instagram.
So that's really the crux of it.
You have a ledger and the ledger is just all about saying,
hey, we need to put some stuff in here
and once it's put in here, you can't turn it back.
And you know when it was put in
and everybody can see it or some group can see it.
And then you need to pick somebody to modify that.
So all this chaos will happen,
all these transactions are all around the world
and our perception of them are different.
There's a beautiful paper from Lamport
that kind of talks about this from the 70s.
It's like one of the most classic papers ever
in computer science.
I think it's been cited like 50,000 times
or something like that.
It's crazy paper.
But basically you have to figure out,
okay, well, somebody has to be in charge.
Some group has to be in charge.
You can do it with a meritocratic,
hash or cratic computation thing.
You can say, well, if you have coins,
25% of supply, 25% of the time on average,
you'll be selected to have the right to do this
or give it to somebody else.
Or you can search for other resources.
And they can even be human resources,
like some notion of merit or social benefit.
Maybe you get a token for that
and you can weight it with these other systems.
And that's where everything's going.
We're getting to a point where we've really optimized
all the properties here.
We've proven all these nice things about it.
And there's a lot of competition
to basically build like the perfect proof of stake system,
whether you're Polkadot or Algorand
or any of these other guys.
But now the next step is say,
well, why don't we just have one?
We should have multiple resources.
And the point is each of these
has different trade-off profiles.
And so they balance each other
and you end up building a much more resilient system.
So it's not winner take all with one particular demand.
Okay, so there's a million questions
that spring up right there.
But first, linger on this topic and say,
what is proof of work?
What is proof of stake?
Just zooming in on each of those.
And what are the differences?
Okay, so they all have the same three properties of
pick someone in charge, do something and validate it.
The difference is that the picking mechanism
for proof of work is you have to solve a puzzle.
So it's basically like buying lottery tickets.
And you can buy a certain amount every second
with your computing devices.
And some of them are ASIC resistance.
So you run them on like a laptop or a GPU.
And some of them are you specialized hardware
that you have to either manufacture
or buy from someone who sells it to you.
And that's just how many tickets per second you can get.
And eventually you hit those magic numbers.
And when you do, it means you have the right
to make the block.
And generally you bundle the block making
with the proof of work system.
Now you can do this looking for a single
or you can do this to actually shard it
and look for multiple block makers at the same time.
So there are sharded proof of work protocols
like Prism is an example of that.
And actually Ethereum got started this way
with Spectre and Ghost and Phantom,
the Avi Zahar's work and Yonatan Samlopinsky.
But the basic idea is you pick some collection of people,
they make some collection of things
and there's some way to sort it all out,
serialize it and prevent double spends.
Great.
Proof of stake is the same, but it's a synthetic resource.
So instead of doing things, they say,
well, if you had 25% of the hash power
on average over a long period of time,
you'd probably win 25% of the time.
Well, why don't we just introduce some randomness in
from some source and then 25% of the time on average
over a long period of time, you'll win.
So it's a synthetic resource.
But you still have to do the other two things.
You still have to make the block
and you still have to validate the block.
The big difference is this step in the proof of work world
is horrendously expensive.
You use more energy than the nation of Switzerland.
And the problem with that is that you have less resources
for the other two.
And the other problem with that is that
if this is horrendously expensive,
you have an economy of scale kick in.
So what ends up happening is the system becomes
less decentralized over time
because you have these vertically integrated operations.
I mean, not everybody can go build a mining facility
on a volcano in El Salvador.
Not everybody can go to Mongolia
and set up a five gigawatt power plant
and a huge data thing.
Not everybody has access to the patent today six
that people produce.
Because what if I don't sell it to you
and I have the patent on it?
Or what if I control the supply chain for these things?
So you'll end up having centralization around maybe 10
or five major operations as we've seen historically
with proof of work.
And that means you end up having like a ruling class
of a mining oligarchy in the system.
Proof of stake, if you design the parameters correctly,
you actually get more decentralized over time
because as the currency goes up in value,
the distribution of the currency tends to get
more egalitarian.
For example, Bill Gates, when he started Microsoft,
he had 64% of the shares.
Now he has less than 5% of the shares.
So there's founder drift over time
as the value goes up, divestment occurs,
you have more and more and more people coming in.
That means there's more people who can participate
in the consensus.
You can even tune economic parameters.
And this is what we did with Cardano and Orboros.
We created this concept of K in the system
and it's just a parameter.
And it's like a forcing factor
that tends to accumulate a certain amount of stake pools.
So you can set it to 200 and then 500 and 1,000 and so forth.
But the basic idea is as the price of eight it goes up,
you make K larger and then you end up in practical terms
having a larger and larger set of actors making blocks
that are unique and distinct.
And the other good thing is this is a virtual resource
instead of a physical resource,
which means it's portable by the click of a button.
So let's say China says mining is bad,
we're gonna shut it all down.
And it looks like they're moving in that direction.
You have all these people in WeChat,
just like trying to sell miners
or trying to figure out how the hell do I move miners?
Cause they have these huge data centers
they've constructed.
You can't exactly go and grab a server
and like take it with you, it's huge.
It's a lot of work.
And if the government sees it,
well it's their property now.
A virtual resource, you can click a button
and redeploy it to a different jurisdiction.
So to me, for a virtual asset,
it makes a lot more sense to try to tie your security
to something endogenous, something within the system
because it's just like the asset,
it can move anywhere at a click of a button
and human beings have a much harder time
attacking something like that.
So people, maybe you could sort of play devil's advocate
and say, what is the strength of proof of work system?
Because some people would argue that proof of work
has, because it's outside the system,
it's tied to physical resources, it's more secure.
It's less prone to attack by large groups of people.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And the first question we had was,
could proof of stake actually work or not?
So the problem was that the engineers kind of led
when the science should have led.
So there were all these POS protocols
that came out in the early 2010s,
like Peercoin was the first and then NXT and others came out.
And there they had suffered from things like
the random number generation wasn't good,
they had grinding attacks and nothing at stake
and all these other things.
And there's a lot of beautiful properties
for proof of work from a theoretical sense.
We even wrote a paper called GKL, named after the authors,
Juan Grey, Nikolayan artist and Aguilos Gases,
our chief scientist.
It's got 1,100 citations now, it was published in 2015.
But basically all it did is just model the blockchain
and created some security properties for it.
And then it started talking about,
well, what does proof of work actually do for you?
And it turns out it does a lot.
It's an asynchronous system.
You can bootstrap from Genesis.
So if Eve joins the network and Wally joins the network
and Daisy joined the network,
then you give them some different chains,
like five or 10 different chains,
they can run a calculation and they will always
pick the longest chain, the heaviest chain,
inside the system.
That's a great property of proof of work.
Until we published Orbor's Genesis in 2018,
you actually needed to solve that in proof of stake
with a trusted checkpoint.
So some actor had to be observing,
watching the whole thing and creating checkpoints.
And then when new people joined in,
they would only be able to distinguish between a chain
based upon a checkpoint telling them that.
So you have to do a lot of really wonky crazy math
to show and create this notion of density
to be able to show that that's possible.
But there's a lot of properties of proof of work
that were super hard to replicate and emulate
in the proof of stake world.
Macaulay kind of revolutionized the whole VRF thing.
There was a group out of Cornell
that talked about better network conditions.
They wrote a paper called Sleepy.
We did Genesis.
We also did the very first proof of the secure protocol.
But that was six years of work and like 12 papers.
And it's still not done.
There's still a few polishing things
that have to be cleaned up
because this is a physical resource
and there's something there.
But there's a flaw to proof of work
that is a little problematic.
It's a winner take all type of a system.
So maximalism is kind of philosophically
and computationally built into it.
Let's say you have two proof of work systems
and they have roughly the same market cap and hash rate
and they use the same algorithm.
Then the problem is if the miner comes in
and let's say the miner has enough resources to have 51%
for any of these chains,
they actually have a perverse incentive
to come and destroy one chain and short sell the asset.
It's called a gold finger attack
and then go mine the other asset
because they're not bound to that asset.
They're not loyal to it.
And they can make just as much profit mining this
as they can make mining the other system
and the markets allow them to profit
from the destruction of a system.
So that's something that proof of stake doesn't suffer from
because the only way you can participate
in a proof of stake system
is you have to actually own equity
and you have to have ownership in that system.
So if you go and destroy Daisy's chain,
it would just be a net loss for the most part
unless you have really messed up markets
or something like that.
So there's always trade-offs and all these things.
And this is why I like this concept of going one to end
and having multiple resources
because why not have proof of work
and proof of stake together
if the proof of work is useful, not wasted computation
and why not add other things
like create incentives for network relay.
Right now there's no incentives in the system
for you to run peer-to-peer nodes and share data.
Right now it's not a problem,
but if you're running like Amazon web services
level of bandwidth, it could cost you like $5,000 a month
in bandwidth just to run a full node or something like that.
No one would do it.
So then your system will centralize along the weakest link,
whether it be the storage layer, the computation layer
or the network layer of the system.
So if you can incentivize the resources differently,
then you'll be in a beautiful position
where you end up having a resilient system
that pays its own bills.
So how does Cardano solve the consensus problem?
Do you tend to eventually wanting to solve it
in the hybrid approach of proof of stake and proof of work?
Yeah, this was a philosophical difference
between Vitalik and myself.
The problem with the people in the Ethereum side
is they're really bright and these really bright people,
what they do is they try to do everything all at once
because they're really, really smart
and they keep going until they run up against the wall
and they realize the problem is a lot harder.
If you're more experienced, and that's why we brought in
proper academics like Agilos and others
because they'd been beaten up through life.
Agilos worked with David Chom and these other,
there's really hard work with those guys
and they'd already been humiliated and yelled at
and had chalk thrown at them and all that stuff.
And so they were humble enough to say,
I'm not smart enough to solve the big problem.
So don't even try.
What you do is you decompose it and you say,
okay, what's the first problem to solve
in a chain of problems that you can compose
your way up to a working system.
And once you get far enough along,
you have something that's pretty good
and then you have an obvious path forward
of how do you iterate and improve that system?
That's why we started with GKL 15
because it was just saying,
we don't know what a fucking blockchain is.
This is, what is this thing, right?
What's the security properties of stuff?
Like, what did we really mean?
Then we did Orboros Classic,
the original Orboros Protocol in 2017
and that protocol was like a synchronous system
and it assumed the nodes were always on
and it worked, but it was useless
because that's not real life.
Then PROS came out and then suddenly we relaxed things.
These are all, by the way,
names for consensus algorithms and computations.
Yeah, papers that we published
and they were all peer reviewed.
Like GKL was EuroCrypt,
that's a very hard conference to get into
and Orboros Classic was crypto
and PROS was EuroCrypt and Genesis was CCS.
So basically every step of the way
was first at academic validation
that there was some merit to the work that was done.
Second, it solved a particular class of problems,
either showing the feasibility of the entire problem
because when I said, let's do the model first
because let's see if we can do an FLP thing.
Let's see if we can get a possibility theorem.
That's great because you're done.
It's like those short math papers were like,
I found a counter example.
It's like, oh, okay, this whole thing has fallen apart
because you have a two line proof, thank you.
So that's what we were looking for
in the beginning of the agenda was,
let's either prove it's possible in a strawman case
or show that there exists an impossibility result,
in which case we can just abandon the entire inquiry.
Proof of stake is impossible.
And then once you've gotten past that threshold,
it goes from theory to practicality.
What actual network conditions are you looking at?
Are you okay with living with an external clock
or do you wanna build time from within?
How are you generating random numbers, et cetera, et cetera?
And every step of the way,
each paper you're solving one particular class of problems.
With Prism, it said,
probably shouldn't know ahead of time who Eve is.
You probably shouldn't know who's making those blocks.
That should be something after the fact.
But if you know ahead of time, you can attack them,
you can DDoS them, you cause all kinds of problems.
Okay, so adaptive security,
also we move from an MPC random number generation,
which was great, but very heavy and very slow.
And you can't scale to large amounts of people
to a VRF based system, which is super fast,
but a little dirtier,
because Algran actually did some great work there.
There was some good knowledge there.
What are the really hard problems that you,
maybe if you just linger on a little bit,
what are some of the really hard problems
you have to solve along this chain of papers, ideas,
the evolution of the consensus algorithm?
Yeah, not only are they really hard problems,
they actually require different cryptographers,
because you're moving from mathematician style cryptographers,
like the Neil Coplitz's and the Adi Shamir's,
and the people that like start as proper mathematicians.
They really love theory, and that's their thing.
And the proofs are dense and they're thick
and they're beautiful to practical applied work,
where you're saying, okay,
now this is something an engineer can look at
and say, I know how to build that.
I know how to think about that.
So that transition from GKL to,
or of course, classic to prowess,
the, I'd say the biggest leap was classic to prowess,
because that was going from a system
that would only work in a consortium chain,
like fabric, to a system that would actually work,
and is working.
That's what's implementing Cardano today,
$50 billion cryptocurrency and all these people.
That was a huge leap,
but that paper alone wasn't enough.
We also had to layer on the economic model,
because we said, well, hang on a second here,
not everybody's gonna be online all the time
to be available to make a block,
so you need some notion of delegation.
The minute you have a notion of delegation,
you have these stake pools, what the hell does that mean?
And so this is a beautiful kind of interdisciplinary notion
that layers computer science and biology together.
And minute that complexity starts going up,
you start seeing cell specialization.
So you go from single cell organisms to organisms
where you have eyeballs and brains and hearts,
and each of these tissues do different things.
Well, analogously, complex distributed systems
start getting specialization.
You move from the single cell thing,
Bitcoin, where everything's a full node,
they all have the same rights and responsibilities,
a lot of homogeneity in that system,
but you're only as good as your weakest link,
you're only as capable as whatever the basic cell can do,
to a specialized system where you start having these actors
in the system that are actually a little different
than the other actors.
So you introduce this concept of the stake pool,
and suddenly now you have this actor
where you're probably gonna be online 24-7.
You're probably gonna have extra relay infrastructure.
There's a trust relationship where you don't own the ADA,
but you have a right to use it for something,
and a person's made that choice to endow you with that.
The minute that you introduce specialization, though,
the system gets more complicated,
the game theory gets more complicated,
and then you start having to think really deeply
and carefully about, okay, well,
can this now introduce a new attack vector
that we didn't have before?
So that leap from classic to prowess
and adding in stake pools and figuring out
how to handle the game theory there
was exceedingly hard, two years to do that.
So stake pools allow for multiple parties
to delegate their staking capabilities to others.
Can you describe a little bit of how this works?
It's kind of fascinating.
It's a super simple concept.
So you register a pool, and then the pool is there,
and basically they advertise,
and they're actually registered on chain with a certificate,
and then in the wallet software itself,
you can see all of the pools that have registered.
There's over 3,000 of them now inside the system,
and then you can click a little tile
and it shows you all the metadata
that's in the certificate and says,
hey, I have my own pool.
It's called Rats, King of the Rats.
So you can see all the stuff that's described there,
and pools have an operating fee
because they're like a business,
and they say, well, if you delegate to me,
I'll charge this much.
So if you get like 100 bucks in rewards,
I'll give you 9D and I'll take 10 or something like that,
and then you make your decision,
and whichever one you select, you click delegate,
push the button, and then you have now
given your staking rights to them until revoked, okay?
So it lived there,
and then the stake pool's weight in the system
is proportional to the amount of stake
that they have delegated to them.
And then we have this other limiting factor, K,
which says that you get diminishing returns
with the more stake you have.
So it's kind of like an S function.
So you kind of go up and up and then eventually caps,
and then at some point you get no rewards
beyond a certain threshold.
So there's an incentive to split pools
to different owners after some point.
Yeah, and so that's a complex thing,
and you have to actually model the game theory out
to understand where those parameters should be set.
And we didn't know how to do that.
So what we did is we bought talent.
We went to Oxford,
and we hired this guy named Elias Kasupis,
he's an algorithmic game theorist,
and he said, hey, would you like to do
some game theory work in crypto?
And he's like, that sounds fun.
So he spent a year and a half,
we built all these beautiful models,
and we kind of figured out what those curves
needed to look like.
So figure out the S curve that would result
in a nice distribution of responsibility.
So not everybody delegates to the king of their ads.
Exactly.
How does it feel to be royalty, by the way?
Ha ha ha.
It's not a very impressive kingdom,
but you're nevertheless a king.
I'll take it,
because I think it's the kindest thing
people call me in this space.
Oh yeah, people love you.
So, okay, so that, I mean,
so is that, would you say, a solved problem?
The game theory of stake pools?
No, it's the starting,
and then I was getting back to my original point
that you build things in iterations,
every step, if you've done it right,
is an invitation for 10 more
sexy, fascinating, fun problems.
And this is why we have such a great time building labs.
You know, we started in Edinburgh,
now we're at Tokyo Tech and University of Wyoming
and Athens, and we're setting up more labs this year,
and all these academics want to work with us,
hey, because we write a lot of really fascinating papers,
but B, because we're focused on all these really cool,
sexy, interdisciplinary problems.
We're actually running the problems
where we don't even know where to publish the paper,
because you'll have this paper where there's like
these PL guys working with crypto guys,
working with systems guys, working with economists,
and you put it all together,
and you have this Frankenstein paper monster,
and we're like, where do we submit this?
You know, where does this go?
Nature.
Yeah, there we go.
Nature or quantum or something, I don't know.
It'll write a nice book.
So the sexy problems multiply exponentially.
Exactly, and we've now gotten to a point
where we're starting to work on refinements to the system
rather than fundamental things that are like,
if you don't solve it, the system just simply doesn't work.
For example, you can run all of this with NTP
as your clock server,
but you actually can create an ocean of time within.
We wrote a paper called World War's Chronos for that, okay?
But that's not necessary for the system.
It's just a nice to have thing.
It's a nice property.
Optimization of the random number generation
is another example of that.
You can run it with a heavier thing.
You just have more blockchain bloat
and slower time in transition.
We have this concept of epic.
So you elect leaders to run the system
every five days with Cardano.
But there's been derivative work.
We didn't even do this.
This work occurred at University of Illinois.
And that derivative work said,
well, you don't actually need to do that.
You can do it on a block by block basis.
It's like, oh, that's pretty cool.
So that's the other point about doing things
in a very rigorous way is that that way
is creates a lingual franca for what you're trying to solve
with the totality of the academic community.
So suddenly people that you've never met,
you know, nothing about have read your papers,
cited your papers and start writing their own papers
either to try to attack and destroy things you've done
or to build on top of the things that you've done.
So people are trying to figure out ways to attack this.
Exactly.
As rigorous as you are trying to build on it.
And I don't have to pay them.
That's the beautiful thing.
It's fun.
It's fun to try to destroy.
And that's how we grow stronger.
And it's how you build your career too.
There's plenty of people that they've gotten tenure
just kicking the hell out of Intel SGX.
You go to CCS every year.
There's some guy there
and he's having a hell of a time making Intel cry.
Can we pull back historically speaking
and in terms of the big picture of cryptocurrency
real quick and ask the question, what is Cardano?
We started talking about already
the consensus algorithm of Cardano takes.
But maybe when you look at the history books,
you know, sort of a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
and Cardano have one sentence.
What's that one sentence going to be?
And in general, what's like the vision
in the context of the history of cryptocurrency.
You have like this whiteboard overview video
that you talk about the three generations
of cryptocurrency where Cardano is the third.
So that's like five different questions
way of asking the exact same thing you can answer.
How are the, how do you want?
You know, I always term Cardano as like a FOSS,
a financial operating system.
And nobody likes it and everybody picks on me
for using that term.
But basically the idea is that, you know,
the world runs on systems, especially the financial world.
You know, the BIS and SWIFT and all this other stuff.
And these protocols allow you to move value around
and represent things like identity
and allow you to express yourself in some way.
And those protocols for the most part work well
for people in rich countries.
And they don't work so well for people
who aren't in rich countries.
And so the point of what we do, or at least what I do
and what my company does is we think a lot about
how do we build a universal protocol
that does all the stuff the legacy system has,
but just does it better, faster and cheaper
for everybody in the world.
And everybody has equal access to it.
You know, so it's the people's protocol.
You know, you have a situation where the guy in Senegal
has the same access that I do or Bill Gates does
or someone else who's kind of higher on the spectrum
of wealth and power.
And so that is what we seek to achieve.
But then the question is, well, is Cardano the solution?
You know, is that that thing?
And the answer is no, because you need a lot more evolution.
You need decades of evolution to kind of work your way there.
And in many ways, the work is never quite done,
but it's better than what came before.
Why?
Because you have a realization that first,
the control of the system needs to be more balanced
and nuanced and it needs to be more democratic.
So there's this sustainability component of like,
who's in charge and how do you pay for things?
Well, the system can print its own money.
So it always has the ability to have a budget.
Okay, so there's a treasury idea.
And then there's a voting thing.
Well, the same things that allow you to move money around,
allow you to represent votes.
So you can do e-voting with the type of system, okay?
And, you know, if you played NOMIC in the 1980s
and Peter Super fan or any of these things,
you can build a self-evolving system.
You can actually create a game where the rules
can be voted on and changed in the game itself.
Great.
Okay, so that exists there.
And then you say, okay, well,
but this thing still has to touch the legacy world
there has to be cash in and cash out
and these types of things.
So there's this interoperability thing
that you need a wifi or a Bluetooth moment for the industry
because nothing understands each other right now.
There are all these chains are blind, deaf and dumb
to each other.
And then there's this thing that it has to work
at a huge scale, like billions of people.
And we've done that,
but we've done that with large multinational
trillion dollar companies with centralized infrastructure.
We've never really done that with one master protocol
that somehow does it for everyone.
The closest approximation is probably BitTorrent.
And there is, you know, there was, it's a cool protocol,
but it doesn't have all the oomph necessary
to necessary to do something like this.
So Cardano is just our first approximation.
And like any good system, it's,
we wanted it to be self-evolving.
So once you get the philosophy out of where's the target
of what do you want to do?
Then you build a community.
Now it's over a million people strong
and that community keeps growing
and they keep pushing the system in that particular direction.
And what's nice about is you,
if you build the right philosophy within the system,
it doesn't need founders.
This is the great lesson of Satoshi.
It doesn't need founders to be able to get there.
So, you know, if you look at the academic side,
that's very decentralized.
We have more than 30 different contributors
for the 105 papers and that set keeps growing
within the next five years.
There'll probably be two, three, 400 different scientists
from all across the world.
Some from Russia and some from India, some from China
and some from Japan and America and Africa and South America.
And the faces change, the language has changed,
the culture has changed, but the process stays the same.
And that is a permanent organ
within what we have constructed as a system.
It's the same situation entering marketplaces
like we entered Ethiopia.
What are we doing there?
We have five million people in Ethiopia.
We're getting them digital identity
and we're dragging that digital identity into the system
because that's the most fundamental thing
of a financial operating system.
You need to know who people are
in order to be able to do business with them,
give them credit, be able to give them economic agency
and so the thing.
But once they're there, they're gonna grow up
with that system.
They're gonna deploy applications on that system.
They're gonna build on that system.
We're gonna use it every day for getting a loan
or payments and so forth.
And if they have pain points, what they're gonna do
is evolve that system to be able to mitigate,
manage those particular pain points
to a point where the system is competitive for it.
So my job is to be, we have this tagline
in our company, cascading disruption.
My job is to be the first domino.
Just kind of knock it over and watch the cascade
and it kind of blows and blows and blows up
until eventually it gets to where we need to go.
And what I was trying to think about with Cardano
was how do you build the minimum viable set of tools
and social processes that once we push the domino,
the system will just evolve to a point
where eventually you can grow to fill that need,
not out of charity, but out of self-interest.
People want things better, faster, cheaper.
People want to have economic agency,
especially when they lack it.
Nobody wants to grow up in a world where they're unbanked
and they have no access to marketplaces.
They're gonna seek it.
Look at M-Pesa.
It's a great example of that, like cell phone minutes.
They're using it as a currency.
So that's where we're at.
And I say a few more years, I think we'll have
that right minimum viable set of dynamics inside the system.
And then it's inevitable, in my view,
that it'll kind of grow and consume and become this concept.
And what's really cool is there's competition
in the systems and concepts.
So China is trying to do the same thing.
They're saying, how do we de-dollarize the world
and create a digital yuan?
So they have a very top-down notion
of how to apply this technology and bring it in.
And they even have an identity system
they're building in parallel called social credit.
We have an identity system, a teleprism,
that we're putting in, ours is bottom-up
and you own your own identity, social credit.
You have no idea, you just have a number
and some computer's giving it to you,
but they're both trying to do the exact same thing.
And it's gonna be this clash of cultures at some point
between the open fosters and the top-down authoritarian fosters
and probably some Hegelian dialectic action to happen.
We'll create some sort of somewhat closed,
somewhat authoritarian, libertarian utopia.
Yeah, most likely it would be AIs battling
in the space of fosters.
So I really like this idea of financial operating system,
but the letter F, so financial,
is this just a basic mechanism
with which you can have social interaction there for,
or all kinds of interactions,
therefore have an identity, like is F essential to this?
Yeah, because that's how people care.
You need resources to survive and, you know,
finance is kind of like this field
of managing your resources in an intelligent way.
And you could call it SOFI too, social finance.
You know, the nomenclature hasn't exactly been settled
for our industry and that's fun.
But basically the concept is
that you have something and you wanna be able to store it,
transform it, trade it and use it to survive.
And the question is what rails do you do that on?
Do you do those on centralized controlled rails
where there are these third parties
that are basically able to live off those things,
come very fat and epitistic?
Or do you wanna do it on rails where there's no middleman?
You have a direct relationship
with whoever you're doing business
and if you invite more people to the transaction,
they're middlemen of value, not necessity.
And that's really the, I would like to say
the resonant detra of our space,
that the reason we exist is to try to figure out a way
to kill the middleman and try to figure out a way
that we can better quantify value
and transform it, move it, manipulate it.
And in many ways we've actually discovered
some amazing things in the last 10 years as an industry.
Like we've kind of created the financial stem cell.
This idea of a token can now just as well be
a national currency as a CBDC
as it can represent a crypto kitty.
You know, the same architecture can do stuff
but the nation scale can do stuff
for a 12 year old kid in Texas.
It's pretty amazing to see that.
But sort of in that wide board presentation,
you gave these three phases
and you're kind of implying that there'll be end phases
to this whole evolution.
And Cardano is just like the cutting edge.
But if you look back to Bitcoin,
how would you compare Cardano versus Bitcoin?
Sort of where we are, how we started
and how it's going.
Okay.
So what I did in that video
and I've done in a lot of media interviews
because I think it really helps people
understand where we're at in the clock
is face things in terms of generations.
And so I said, well, the first generation is Bitcoin.
Really the problem Bitcoin was trying to solve
is saying every time we want to represent or move value,
we need some sort of trusted third party
to facilitate that.
So can we build some sort of system
where we can create some notion of value
that can be teleported around the world
and it doesn't require a trusted third party.
That's it.
And it's done in a beautiful way
because it didn't try to be anything else.
It just was, you only have Bitcoin,
you can only do one type of thing, you can only push it.
You can do some things on the encumbrances
of like multi-sig and other things.
But that's a one-trick pony as a system.
And it wasn't really clear
if that was going to work or not for a long time.
It took several years to build up enough network effect
and for Bitcoins to actually become valuable.
And I'd say the inflection point was 2013.
And at that point it became a billion dollar market cap.
There were like Silicon Valley startups,
real exchanges were forming.
And it got to a point where there was legitimacy
behind the concept and people started getting,
this is a really incredible idea
because I can have a capital controls
with that I can like move $10 billion of something
from one country to another country in five minutes.
It's like, I could never do that before.
And you know, this is incredible.
Okay.
The problem is the minute that people validate
the idea, they immediately want something they don't have.
So like the minute Elon can land a rocket,
you know, there's the next big thing, right?
You've landed the Falcon 9, now you're on the Starship.
Similarly, you say, okay, I want programmability
with this thing.
It's kind of like when JavaScript came to the web browser,
you went from these static, perhaps pretty,
but ultimately static non-interactive pages
to YouTube and Google and Facebook
and these amazing, rich, incredible experiences
because now you can actually interact with the user.
You can program things, stuff runs on their side,
stuff runs on your side.
It's a beautiful two-way relationship.
So that's what Ethereum effectively did.
They bolted a programming language onto a blockchain
and they went from a certain use case
to whatever your imagination can have, you know,
like sunshine and rainbows and unicorns
and these types of things.
So you're saying as Bitcoin is HTML
and Ethereum is JavaScript?
Basically, yeah, it was like when JavaScript came
and with like JavaScript,
it has all kinds of problems and issues.
I wonder who's flashed in this analogy.
Well, that's metaphor, but let's not go.
Well, actually there were plenty of active Xs and flashes.
NXT was an example of a fail to start
and BitShares was another example.
There were a lot of people who tried to add some notion
of programmability and or a different view
of how these things should be done
and they were not as competitive.
Ethereum kind of came out at that JavaScript moment.
Okay, the minute you have that,
then suddenly you have ICOs and DeFi and STOs
and NFTs and all these word salads of things.
And then people start using to get frustrated.
Why? Because it's too slow, it's too expensive.
It doesn't talk to the things they want it to talk to.
And also it gets too big to manage itself.
When you're small, you have founders and, you know,
foundations and you have trusted actors
and core developers and you can feed them with pizzas.
You know them, you can meet them,
you can shake their hands at conferences.
When you're a multi-billion person system, you know,
you're too large to be able to do that.
You know, for example, we had the Shelley summit last year,
we invited Vince Cerf to come to the summit.
Vince is a brilliant guy and he created the internet
with Bob and the rest of the gang.
And, you know, back in those days,
it was such a simple, small system
that, you know, one of their students, they said,
hey, you need to test it.
He created a video game just to kind of test the thing.
You could call the guy on the other side
and say, are you seeing this?
Are you getting the signal?
They used to have an actual address book
for email addresses.
Yeah, so you'd open up the book, look it up
and now look at the internet.
It's like, who's in charge of that?
It's this gargantuan network
and there's no group of people you can bring in.
And thus the internet evolves very slowly.
You see, and so that's the problem
is that you have this situation
where you want to do lots of utility.
You want to do a lot of things.
You want to be a financial operating system
and, you know, be everything to everyone.
But then your rate of evolution slows down
as your rate of adoption speeds up.
So that's one of the other design goals
of the third generation.
It's not good enough just to do things
better, faster, cheaper and have consistent cost
with your population growing or talk to everything,
your Wi-Fi moment.
You also need a system that can govern itself
at a scale of millions to billions of people
who have divergent interest.
Some cases, ice pick and I divergent interest.
They really hate each other and they don't get along.
And so that's what we termed
a third generation cryptocurrency
and there's a lot of people attempting to compete
in that space.
You know, there's Taizos and Algran and ICP
and Polkadot and so forth.
And each and every one of them kind of brings
a different blend of things that they value.
So it's not completely equal between scalability,
interoperability and sustainability.
Some people were very focused on high throughput,
lots of transactions per second.
Other people very focused on governance.
Like Taizos is like the governance chain
and they were one of the first to do a self-amending ledger.
And other people are like Aeon or Polkadot.
They're really thinking carefully about
how do we build a nice interoperable ecosystem?
With Cardano, we tried to actually tackle
all three at the same time,
which was one of the reasons
why we were a little slower out of the gate.
We had to write a lot more protocols,
but we think we've kind of come up
with a beautiful interlocking design for all of them.
And again, the point is not to get it perfect,
but rather get those just right set of evolutionary factors
that when you click the domino,
it just self evolves into what you need it to get to.
Allow me to stretch the metaphor further.
If Bitcoin is HTML, there's HTML five.
If Ethereum is JavaScript,
JavaScript with V8 has become quite fast,
quite, you know, it runs much of the internet.
So the argument could be that eventually
everything will be JavaScript,
or maybe you could say eventually everything would be HTML
and it'd just be a bunch of different tools
that generate that HTML.
So is it possible that just like we were so,
we eventually return to generation one, Bitcoin,
or we return to generation two, Ethereum,
as we, you know, at the end of this journey?
You know, the problem is your tail is wagging the dog there.
And it's not, you have a situation
where you're so focused on the technology
that you're failing to understand
that there's still Daisy here, you still have the user.
And where's the app store?
Where's the one click install?
Where's the use and utility?
You know, all these layer two protocols
and these DeFi applications in five years,
they're completely protocol and blockchain agnostic.
Because at the end of the day,
they care about liquidity, operating cost,
and user experience.
It's so preposterous and absurd for somebody to say,
oh, well, I'm gonna go build my application,
get on the, you know, the Apple store,
and I'm gonna use Amazon as my web host.
And no matter what happens, I will always use Amazon,
even if the operating cost is crazy.
I see. You see?
And so we're just in a unique period of history
where there's a network effect
around some initial infrastructure
and people tend to be building around that.
But every single one of the top DeFi providers
are, if they're getting successful
into a certain network effect,
they're having the multi-chain conversation.
So I don't really believe in a winner takes all,
a maximless view of, well, there's gonna be some protocol
that becomes the God protocol.
First, because they evolve too quickly.
Second, the incentives aren't aligned for that.
TCPIP didn't have a token connected to it.
There was no financial incentive
where if TCPIP got adopted over something else,
they'd make some big company crazy amounts of money.
It was a useful piece of infrastructure.
So I think that the third generation
is gonna be as defined by the social components
and the usability components
as it is by the technological capabilities of the system.
Really what these technological capabilities gave you
was the ability to demonstrate a proof of concept
and say these things are possible,
kind of like Xerox PARC, when Steve and Bill came in,
they said, wow, you have networked computers,
object-oriented programming, and a GUI.
And this is like, what, was it 70s?
It's like, wow, it's incredible.
But none of that was an actual product.
That wasn't a Macintosh.
But it was enough to get the idea,
and then it was a race to how do we productize
something like that.
And in that case, it actually took several decades
to roll out that vision that those guys had.
And I think that's what Bitcoin and Ethereum did.
But what's unique about this is normally you throw away
the prior experiments.
With these things, these are self-evolving systems.
So it's entirely possible to, Joe Rogan quote,
to evolve Bitcoin to a point
where it could become a third generation system
if desired as some amalgamation of layer one
and layer two protocols.
And it's the same for Ethereum.
In fact, Vitalik is throwing away Ethereum
and replacing with Ethereum two
because he recognizes he needs to upgrade
and evolve the system.
And that's what makes it fun
because the techniques and methodologies
that they've chosen to evolve and upgrade this system
are distinctly different from the ones that we've chosen.
And we have no idea which one's actually going to win,
but we learn from each other
and we co-evolve from each other.
So you're running like all these experiments in real time
in a giant marketplace.
And maybe they'll consolidate,
maybe they'll stay divergent.
I mean, look at big tech.
You have Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook,
they all coexist and they're a trillion dollar companies.
Some cases with TCP, it consolidates to one standard.
That's what we end up using.
So what's your intuition with Cardano having the proof of stake
and then eventually smart contracts
versus the Bitcoin with layer two technologies
that's kind of evolving creature.
Again, you said you can't really predict the future,
but what's your intuition?
Why one might be more successful than the other?
So the problem with Bitcoin is it is so slow.
It's like the mainframe programming of the past.
And it's the only reason it's still around
is because there was so much invested in keeping it around
that we just kind of have to leave it there
and one day cobalt will die, you know?
It's, there's nothing about it
from a collection of USPs that's particularly desirable.
You have extremely long settlement time.
You have extremely low programmability.
It is not aware of any other system.
There's no native way of issuing an asset in that system.
You can't even do a poll transaction.
You can't do anything that's interesting or unique there.
And yeah, I'll do respect.
It's, you know, mafia, I'll do respect home.
You got some problems.
You need to lose the weight.
You come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding.
I know, I know.
So, you know, I'll do respect to the Bitcoin people.
It's like an amazing, incredible first generation thing.
And it really, we're all here because of Bitcoin.
But the problem is you have to upgrade the damn thing.
You know, just because you were a high school football star
doesn't mean that 30 years later,
you're still a high school football star in the same shape.
You got the beer belly, you're old,
you're not doing this thing again.
That's what Bitcoin has to do.
There's fundamental improvements
that I think Bitcoin can make at the protocol level
that would actually make it an incredibly competitive system.
Like if they wanted to keep Nakamoto consensus,
proof of work, there's ways to enhance proof of work.
I mean, Mingen Seer did this with Bitcoin NG,
Promotivus Juanus did this with Prism,
make it 10,000 times faster
and you don't compromise the fundamental security assumptions
that the system has.
You can add programmability to it.
Blockstream created a language called simplicity.
And so there's actual ways to extend.
And we did this with Cardano with the extended UTXO model.
There's ways to extend what Bitcoin has,
keep the philosophy, the accounting,
the way of thinking about transactions,
but then suddenly you can now do DeFi and other things.
But what they've done is said,
we will not evolve the base layer at all.
And we're just gonna build all this layer two stuff,
which is usually highly fragile and centralized
and requires enormous effort
at the base level to do anything.
There's, it's not a coincidence
Vitalik started as a color coins guy
and a master coin guy hanging out in those circles.
He was trying to innovate and do things in Bitcoin.
And it was so hard and difficult
that he started diverging and going and doing things
in a different system entirely.
You know, I knew the master coin guys,
Jared and all these people, they were maximalists.
They really wanted to build something cool
and exciting for Bitcoin.
And anything they did, the developers would attack them.
It's all you're misusing op return.
You're doing this that it was a holy war
anytime you wanted to evolve.
So I think it's its own worst enemy.
It has the network effect, it has the brand name,
it has the regulatory approval,
but there's no way to change the system,
even correcting obvious downsides in that system.
Now, what's really cool is Ethereum doesn't suffer
from that problem.
It's getting to a point where it has
a similar network effect to Bitcoin,
but the community there is completely different in culture.
They love evolving, they love upgrading,
sometimes a little too much.
And so that means that if you look at the trajectory
of things, if I had to bet just those two systems,
Bitcoin or Ethereum, I would say nine times out of 10,
Ethereum is going to win the fight against Bitcoin
if it was the only competitor.
But obviously we're here
and a lot of other people are here.
So there's different things going on.
So it's a much more complex game.
But I think that's always the key,
zooming out a little bit,
set the technology aside
and the word salad of cryptography aside
because it's too much.
We have to always do is say,
what incentive does the system have to evolve?
And when you look at things like Android and the App Store
and these analogous platforms,
you say, ah, the evolution is user-driven
and there's a financial incentive
for the user to participate.
So if I had to look at the trajectory of this thing,
come back 10 years later,
probably going to have millions of applications
and lots of stuff going on
because that's the way the system was constructed.
Okay, it makes sense.
When you look at Bitcoin,
you say what is the incentive to evolve the system?
There's none.
What is the incentive for the system
to get more competitive?
There's none.
In fact, it's the opposite.
They've turned it into a religion.
I was in Miami at this Bitcoin conference there.
I had a toilet paper roll thrown at me
that had shitcoin written on it.
You have Max Kaiser out on the stage,
doing his best Rick James impression, you know.
We'll see the guy that did the FE on.
Yes, yes, yes, you know,
and so you're watching this stuff and you say,
okay, first, why would anybody want to join that?
And then second, where is the conversation
about how do we achieve something?
I started with Cardano the end in mind.
I said, what, you know, we really want to sit down
and build this financial operating system.
And the definition of success is
the poorest person in the world
has access to the same system
as the richest person in the world.
And they both get treated fairly.
We've never had that happen before.
Okay, that's something.
You can agree with it, disagree with it,
say it's boiling the ocean, it's impossible.
At least I have something.
I can't for the life of me understand
what the hell is the point of Bitcoin?
When I joined the Bitcoin space way back in the day,
it was, hey, we hate the dollar and, you know,
hey, we like gold a lot.
Let's create digital gold.
Let's build a payment system.
And then it just kind of went all these different directions
and nobody can actually tell you what Bitcoin is for.
It's a store of value, okay?
You know, if there's some proof of work thing
where maybe you're like incentivizing
that alternative energy to be pretty, I don't know.
It's like, nobody really knows the philosophy.
There's no direction.
And they say, but don't worry, just buy and hold
and everything will sort its way out.
I believe it's hoddle.
Yeah, hoddle.
What about the idea of digital gold?
So trying to replace that particular physical material
that is gold, the transfer into the digital space.
That's something.
Okay, let's do that then.
And just say that's all it does.
Then why are we doing lightning?
Why are we doing any of these other things?
You don't really need with, you know, a commodity,
a digital commodity, high throughput.
You can have slow settlement.
You can have high transaction fees,
all these types of things.
And, you know, that's fine.
Okay, that's something.
Pick it.
Well, the idea is to try to come up with technology
like the Lightning Network that could have something
like gold, but then still build an economy around it.
Something with high throughput transactions.
And have we ever built a successful banking credit system
off of gold?
Never.
It never works because there's too much volatility
in the underlying asset.
Would you take a gold-denominated loan for something?
And so he says, okay, I'll give you five bars of gold
to go buy this car and pay me back five and a half bars
of gold.
Nobody would know in five years
where they come out in that kind of a range.
The idea is that the gold is used
for the settlement of transactions.
And then you're operating, the actual economy
is operating outside of gold.
And then you kind of connect back to gold for that.
So you have to go back to the gold reserve.
And we tried that for a long time.
It didn't really work in a modern global economy.
We had the Brent Woods Agreement,
all these other things.
And so I understand what you're saying.
And maybe there's some merit to that.
But if that was really in earnest where they want to go,
then the conversation should be about,
well, how do we make it easy for later two protocols
to interact with Bitcoin?
So why is simplicity not built into it?
Why is it taking so long to do snorkegs?
Why is it taking so long to do all these obvious upgrades
which are cryptographically low danger, also NEPA POWs.
Not interactive proofs of proof of work.
There's no cost to doing that.
It's just a property of proof of work
where certain puzzles are more special than other puzzles.
And by noticing that, you can create these beautiful proofs
that allow you to have side chains and like clients.
It's not compromising security to the system.
It's just something you get for free with proof of work.
Those came out in 2016.
There's derivative work, fly client floating around.
What the hell is it?
This is the frustration that I have is like,
if you really are serious about this whole lightning
and gold economy thing, I love choice.
I'm a libertarian by nature.
I love competition.
And I read all those books.
I read Louis von Mises's work and Murray Rothbard's works.
And I love what Hayek had to say about private currencies.
Let's go try it.
That's great.
But then you have to have some focus and commitment
as an ecosystem.
And the excuse they use is, well, no, we don't
because we're decentralized.
And because we're decentralized, we don't need that.
As if there's some sort of guiding swarm intelligence
that will naturally push the system
in that particular direction.
But then you ask, well, how do people
measure the success of Bitcoin?
Is it the fact that they've actually
achieved lots of transactions and lots
of actual economic activity and lots of businesses
accepting Bitcoin is the price?
That's what they do.
And that's the only thing they pay attention.
That's why this is the most attended Bitcoin conference
in history.
Not because somehow Bitcoin got so much more adoption.
It's because this is the highest price point
Bitcoin has ever been this year, over 30,000.
So first of all, let me state that Charles, for the most part,
is purely objective.
The bias that comes in for the record,
I want to say, that I have heard because you mentioned
the mafia, that you prefer good fellows over the godfather.
So a man who prefers good fellows over godfather,
you take it for that opinion for what it is.
I actually have to think about that one for quite a bit.
I think.
Oh, come on.
Joe Pesci was so good at that.
He's incredible.
I also love Casino and those big glasses on Daniel.
I love it.
We'll share on stone.
But we could talk about that for hours.
But let me ask you about the Bitcoin conference
because it is kind of, I would say, an important moment
in human history.
It was quite exciting in terms of size and kind of turmoil
and all those kinds of things.
And you were there.
And what is it, hot and humid Miami?
I believe it's the way you introduced it.
So what do you make of the community of Bitcoin or that particular event in human history?
What makes me sad is I remember the old Bitcoin community and I've seen what it's become.
And the old community was really fun, like the San Jose conference in 2013 or subsequent
conferences.
There was just a lot of people.
They had no money.
And they just really love this idea of decentralized money.
They love this idea of decentralization in particular.
And you could strike up a conversation with everyone.
There was no ego at all.
But what was really fun is you could really get intimate friendships and relationship
and great conversations with people there.
It's kind of like the early days of AI, you know, they all met in Dartmouth and all these
other places.
It's very intimate.
There was no egos.
Everybody was just trying to do some really cool stuff.
Now, just like those early days, there was an overestimate of how robust the solutions
would be.
So we believed, oh, yeah, 10 years, we're going to rule the whole world, didn't exactly
happen.
On the other hand, Bitcoin grew from nothing in just 11 years to I'm in Mongolia riding
camels and the camel herder has Bitcoin in the desert.
So that's telling you that's a pretty pervasive technology if you have that level of adoption
that quickly.
When I went to Miami, it was unrecognizable.
You know, everything was so commercial.
Half of the vendors at the conference were like watches that were cost half a million
dollars and they were covered in diamonds.
So when you see that kind of materialism leak its way in, it's first is repulsive.
The other thing was there was no, like I remember one of the first conferences, Mo 11's conference
in January of 2014, the North American Bitcoin Conference, ironically in Miami.
There was a Bitcoin Help Center booth, DEMA ran it and a few of the other Bitcoin OGs
ran it.
The core developers actually came over like Jeff and others who were there and sat at
the booth and anybody come up, ask a question, anything you want to ask about Bitcoin.
And I was like, that was the culture, just help people welcome it.
There was no help booth there.
There was no notion of that.
There were six hour lines and superstars and things like that.
And again, again, it was always the same thing.
Look how much money all these people have made.
And the whole point of Bitcoin was to redefine the notion of money, redefine the notion of
value, you know, these types of things.
So it just, I'm no longer part of that.
And it made me sad because I really enjoyed being part of the, how I got started was the
Bitcoin education project, I did a class on Udemy, I gave it away for free.
I had 80,000 students and they would email me.
I got 5,000 emails before I stopped answering them and everyone come in and ask me some
question about something, sometimes arcane, sometimes trivial.
And I take the time to sit down and answer the question or forward the email to somebody
I knew who could answer that particular type of question.
And there were some amazing people in the early days like Mike Hearn and Gavin and others
and they were just super committed.
And they, Mike's case, he knew Satoshi actually emailed them back and forth because he was
around 2009, 2010.
He did the Bitcoin Jaffa client and Satoshi was all excited.
He said, oh, wow, Bitcoin can come to a cell phone.
This is really cool and exciting.
And then what happened?
Mike left Bitcoin in 2013 over the whole big block debate that, that happened.
They just treated him like dirt, like he was subhuman or something.
So I don't know.
The cultures changed a lot and if they like it, it's good for them.
They can enjoy the religion, but it's not for me.
And where I like being is, like I had a guy who used to work for me, Alex Cherpanoi, and
he created this beautiful project called Ergo.
To me, that is the spiritual successor to Bitcoin.
Ergo is really special because it has the same culture, it has the same mentality and
the technology is kind of like a natural evolution of what you would do if you knew about Bitcoin
and you wanted to build the next big thing.
So it's still a proof of work system.
It's still a UTXO system, but he added UTXO with some smart contracts.
It's this Sigma protocol idea.
On the proof of work side, Satoshi had this one CPU, one vote idea.
So Alex tried to create non-assertible puzzles to make it impossible to have mining pools.
And there's all these other beautiful little things.
And he's this brilliant Russian programmer and he's surrounded himself with all these
other brilliant people.
He has zero ego, he's like, he has negative ego.
When you put him with the person with the ego, your ego goes down, right?
And everything about Alex is always like, how do I solve this?
How do I do that?
And he gets legitimately excited when he meets somebody that he can collaborate with or learn
from.
That's where Bitcoin was in the beginning.
Everybody set their egos aside, whether it was Hal Finney or whatever, and they would
just say, how can I help?
What can I do?
And it was all about coming up with some cool new thing or solving some cool new problem.
I don't see any of that in Bitcoin today.
So quite a few people are excited about Ergo and excited about the fact that you kind of
appreciate Alex and Ergo.
Do you see Cardano potentially utilizing the proof-of-work mechanism from Ergo as part
of this pool for the consensus mechanism?
I mean, anything's possible and there's a lot of evolution Ergo has to go through.
And Ergo was kind of like, when the Xbox 360 first came out, while they were prototyping
it, Microsoft needed a development environment.
They ironically purchased a lot of Apple computers to do that, because Apple was moving away
from the PowerPC to Intel and Microsoft was moving towards the PowerPC, just this weird
intersection of history.
So at that time, the largest order of Mac computers made was done by Microsoft and they're using
it for Xbox stuff.
So Ergo, we viewed the same way.
So we said, well, we have this extended UTXO model.
The only thing that's as sufficiently close to it where we can beta test contracts is
actually with Ergo.
And Alex just was a little faster in getting certain things out because we were doing things
in a slightly more rigorous way and slightly more expressive way.
So we actually tested a stablecoin and Oracle and other things on Ergo.
And it has just incredible community.
When we said, hey, we're coming here to work and build the, oh yeah, we love work with
you guys.
This is so cool.
The other thing is Alex used to work for us and he had this lovely project called Scorex
and it was all about like a pedagogical framework for building blockchains.
And if you want to do prototyping or academic research, it was great.
It was super modular and it separated the consensus network and transaction layer from
each other in just the right way so that you can make it modular and mix and mix things.
So you can put secure cadmium or maybe a different network layer and a different consensus protocol
like proof of work to another proof of work and so forth.
So we loved having that kind of IP sitting around because it gave us the ability to kind
of play around with ideas in a matter of weeks instead of months or years.
And then he just took that concept and he gave it away.
The wave protocol was built on it.
That was Sasha Ivanov.
He did that.
I think there's two or three other cryptocurrencies that were launched from Scorex and then Alex
took that and built Ergo from it.
So there was a nice intersection where there was overlapping technology with Ergo with
our technology and the other thing was that the community was so open and friendly.
It was just a no-brainer.
Just go in and start building some things there.
Now in terms of evolving ideas, the whole Sigma protocol idea is very different and
it's very interesting and there's a guy at a Boston University, his name will come to
me in a segment who came up with this stuff and I think there's some merit there, especially
as we start moving closer to this idea of blockchains being used to validate proofs
instead of running computations.
What's the Sigma protocol, brother?
So it's just a way of expressing scripts and basically you get these concise representations
of proofs and then you can say, okay, the script is correct, but you don't have to run
the whole program.
So there's a lot.
I'm not doing the topic justice.
There's a lot more to it, but that's the basic concept and in a Redeemer Validator model,
you need stuff like that because as your model gets more complex and a lot more things happen,
you don't want to have a situation where I have to run, replay a huge amount of the
UTXO graph to be able to get to a point where I have the state of the system.
You need some mathematical artifact that gives you the state of the system quickly and then
you say, okay, I now know what computation thread I need to run to be able to get enough
to be able to redeem this transaction.
So he just found a more compressed representation of it and the math doesn't matter.
What matters is there's a whole beautiful field that thinks about this type of stuff
and it was never once linked before into our industry.
The brilliance of Alex was to actually realize you could do that and pull those things together
and it may actually have some merit, but by no means is the only guy that does this
stuff.
There are other approaches in verified computing that have explored that.
My favorite came out of Microsoft Research as a project called Pinocchio and there was
a follow-up called Gepetto and the basic idea was that it's fortuitous that you have these
computer science problems like hashing where you can do all this computation and once you've
done all of it, you found this magic number that you can verify that the computation was
done correctly.
It's like proof of work works this way, hard to do the proof of work, easy to check the
proof of work.
Cryptography also works this way.
You have some trapped door where you can verify something's correct, but to get that
thing done, if you're doing it brute force, it takes an enormous amount of computation.
Well, not all problems are like this, like protein folding.
To verify the protein is folded correctly, you have to fold the protein.
You have to redo the work.
But what if for arbitrary computation, you could take a problem and then you could generate
a proof that you've done that computation correctly and the proof validates in logarithmic
time or constant time?
Wow, that's incredible, right?
Well, Microsoft actually wrote a paper on how to do that, it's called Pinocchio.
So that's another example of these types of things, these roll-ups of things where instead
of doing the computation on chain or trying to create some sort of replicated machine that
does all this stuff, you instead just say, okay, only thing I'm going to use the blockchain
for is to check your proof, but I'm going to turn it into a distributed computing problem
and any person in the world can do the problem.
On any server, untrusted server even, because you don't have to trust the output, you trust
the proof and the proof is deterministic.
It tells you these things.
So whether you're using zero knowledge or sigma protocols or some other mechanism, it's
moving you in that particular direction to turn it from a replicated to a distributed
problem and go from I'm doing the work to I'm checking that the work was done correctly.
That's fascinating.
And all of a sudden we're back to the P equals NP thing where for many very interesting problems,
the checking is efficient, is much more efficient than the solving.
Right.
And also, do you want complete determinism or is it probabilistic?
Because if you relax that requirement a little bit, then suddenly actually you have a broader
class of things you can construct this stuff for.
You mentioned UTXO, there's a paper titled the Extended UTXO Model.
It writes in the introduction, Bitcoin and Ethereum hosting the two currently most valuable
and popular cryptocurrencies use two rather different ledger models known as the UTXO
model and the account model respectively.
At the same time, these two public blockchains differ strongly in the expressiveness of the
smart contracts that they support.
This is no coincidence.
Ethereum chose the account model explicitly to facilitate more expressive smart contracts.
On the other hand, Bitcoin chose UTXO also for good reasons, including that its semantic
model stays simple in a complex concurrent and distributed computing environment.
This raises the question of whether it is possible to have expressive smart contracts
while keeping the semantic simplicity of the UTXO model.
Okay.
So, what's the fuck that means?
Exactly.
What is UTXO?
What is the account model and what is the idea of the extended UTXO model?
So I guess the easiest way of visualizing it is that UTXO is kind of like cash register
accounting.
So let's assume you don't have credit cards, you just have cash.
And so when you go and buy some milk and potatoes or whatever, you go to the cashier, you pull
out your $20 bill, you give it to them, and let's say that comes up to $17.50, they have
to make change.
So you don't tear your $20 bill and cut a piece of it off and say, here's part of my
20.
You give them the entire $20 bill and then they give you something back and the things
that they give you back are also atomic units.
They don't cut those things up.
So that's kind of what UTXO is all about in a nutshell is that there's inputs and outputs,
your inputs to that 20 and your outputs will be the $17.50 that goes to them and then the
remaining change that goes back to you.
The problem with this particular model is that the way it was implemented with Bitcoin,
there was no notion of how do we run complex predicates, complex contracts on this thing,
where instead of just saying, okay, I'm just going to push value to you, I want to put
lots of terms and conditions into the movement of that value.
Like you only get this if I mow your lawn on Tuesday or you only get this if some event
happens like the Broncos win the Super Bowl or something like that.
Okay.
So you need some notion of programmability with it.
So a lot of people are trying to figure out in the early days of Bitcoin, how could we
improve the expressiveness of the system?
And one of ways of doing it is you can go to a different accounting model, bank style
accounting.
You can do it with a ledger.
Every time you do a withdrawal or deposit, it's a mutable system.
With the cash register accounting, you don't tear up the bills, but the bank, you can deduct
or add a ledger all the time.
So Ethereum kind of works in that bank accounting system where you just, you send messages,
you send transactions, and you're going up or down.
And so you can trigger programs the same way.
So what we did is we said, okay, if you take the UTXO model and you have some data to it
and instead of saying it's just a digital signature, but it's in a script, you can basically
create something that's still the same as cash register, but now you have programmability
and the big difference is local versus global.
So in the case of UTXO, your scripts are your concerns.
So whatever's going on in that cash register has no bearing or impact on the other cash
registers.
But when you look at bank accounting, you have to know the state of the entire banking world
to be able to make that work.
Why?
Because if that transaction is inbound, that wire transfer is inbound, you have to know
those funds are actually there.
That thing is actually happening.
So when you have a global state for a program, it's like you can do a lot more with it, but
it's a lot more dangerous.
And so you have to build all these mechanisms to try to protect yourself from it.
So what we did is we said, okay, add data, add a programmability, and you're kind of
this nice Goldilocks zone between what Ethereum did with an account style model and a global
state system.
And you're not as restrictive as Bitcoin, but you're still at a turning complete world.
You can still run all kinds of things.
And then any standard mathematician, they'll say, okay, well, is it isomorphic?
Is there a mapping between this?
What type of function can I actually take something expressed in one structure and transmit it
to the other structure and properties are preserved?
So we wrote a paper.
It's called Chlamaric Ledgers, where we actually show that UTXO, extended UTXO, and accounts
are somewhat similar in that you can map things that happen in one system to the other system,
the properties are preserved between the two.
So in practice, what's nice about extended UTXO is that you can put infrastructure on
top of it to make the development experience relatively similar to the development experience
of what you would do with Ethereum, but you don't have to worry about this global state.
So when you talk about sharding, it's a lot easier to do that.
It's a lot more conceivable to that.
And also you get determinism in the system.
So when I have a Plutus smart contract, whatever I run locally is exactly what I expect to
run in the system.
When you have a concept of this mutable global state in the system, whatever you run locally
is not necessarily what you're going to get when you actually push it into the system.
So you may misprice things and the contract will fail.
It doesn't ever happen in the Plutus world.
So you get a lot of advantages with this particular model.
The downside is that it's a little bit less expressive on the boundaries and a little
bit harder to write certain types of software with it.
But again, how you resolve that is you kind of build higher level languages and other
such things that compensate for these types of things and design patterns that compensate
for these types of things.
The other advantage that we have that's really fun and exciting is that Bitcoin lives in
this model and there are other UTXO based systems.
And so they're all talking about smart contracts as well and they would like to continue working
in the UTXO model.
So if you're a Bitcoin contract developer or other things, there's actually already a
group of people that understand this very well and that's still a fairly large part
of the mind share of the entire space.
So there are no silver bullets and anytime you pick a particular model, there's an upside
and a downside and there's different ways of doing things from cash register accounting
or bank accounting.
You can even do different accounting models.
But we felt this was kind of the best first step to go into because we started with something
very familiar that had a long history behind it and it maps very beautifully to functional
programming principles, this concept of immutability and these things and much more strict management
of state and no notion of having this global concept that you have to kind of manage as
you break up the system.
Now in practice, what does this mean to the developer when they actually start real writing
an application?
Not too much.
You know, there's going to be a little bit of retooling and some new patterns you have
to learn.
But in practice, you can still do the same things.
You can implement a uniswaptile style thing.
In fact, we even wrote that code with the Plutus Pioneers program so you can go to YouTube
and watch a lecture and see how that's done.
You can do a stable coin.
You can do an Oracle.
You can do interactive contracts.
It has to be done a little differently than the way that you would do it in an account
style model.
Just like you can write an application Java, you can write an application in Haskell,
they both can do the same thing.
But the code is going to look different and the canonical way of looking at things is
different.
So in terms of Oracle, Oracle Networks, what do you think about Chainlink and external
off-chain data sources and everything we've been talking about now with the external,
with the extended UTXO model?
Yeah.
I mean, trying to do smart contracts without Oracle is like trying to have sex with your
pants on.
I mean, it's not really fun.
It's not exactly the best of things.
That's the way I've been doing it all these years.
I didn't know.
For any other person, Lex, I wouldn't believe you, but for you.
That's why I'm single.
This makes so much sense now.
Okay.
So you need the outside world to be injected into your system, right?
Yeah.
Try to keep a straight face.
Yeah.
It's great.
You need the outside world to make your system useful.
It's like all the kinds of things that you would care to do with a smart contract usually
involve human beings and information streams aggregating and doing something.
So the Oracle is a super important component in practice for any smart contract involving
any notion of value.
You need to know when things have happened, how they happen, who won, who lost, etc., etc.
So first, where do you get the data from?
So what's the aggregator?
This is why we love our relationship with Wolfram, because one of the things you'll
know about Wolfram as you get to know the guy is he's a data pack rat.
Every email, every communication, every interaction, he's archived somewhere.
Last time I talked to him, I have emails from you from 2012.
You still have those?
Yeah.
Every keystroke is written down and stored somewhere.
So if you use Wolfram Alpha, it's a simulacrum of the way his mind thinks.
So you can query the system and be like, oh, how many shipwrecks have happened in Florida
between 1950 and 2000 that have resulted in more than $1 billion of cargo loss and at
least one fatality?
And it'll return an answer.
Yeah.
I mean, it has this incredible source of data that's computable.
For people who don't know, Wolfram Alpha is more than just the thing that assists you
with your math homework in high school.
It's actually this giant network of data of weather data, of location data, just statistics,
all kinds of...
It's doing the aggregation in a way that you can query across data sets.
And it's exactly this kind of idea.
It basically represents the very kind of thing you would hope to be able to query off chain
as part of the smart contracts.
Right.
But the only downside is it's centralized.
That's always the Achilles' Healable for him is he tends to like proprietary things
and he tends to like centralizing things and mostly because he likes running the things.
And then everybody can have an opinion on that.
The thing though is that after you've done aggregation, there's a question of injection.
How do you get that data into the system?
And you can do that in a very naive way where you can say, oh, I'm just going to attach
a public key to it and it'll sign for that data feed, that injection.
And then somehow I'll just trust it as it is.
Or you could try to make it more complicated.
You could weight data feeds from different sources and have some notion of truthiness
or a veracity metric or something like that.
So Chainlink is just one of many different philosophies that was born out of the academy.
I believe Ari Joule was connected to it and there's some good people on that side.
And it has a philosophy about how do you aggregate a philosophy about how do you inject and how
do you create incentives so that that process over time gets more federated or more decentralized
instead of centralizing around one particular setup.
Now closely related corollary to this is computation off chain.
So as I mentioned, smart contracts are intimately connected to Oracle.
The question is how much pre-processing and state management are you going to do outside
of the system versus what do you do inside of the system?
So it's a very interesting balance between these two.
When they were thinking about this stuff for a long time, there's a great paper called
Town Crier came out way back in the day at Cornell and that was all about using SGX
to scrape things and you can rely on trusted hardware to give you good data.
But you could also use those SGX cores to do contract processing because if it runs
in trusted hardware, then it's very unlikely to be tampered with or manipulated.
And because of that, you don't have to federate it or decentralize it.
You can run it on a single device as if it was running on a cryptocurrency.
So there seems to be a desire in that community to capture more and more of the smart contract
stack and pull more and more of that stack into that Layer 2 infrastructure from running
on Layer 1.
Why?
Because you have cost reduction and potentially because your trust model collapses to whatever
Chainlink is offering, you're not gaining anything by doing the computation on Ethereum
or another platform.
Because you ever watch The Simpsons, there was this beautiful episode where Mr. Burns
wants to turn the power off in Springfield and it's the perfect analogy for information
security.
So he and Smithers, they go through this elaborate series of doors and secret passages and guard
dogs and robots and shit to get to the center of the power plant to turn off the power.
And when they arrive at the center of the plant, there's this stray dog that's inside
the room and there's this wicker door that leads to the outside and you're like, well,
why the hell did you go through this elaborate series of doors and things if there's a back
door into your system?
So that's basically a real life analogy of the relationship between the Oracle and the
smart contract.
You're only as good in your infrasick model as your weakest link and it doesn't matter
if all of your computation is decentralized if you're at the mercy of your data feed.
Because I can just manipulate that and break the entire security model of the system.
You'll perfectly execute the wrong answer.
So they say, well, if you're trusting us anyway, why don't you pull more of what you're doing
on Chain into our stack, which creates more transaction fees for them and more value for
them.
But there are many different ways you can do oracles and earlier I was talking about
the biology of these things, cell differentiation.
The minute that you admit heterogeneity in your system and you start having cells like
stake pools or things that are on 24 seven, then you can start asking the what if question.
Why don't you guys just also provide data feeds?
Why don't you guys also provide state channels or payment channels or generate random numbers
for me or whatever?
And you're now a service provider.
You're making the blockchain full time, but part time you're doing this.
If you're making bagels, you probably make donuts, that type of a concept.
So I think that type of competition is going to be very difficult for a lot of these layer
two protocols that aren't tightly coupled with the protocol.
Because the ones that are tightly coupled with the protocol, they have a built in trust
advantage.
They've already built a commercial reputation.
There's already an increasingly more decentralized set.
The other thing is you don't need a token.
You can just use ADA.
You don't need an oracle coin for these types of things to work.
And by the way, that's just for the injection component and the veracity attestation.
So is it true or not?
That's not about the aggregation.
That's still a tremendously time intensive, expensive proposition.
There's only a few people in the world that have what Steve has with Wolfram and those
guys by just cutting off those supply to replicate what they have is something that would cost
hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
And so it's an interesting question of how do you incentivize the centralized aggregation
of information?
And that's kind of what town crier and other protocols we're trying to achieve.
So maybe you can say how town crier works because it's like, what's your vision?
You're not partnering with Wolfram and Wolfram Alpha and sort of exploring this partnership
of data and the blockchain.
What's your vision for a possible distributed version of Wolfram Alpha?
Well, the first step is just say, can we use this as a feed and they can be what Bloomberg
is to the financial markets.
So you have a terminal and you have something and there's always a value of at least offering
choice.
And so it's not like we're anti-chainlink or picking winners and losers.
It's an open protocol.
It's an open system.
So if we're successful, chainlink will migrate or it will at least support us because they
like money.
They like users.
They like liquidity.
It's a disservice to their community not to support a potential customer set.
But you're going to have a spectrum from the desire to do a completely decentralized
aggregation, curation, injection, and veracity attestation to a completely centralized vertically
integrated set.
You need to be able to have that whole spectrum and offer that to the smart contract developer
to decide what makes sense.
By the way, a lot of cases, they're going to be their own Oracle.
So for example, the World of Warcraft example that I gave, it's a completely centralized
thing.
They're run by a single company.
There's no sense in saying that we're somehow going to decentralize that.
What they're just trying to do is extend their currency or NFTs or whatever into new market
places.
So the minting of that is controlled by a single entity.
And the world state of that, you just have to trust Blizzard to inject that into the
system.
You could try to imagine some sort of like, you know, sentinel group of people within
the game who keep Blizzard honest, but it's completely unnecessary because they can change
the rules of the system arbitrarily.
So in that case, you're optimizing around efficiency and cost reduction.
So you'd want a single feed that gets injected into the system from them.
If you look at a stable coin that's algorithmic and it's basing its value on the aggregation
of many different exchanges, that's the polar opposite example.
Because there you're saying, okay, what's the price of my asset relative to some basket?
But how do I know that the price feeds I'm looking at are accurate?
You have to look at Binance and Bitrix and all these other things or maybe there's conventional
forex exchanges or something like that.
Okay.
Well, how do you weight that?
And how do you clip outliers and, you know, these types of things, that's a completely
different conversation.
And there's a lot more mechanics you have to put in for that bundling and attestation
of the veracity of the data feed.
And what happens if you get it wrong?
Your stable coin gets mispriced and everything goes to hell.
And you know, the markets will eventually correct it for arbitrage seeking behavior,
but anything that was built on that will fail in the short term.
So Oracle is really just a game of, you know, you have to build a standardized interface
system, make it as easy as possible for people to do that and then let people choose how
they want to inject data and what level of assurance do they need behind that.
And the question is how much do you leave to the user versus how much does the protocol
take care of for you and it's a difficult design question.
For our part, you know, we love working with Steve and Wolfram and they're a great company
and they really have some bright people there.
And we know on the data set that they're second to none and because not only they have it,
it's computable.
You can do all kinds of things and manipulate with a very rich query language.
So that's a great thing and we want to make sure that that's accessible to developers
and Cardano.
But remember, they're like Bloomberg, it's a centralized speed in that respect.
So if you want to build a chain link as competitor, you know, there's other protocols you could
do for that.
Now you asked about Tom Crier and that was that was an attempt to kind of sweep the oceans
with the net, you know, get some, get the data through a decentralized way.
And that was just saying, hey, let's use trusted hardware to go read all kinds of websites
and other things.
And because it's trusted hardware, the scraping is nonbiased, you know, if you find something
inconvenient to whatever the person who's scraping is it, the trust hardware will still do it
and it can't be changed.
You'd have to manipulate SGX to do that.
So that's great, but you still run into the problem of how do you wire that together.
The underlying websites still don't have any notion of veracity or reputation behind them.
And then you also have the issue of storage or the hell do you put all of it if you have
exabytes of data.
What's the incentive for that?
That's the dream of the semantic web.
I still think is a fascinating idea to basically convert the internet into a court like a knowledge
base that you can, you can query, you can integrate the same way you did with Wolfram
Alpha, but much bigger.
But that, that means basically revolutionizing the way we put the internet together, which
I think these ideas of off-chain data will, will motivate people because there's a lot
of money to be made and creating, finally, there's money to be made with a semantic web.
So that, that'll be an interesting kind of future.
I do want to ask you about video games really quick and a small tangent because you said
this really interesting idea of Blizzard being centralized control, is it possible to have
items in the game that are not controlled by Blizzard?
Sure.
Being controlled in a decentralized fashion that you can, like what is it, the grandfather
sword in Diablo?
Hmm.
What was it really?
Somebody was criticizing me.
I said, I was saying all these kinds of nice things about Diablo three and they said Diablo
two resurrected is coming out.
They need to check it out.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of camps and wards on each side.
Well, come on.
We both know that Diablo two is far better than Diablo three.
That's what they're saying.
This is the war that they're having.
Okay.
So we'll play it.
It's coming out soon.
I'll play it.
Fine.
But nevertheless, those items are owned by Blizzard.
Is there, is it possible to create video games where items are owned by the people,
like outside of Blizzard?
And do you think in like a half century from now, we will all live in those games and we'll
forget the physical space even?
Well, yeah.
That's definitely possible.
I look at crypto kitties.
That's a great example of that.
Can you explain what crypto kitties is?
Well, it's basically just a video game that kind of lives on a blockchain and the creatures
within the game can breed with each other and create new crypto kitties and you can
own them.
It's just like, like, like some sort of dystopian Tamagotchi with lots of money behind them.
But anyway, you know, the thing is those assets actually have a blockchain based representation.
And so whether the infrastructure that hoists up that game off-chain goes on or off, because
that ledger exists outside of the game, any person can come in, replicate it, restore it,
and you know, turn it back on, sans intellectual property.
So yeah, it's completely possible to break your architecture up where you have a notion
of the player part and then you have a notion of the experience part and you can interchange
experiences.
Just like you do cascading style sheets or something for, you know, have different presentations
and the ownership of the underlying layers, the players.
So yeah, that's definitely doable.
And frankly, that's what's going to happen in the gaming world because there's so much
value in that.
I mean, everybody wants play and, you know, right now the model is you make a game, you
sell licenses and you have a huge surge of people at the beginning of the game buying
the video game and then you have this long tail, but you've gotten almost 95% of your
value in the first six months.
You have a huge churn rate.
The odds are the vast majority of people won't be playing the game within 12 months.
But if you can create an interactive game where there's an actual economy inside the
game, then you have Eve online or Second Life or any of these things where you have people
playing for 10 years and there's like people buying virtual real estate and all these other
things.
You as a game developer actually don't have to create a lot of content.
So your long tail gets a lot fatter and it generates a lot more revenue and your cost
of operating system is fairly fixed or diminishing.
So the economics align for doing exactly what you're talking about and I think it'll
get done.
Well, I just saw recently sort of this calculation that people played WoW and Fortnite for 140
billion hours.
And that's without the economic incentives there.
So do you think it's possible that like most of our economy in the future will be people
playing video games essentially?
Like, okay, so one vision of the future, especially with AI and automation, that people like we
get wealthier and wealthier, there's this kind of rising GDP for the entire world.
And then people are losing their jobs, but they're still are well off enough to be able
to have a high quality of life.
So we're all looking for meaning and meaning we'll find is by playing video games and now
there's this extra levels like you can be a Bill Gates within a video game world in
the digital world as opposed to the physical world, is that you think that's the future?
You just want to have the Westworld if you can't tell the difference.
Does it matter why I'm uttered to you?
Did you ever interview Yvonne Harari?
Not yet.
Eventually.
Well, yeah, I guess, you know, Homo Diaz, that's kind of like the roadmap there, this
hedonistic dystopia where everybody just lives wired into some simulation and there's some
movies about that ready player one and the other one was surrogate and so forth.
So yeah, Hollywood has certainly visualized what this could be.
But you know, I'm not so pessimistic in that respect.
I do believe that the video game world is evolving at an amazing pace.
If you look at where Unreal is at, it's just incredible, the latest Unreal Engine.
And within one or two more ticks of that clock, the iterations, so five to 10 years, the photo
realism will be so good that it'll be hard to distinguish between real life and video
games.
And you know, the hardware is almost there.
So the question is then, when you have photo realistic experiences where you've successfully
traversed the uncanny valley to a point where it's good enough, then will virtual reality
be more desirable than actual reality?
And for the vast majority of people, the answer is probably yes, because for actual
reality, it's tough, it's hard, you know, but then your knowledge of that you live in
a virtual world actually becomes a problem for you.
So there's going to be this kind of sad, dark industry where people try to create amnesia
where they're not aware that they're inside the virtual world.
And so that's that's why it's sad.
I mean, it's almost like because, you know, it's not real.
But if you could forget that it's not real, then you believe what you're experiencing
is real.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what you forget?
Like you forget all the ugly parts of life, which is the physicals, the meat space, and
then you should get to enjoy video games.
But it's always lurking the back of your mind that you're in the matrix.
Well, they have to not be in the matrix.
That's just why the bald dude in the matrix was like, I want to be rich and have a beautiful
wife and eat a steak every day.
You know, he didn't want to know he was in the matrix.
So you would take the red pill, not the blue pill.
Well, no, hang on is it depends on how good the virtual world is like, well, that's what
I'm trying to tell you.
Because, I mean, isn't that what most of the beautiful experiences about human life are
is forgetting for a moment, for a time, like the mess of it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what love is.
You forget.
Like all of a sudden, everything is beautiful, but like the reality is you're going to lose
that person and most likely love will fade.
And no matter what, even if it doesn't, you're both going to be dead soon.
Jesus Christ.
So I'm taking the blue pill on that one.
You went full Ernest Becker on me, man.
Okay.
But you know, I get what you're saying, though, and then actually, but then it begs the question,
how do we, and goes back to the very first question you asked in this interview, which
is like, how do we know we're not in a simulation or, you know, is this, this Bostrom's concepts
or these ideas like real, well, it's entirely possible that we are and that we desire to
be because the real world is horribly, horrifically dystopian or bad, or maybe we're actually
don't exist, we're completely virtual and does it matter?
And I'd argue that it probably doesn't at, you know, at some certain point, if you're
at the end of your life and you're 90s dying of cancer, you know, the fact that you can
live out being young, healthy in 25 is probably a desirable thing and no one would ever complain
about that.
Where it becomes problematic is if the vast majority of society enters this virtual simulacra
of reality and as a consequence, nothing works because there's no one to do anything.
Everybody falls apart in that respect, you know, there's no desire to do anything in
the real world.
Innovation stops, the desire to actually do real work stops because you're always inside
this virtual economy.
So I don't know, it's, it's, it's an interesting question, but you know, drawing it back more
to where we're at today, the evolution factors are there, you know, VR is evolving at a very
rapid rate, the game engines are just incredible today and they're really doing amazing things.
And there seems to be an overwhelming desire for people to escape the harshness of where
they live just by evidence by how many billions of hours have been spent playing video games.
People still play Skyrim.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a good game.
It's probably my favorite game with the whole Elder Scrolls series, but you know, it's,
it's fascinating because smart contracts is actually the mechanism by which we take a
lot of the meat space stuff and move it to the digital world.
So where this is, all the stuff we've been talking about is really probably the mechanisms
which take us there, which I find that world not dystopian, I find that world quite utopian
because there's so many opportunities to create beautiful experiences.
But since we're talking about the future, let me ask you the timeline question or even
just like definitional, what is Alonzo?
You mentioned some fun hello world experiments going on and how and when will Cardano get
smart contracts?
Yeah.
The Church is a famous, famous mathematician, computer science guy and he was a contemporary
of Turing and there was like these three different views of computing recursive functions
from Gertl and Turing machines from Turing and you know, Church had lambda calculus
and they're all equivalent and they all give you the ability to build a computer.
So we like functional programming.
So we decided-
That's your favorite Church.
Yeah.
So we had to name something after Church and it's just weird that, you know, we never
did.
So we said, okay, Alonzo is a good release name.
Actually it was bringing smart contracts to Cardano, it took us a long time to get here
and we'll be there in the next 90 days.
You know, it's like everything we do, there's a process and so there's all the colors of
the rainbow.
We start with Alonzo blue and then white and purple and each step you do some more things,
you bring more users in and then eventually you get to a threshold where you say, okay,
everything works the way intended and you push a button and we initiate what's called
a hard for a commonator event and boom, the system has smart contracts.
You just wake up and it's there, it's like it's in your house.
So it's gonna be a hard fork.
It's like when I got my blue check mark on Twitter, I woke up and I had it and it's just
like Christmas came.
And you were never the same.
You can't go back, it's like hard fork, it's a hard fork of Charles.
Yeah, exactly.
You've got blue mark.
Well, actually I think you can take it away, but-
They take my check mark away, Lex.
But they'd be like a hard fork backwards, I guess.
Okay, so great.
That's, but currently there's a testing procedure going on to see what does that look like and
what will give you confidence that things are working well.
Yeah, so first you start with the Marriera, which is where we're right now multi-asset.
So you can do metadata and issue tokens on Cardano, but you'd have limited programmability
on chain.
Alonzo adds the programmability in, but we already have most of the foundations of the
extended UTXL model and the smart contract model, it's just those things aren't ready.
So the first step is say fork it, so all those rules are now there.
Okay, so that's what we did with Alonzo blue.
We forked a testnet based layer and it successfully survived going from Marri to Alonzo, which
means that you can move transactions from one side to the other, both systems work.
And then the next step is say, okay, well, are the stake pull operators, people run the
infrastructure able to run this testnet just like they run Cardano, and that's what we're
doing right now with blue.
We're bringing all these SPOs in, and then are we able to submit and run smart contracts
on the system?
And they actually return around trip.
You send something, you get something back, yay, okay.
So that's where we're at.
And then what you do is each step, so the next is white, you go from like 50 people to several
hundred and then purples and open testnet, where we want every single person in the entire
ecosystem to use it.
And it's also a dev net.
So that means that people are writing with plus playground and local interpreters, their
smart contracts can actually start testing them now on the public infrastructure.
So it's kind of like releasing dev kits to the Xbox or something like that.
You send them out to game developers before you release the Xbox, so they can test their
video games in anticipation of the release of the system.
So you run that for at least a month.
And as long as it doesn't blow up in your face, and oh God, what have we done, Hindenburg,
all the humanity, you release it and you ship it.
The problem is it's no longer in our control.
There's over a hundred exchanges that have listed Cardano.
There's lots of wallet infrastructure, there are thousands of different constituencies.
So it's less of a technological problem now, and it's more of a coordination problem.
So you have to evolve in a very methodical way, and each step of the way you bring new
actors in, they get ready for it.
They upgrade their infrastructure to it, and then like shells, eventually you get to the
outer shell, which is the hard fork for the general public.
And if we've done it right, like that blue check mark, they wake up and it's exactly
the same.
They just get a little update, update your client, and they start demanding Wagyu beef.
Is there stuff you're worried about in terms of like when this tricky, you know, goes up
several orders of magnitudes in terms of scale?
Are there problems that you foresee?
Is there like, like we said, there's game theoretic aspects, all those kinds of things.
Like what worries you the most?
I mean, I sleep like a baby.
I wake up every two hours crying.
Oh, damn, that's a good line.
You're full of good lines.
I mean, there's a lot to it.
You just made me realize that expression makes no sense.
I slept like a baby, but go ahead.
Yeah, exactly right.
Messing your whole world up right now, Alex.
No, I mean, there's so much that keeps me up at night.
You know, it's like you're in a cold sweat every day when you have an ecosystem like
this.
Because the other thing is you're judged as much by the applications people build on
the platform as you are by the platform you've constructed.
So you know, one of the most unfair things that happened in our industry was blaming
Vitalik for the Dow hack.
He didn't write the code.
He wasn't responsible for it.
It's completely independent, different team.
And because it blew up, a lot of people just developed this idea, Ethereum is not secure.
EVMS fundamentally broken.
And it's true.
There are some issues there, but come on.
That's like saying, oh, well, Photoshop didn't work.
Fuck Bill Gates.
Yeah.
You know?
You get, as a platform developer, you know, inter, coupled with the wins and losses of
your application developer.
So if they go do amazing things, it's like, oh yeah, Windows is great.
We love it.
And if they go do terrible things, they're like, oh man, I guess he's trying to kill
all of us.
So what we're kept up at night about is not just what we've constructed, but also how
do we curate an ecosystem and foster the development of an ecosystem where you have
assurance baked into the application.
And that's somehow expressible to the user.
So when you download your smart contract or you click your one click install, you use
your Uniswap clone or whatever the hell it is that's deployed on Cardano, you have a
little green check mark or something that indicates to you that somebody audited the
code or followed a specification.
The lack of that is problematic because then first there's impersonations, the whole my
ether wallet thing or like your videos or my videos are the same.
Every comment there's a bot that says, hey, give me some money or something like that.
That kind of stuff happens.
But then just protocol level flaws like what happened with the Dow hack, that's what really
keeps me up at night.
How do you resolve that problem?
Because I don't hire these people.
I don't tell them what to do.
I didn't tell them how to build things on the platform.
They may have tons of experience and knowledge that can be Simon Payton Jones or they could
have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever.
And they read one tutorial and they've written three lines of code their entire life and
they've deployed something horribly broken copy paste.
And suddenly it all goes to hell.
I'm judged by both.
That's what really keeps me up at night.
And we're, as a company, trying to figure out and as an ecosystem, trying to figure
out standards like at University of Wyoming, we're setting up the smart contract engineering
institute.
We're negotiating with them right now.
And the goal there is just to create some standards for how to certify smart contracts
so that you can get that green check mark and know that it actually has some assurance
level behind it.
But God, that's a huge coordination problem.
And it's a huge information presentation problem and incentives problem and so forth.
And unfortunately, people who value being first the market will kind of piss in the
pool for everybody else.
In terms of, maybe you can comment on the topic of decentralized exchanges, what kind
of decentralized exchanges Dex is what are they, first of all, and what kind would you
like to see built around Cardano?
Yeah.
So people want to create exchanges that don't have custodial risk.
The point of exchange is to build you a marketplace where bids and asks can find each other market.
People can meet and trade.
You can find a price and you can get liquidity.
So you got gold, you want to turn your gold into dollars.
Well, somebody has to create a marketplace for that.
So Coinbase is an example of marketplace, but it's centralized.
But the problem is you have custodial risk.
So when you put your gold and your dollars or your digital representations of these things
into the exchange, what if Wally, he was, Eve broke up with him and now he's really sad
and he's gone to the dark side and he's become Wally the hacker.
Okay, so he can go and sneak his way in and hack into Coinbase and steal all your gold
and your tokens.
So instead of you actually being able to swap these things, you've lost all your money.
And there's other problems too, like let's say, Daisy has now come in and become a regulator
and said, oh, I don't like these exchanges anymore, I'm just going to shut them all down.
Yeah.
And then you have no access to it.
So you have sovereign risk, you have the risk of threat, you have regulatory risk, you have
the issue of banks maybe cutting you out.
So it's been in our industry for more than 10 years, Mount Gox was the most famous example
of that.
They collapsed, I believe, in 2013 and hundreds of millions of dollars was lost over the course
of a while.
So the point of a dex is saying, can we do what a marketplace does but not have Coinbase,
not have a central actor run this thing?
And there's a lot of problems with that because exchanges are generally creatures of latency,
you know, high frequency trading, for example, these things, the nanosecond, they co-locate
their infrastructure with the exchange software just so they can front-run orders over other
people.
I mean, it's crazy the amount of technology that they put in.
So the traditional Wall Street version of an exchange is very centralized, very fast,
very optimized, and kind of behaves by a very close set of rules.
When you look at a dex, you have to accept that you're going to have to have slightly
different rules because you're operating in a global system's latency and you're operating
in a system that has different behaviors.
However, that said, there's a lot of great protocols that have been built for it.
Uniswap has kind of evolved a lot over the years and we've seen a huge competition and
a lot of evolution to basically build out protocols that kind of excuse some of these
security problems and enjoy high liquidity and then also have this beautiful concept
of openness.
One of the gatekeepers to crypto when you're a cryptocurrency developer are the exchanges.
I remember when we first created Cardano, the Bitfinex guys reached out at the Cardano
Foundation.
They said, oh, we'd be happy to list data.
I said, okay.
And they said, yeah, we want $5 million to do it.
So there was kind of a sub-Italian for go fuck yourself in those email conversations.
I think fuck who knows what I said.
But anyway, that kind of back and forth happens all the time.
Because these guys are gatekeepers.
They have this nepotistic control, information asymmetries and so forth.
So having a DEX, you don't have that problem.
You have open listing and you basically just put the asset into it.
And if anybody wants to trade it, they will.
And if it seems like it's a good idea, a natural market will form, market making will occur
and you get liquidity with it.
So there's no barrier to entry for that type of system.
The biggest existential problem for DEX is right now is the concept of regulation.
So basically right now, when you use Binance or Coinbase or these other guys, you have
to go through KYC and ML, know your customer and anti-money lottery.
So basically who are you and is your money real or not or are you a drug dealer or something?
So normally you do that by saying, okay, I'm going to give them my copy of my passport
and maybe they're going to request some tax records or whatever the best practices are
for the particular jurisdiction.
And then that exchange is liable if that's fucked up.
So if the government comes in and says, hey guys, you know, pull your compliance records
and they find discrepancies, they'll actually put the exchange out of business or find them
very heavily.
JP Morgan Chase got $19 billion in finance and fines over the last 20 years for various
compliance issues amongst other things.
So it's an expensive, very difficult thing and at DEX, it's an open system.
You just have value coming in, not identity.
And so all these things are trading amongst synonymous accounts.
And so there's no notion of compliance right now for that.
So a lot of regulators are coming in and saying, oh, well, this is just a cesspool for terrorism
and drug dealing and bad stuff.
They're word salad of bullshit.
But it is what it is.
You have to deal with these guys.
And so there's been a lot of discussions of can we take DEXs and keep the openness and
keep the liquidity and no counterpart or custodial risk and can we add some notion of compliance
to that?
And it just centralized way.
It doesn't require a single actor to be a gatekeeper.
So I think actually by combining DIDS, decentralized identifiers, that's the way to do it.
But it's actually the next generation of the technology is the regulated DEX and who regulates
that?
How does that work and so forth?
But I think ultimately those are going to be the only marketplaces that end up surviving
in this current environment if your desire is to exit to a dollar.
If you don't really care about the fiat side, like traditional legacy currency, you can
always do things in a shadowy, unregulated way.
But I mean, it's a personal preference and a business preference.
Can we kind of return to proof of work and proof of stake?
There's just so many topics I want to talk to you about.
So I'll jump around a little bit.
But at the Bitcoin conference, Jack Dorsey spoke, I think, I believe he said Bitcoin
changes everything.
I think you made a video for Jack trying to explain different ideas to him.
I guess describing the difference between proof of work and proof of stake as we've
talked about.
Right.
What do you hope Jack Dorsey comes to understand about the difference between proof of work
and proof of stake?
Well, I hope he understands it's just a resource.
That's the entire point of the video I was trying to make is like, dude, you're in this
cult where you think the only way to be secure is proof of work and somehow proof of stake
is less secure than proof of work.
I don't even know how you put those inequalities there because you're talking about apples
and oranges.
You're making different trade-offs and there's different assumptions about the nature of
the people involved, but the mechanics are the same.
And so it's really more of a question of what type of system do you prefer?
Do you want mercenaries guarding Rome or do you want Roman citizens guarding Rome?
And as the Romans learned, it's better to have citizens usually doing that.
And that's the only point I was trying to make to Dorsey.
I don't think he watched it or particularly cared, but it was more of a video for everyone
and to start that dialogue of realizing that the real game is proof of stake better than
proof of work, is how do we go from one to N and what should N be?
You just mentioned that semantical addressable web going back to IPFS and these other concepts.
Well, how do you pay for the enormous burden of storing that much data?
You can create a consensus protocol for it.
There actually is one.
It's called Permacoin.
It came out in 2014, 15, Andrew Miller wrote it and a few other authors.
I think John Katz may have been an author as well, but basically it was just a throwaway,
proof of work style algorithm that only works if you have large amounts of data.
So it's like your miners are like a hard drive effectively.
Proof of storage, I think you call this.
This type of stuff.
And there's been since then many iterations, evolutions of that type of protocol.
So what if you throw that into your resource bag?
Now you have a capacity in your system for storing huge amounts of information that's
incentivized by the way the system works and you can balance that with a proof of stake
system and you can balance that with a, let's say you have proof of useful computation.
We may have a paper on that.
Who knows, coming soon.
And what if you have a proof of useful computation where maybe you can do walk-sat or something?
Who knows?
With something like that, okay, well now you have three resources inside your system and
those three things keep your system secure.
They keep each other balanced and they just so happened to create the world's largest
supercomputer that's programmable and it just so happens to create the world's largest
database that's programmable.
In addition to having a shareholder style model for ownership inside of it to kind
of balance these things out so people care about the appreciation of value inside the
system.
So that was my point to Jack is your business guy, why are you betting all your eggs?
And one crazy model that's a cult, step away and realize that that does something.
It's a tool, but saws aren't the only tool in the toolbox.
There's hammers and screwdrivers and other things.
Go to N resources and let's have a real conversation about what would a world computer or a world
infrastructure that's useful for your business don't know, in his case Twitter, require.
And what type of resources would you need for that such a thing?
Well in his case, Square more importantly.
Currently if you look at Square and Cash App, they support Bitcoin.
He is kind of all in on the proof of work idea, not all in, but currently kind of that's
the one supported idea.
I guess there's not just a tip in proof of work.
I love you so much Charles, thank you appreciate this.
But I'm not going to run with that even though I'm tempted to, but looking forward to you
Hope Cardano becomes part of Cash App.
I mean he's a business guy or at least I'd hope he is and it's not about what I want
or what he wants.
It's about what markets want.
When you run a publicly traded company, you have a fiduciary obligation, you're shareholders
to maximize the utility, sustainability and value of your company.
And so if he's running a company that makes money off of these things, it makes absolutely
no sense to be a maximalist.
You want transaction volume, that's how you make your damn money.
It was Coinbase was the same way, they were very maximalists in the beginning.
Very quickly they started realizing, hey, we're losing a lot of money.
If we want an IPO, we kind of need to be a bit more diverse.
Eric Voorhees was also a maximalist way back today.
Now look at Eric, he's got a shapeshift and all these other pieces of infrastructure.
He's a lot more friendly with us Alties.
So you know, Jack will make that decision, his people will make that decision I think
based on market dynamics, transaction volume and value to the user.
And if the concern is actually legitimately security, then the only question I'd ask their
team is, can you please provide me a definition of one?
Doing POW is more secure than proof of stake as a tweet is not really a proof.
You need to actually come out and sit down and say, what is your security model?
What do you care about?
What do you value?
What's the problems you're concerned about at proof of stake?
And they never really get there.
And that's why I call this maximal like a religion because it's just like saying, well, the angels
descended from the heavens and it's like, well, how do you know?
Because the Bible said so or the doctrine said so, it's like, well, that's your evidence.
Somebody wrote something down.
Can you please give me a little bit more?
They say, no, you're challenging the word of God.
In this case, you're challenging the word of Satoshi.
And all I ask for is just what is the burden of proof?
We wrote the papers, we have security models, we went through the peer review process, God,
that was not easy.
We wrote formal specifications and some cases we formalize those specifications with Isabelle
for God's sakes, which is not easy to do.
And then we implemented it.
And it's running in production with a million users at a $50 billion market cap.
I mean, at what point do you start saying, well, maybe there's something there.
And they say, no, there's nothing there and it's not secure, it can't be secure.
And he's, okay, then why do you believe what you believe?
And they never come back to me with an answer, ever.
Well, I believe God didn't go through a peer review process when you wrote the Ten Commandments.
So sometimes it works out, sometimes not.
Let me ask on that same thread, Tesla, SpaceX, Elon Musk currently invested in Bitcoin, but
are openly looking to explore other cryptocurrency investments.
What case would you make for Cardano?
Well, if they truly care about alternative energy and sustainability, carbon reduction
or carbon neutrality, you can't be in a system where there is no built-in mechanism to constrain
the energy consumption.
With proof of stake, energy consumption is a negative.
You want to minimize it.
If you can get the same amount of stuff done on a Raspberry Pi as you can a big server,
you're going to do it on the Pi because ultimately that server cost and the energy cost is coming
out of your budget.
With proof of work, any innovation you come up with to optimize power, you just build
more Asics because it's always 30% more power efficient, great, buy 30% more, you keep adding
to the work set because you want more hash power, more hash power, more share of the
Pi.
So you have no energy savings component.
I know these people are saying, well, there's a lot of wasted energy in the grid and this
is incentivizing using that wasted energy and it's a better way of storing it than batteries
because you're now storing it as a Bitcoin instead of storing it as energy.
Okay, maybe there's some truth to that, but anyway, it's just-
The energy is a critical point for you.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
The energy is a critical point for me with Tesla because they assert to be an alternative
energy company and unless they can make the case that somehow the proliferation of Bitcoin
is legitimately going to proliferate batteries, solar and wind or other things, then it's
probably good for them to just focus on the most efficient energy efficient cryptocurrency
possible.
Otherwise, you're exacerbating global warming, you're exacerbating the ecological consequences
of it.
The other thing is Bitcoin is the least programmable of all the cryptocurrencies and if you want
to do interesting, sexy, unique things, let's say Tesla, for example, they want to start
doing VDI and V2V for autonomous vehicles and have the vehicles start talking to each
other and connect it to 5G, well, imagine if you want to build a telco coin or some
sort of 5G coin and you want to build an IoT layer and network, there's just no real way
to do that on Bitcoin with the way it's designed.
So you'd need fundamentally different infrastructure to create such a token and regulate such a
system and have these things autonomously negotiate and do business with each other.
You need DEXs and stable coins and all kinds of mechanics to make something like that possible.
Well that's really beneficial to Tesla if they could figure that out because they could
create like an information sharing incentive scheme where if the cars talk to each other,
including other branded cars like GM cars and Ford's, they can now actually get data
from those cars through a marketplace in exchange for the benefit of autonomous driving or for
the benefit of understanding road conditions or safety enhancement and so forth.
So it's just depending, are you just here to speculate?
Are you here to actually use it as another medium of exchange or do you actually want
to build infrastructure on this thing?
The more closely you get to utility, the further down the road you get there, then the more
programmability you need and so it makes a lot more sense to be an Ethereum fan or Cardano
fan than to be a Bitcoin fan.
So to be both proof of stake and have the smart contracts capabilities.
Yes.
And that's why we went over Ethereum because they're proof of work.
You mentioned God, God spelled backwards as dog.
How's that for a transition?
And Elon Musk and Tesla are at least a little bit curious about a coin called Dogecoin.
You made a video directed to Elon on how to improve Dogecoin.
What are your ideas for making Dogecoin even better than it already is?
Well, Dogecoin is like that Nine Inch Nails song, a copy of a copy of a copy.
Yes, it's a copy of a copy.
It's a Bitcoin gave Litecoin, Litecoin gave Dogecoin and it was kind of a parody cryptocurrency
and I think Jackson was trying to do it to prove a point about altcoins and then true
to form, it's like nobody got the doctrine and completely perverted the entire religion.
It's almost like the emperor of man in Warhammer 40K was like this atheist, don't worship
me and now there's like this whole religion built around the emperor.
So Dogecoin has become a thing and it's become such a large thing that it is a reasonable
target for somebody to fix it up and repair it, make it an interesting cryptocurrency.
The point of the video was to show what a modern third generation cryptocurrency really
would require.
It's a major overhaul and there are already people doing this.
You know, there's the Solanas and the Harmony Ones and the Cardinals, Neosis and all these
other guys and they have billions of dollars and huge dev teams and all these innovative
protocols.
If you're really serious about this thing sticking around, being useful in doing stuff,
then the point of the video was to show the types of things you'd have to think about
and the types of papers that are all open source, patent free and don't have any notion
of intellectual property behind them that his engineers could grab and go and do.
And he did mention on Twitter that he was looking for feedback on how to improve Doge
and so I said, all right, well, I'll just put all these things together.
It was a little tongue-in-cheek because I figured he'd ignore it, but it was also showing
how hard it is to innovate in this entire space.
You know, you don't just go and say, I'm going to go build a battery-powered car or rocket
or enter a new industry.
It's really hard to do that.
You spend years and lots of effort.
You have to do a series of small learning steps.
You have to pick up destroyed rockets on the side of the beach and things like that before
you get to the rocket landing itself.
Well, analogously, it's really hard to build a cryptocurrency.
Satoshi probably spent years thinking carefully and that work was a derivative of 30 years
of work in the digital assets space starting the 1980s, working its way through.
And then Bitcoin only did very limited things relative to what Ethereum can do or Cardano
can do and so forth.
So the minute that you extend that complexity, you're talking about years of R&D, years of
engineering effort that needs to be done.
So what's the point of Doge?
Is it just a meme?
Is it actually contending to be useful?
Or is it competing as a store value against Bitcoin?
Now, if it's competing as a store value against Bitcoin, why the hell does it have the monetary
policy it does?
Also, there's predatory distribution of the underlying asset and over 90-some percent
is consolidated less than 1% of the holders for Dogecoin at a very, very low price point.
So they can sell at almost any price point and make a profit.
So it hits 50 cents there, they're billionaires and it's not like 20,000 people, it's probably
less than 100 wallets that have that distribution.
So there's this existential ticking time bomb that's in Doge that once the guys who are
vested start selling, they can just keep selling and keep selling and ride it all the way down
and make windfall profits regardless of what price they sell down.
And who are they selling against?
The retail investors.
People make $500, spare money a month or something like that.
And it bothers me because I see it in my community.
So I live in Longmont, Colorado, and I was at a restaurant and I was talking to the waitress
and she asked me what business those and I said, I'm in the cryptocurrency space and
she's like, what is that?
And I started explaining all of it and she goes, oh, yeah, I own some Dogecoin.
I said, do you own anything else?
No, no, I just bought some Dogecoin.
Why did you buy Doge?
Oh, I saw Elon tweeting about it and I thought it was a good deal.
So when you see stuff like that where people have no clue what they're doing, they don't
really understand the supply dynamics, the ownership dynamics and these types of things.
And then when the clock stops, they're the ones who get hurt.
And then the regulator comes in, the Elizabeth Warrens of the world and they say, see, this
is an evidence these guys can't regulate themselves, control themselves.
We need to control everything, either let's ban it or let's just announce that the only
three are legitimate and every one of them has to be connected to identity and rah, rah,
rah.
And I'm just very concerned that that's a bad thing to do.
And that's why I've been so vocal about this topic and my hope is that a compromise can
be made where real developers come in and they start working on Doge and they find a
way to create some sort of use and utility for it.
So at least it has a value floor and it won't collapse.
Is it possible for Cardano and Doge going to work together somehow?
Yeah, it'd be a lot of fun.
I'm not adverse to the idea of cleaning up the code base, but legitimately, whoever
comes in, be two years or three years of work because you have to do real stuff and that
code is like Litecoin circa 2012, 2013.
Well, the interesting thing about Elon, I've got to interact with him quite a bit.
That combination of humor and extreme ambition like in the face of impossible odds is something
he does really well.
And so I think that's the spirit of Dogecoin is fun and almost like bold, ambitious innovation.
So I think you can't discount the power of that.
But where's the innovation?
What's the agenda?
Well, this is step one.
What's going to Mars for Dogecoin?
Well, he came in the same way to rockets, he came in the same way to electric cars.
It seemed impossible at first, but you step in and you solve the problems, first principles
one at a time.
But I'll challenge you a little bit on this because I think he had some trends though
that he was very smart to recognize.
In the case of battery-powered cars, he said, hang on, everybody has tablets and cell phones
and these other things.
And there's an incentive to make batteries better, faster, cheaper, and charge faster.
And that's connected to mobile computing.
So regardless if you want battery-powered cars or not, every year you have billions
of dollars of R&D being pushed to force this capacity to evolve and he's just getting on
the train and piggybacking on that.
So that was a brilliant business acumen to recognize that.
In the case of SpaceX, it was just an obvious question.
If every time you get on a plane, you have to throw the plane away and no one would fly.
So reusability is like a fundamental thing that if you solve that, you've now opened
space up to a complete new class of commercialization.
I don't see the problem in Dogecoin because if he was looking for it, then why not look
at a real platform actually trying to solve a real problem?
There's so many of them.
He throw a rock, he can hit 15 of these guys and they'd all die to work with you at Musk.
Yeah, that's very interesting.
I mean, so far I could continue pushing back on your intuition about electric cars and
batteries and so on.
I don't think it's more obvious in retrospect than it is at the time, I would say, because
I would agree with you on the batteries front.
I wouldn't necessarily agree with you with the electric car because first of all, nobody
started a successful car company for decades.
Well, but it was the loyalty.
The EV4 guys or whatever it was with GM, they didn't want to give them back when they had
the lease program.
So there's some basic intuition that there is some hunger here, but it's not obvious
that you can do it successfully and with relaunching rockets for cheap, that sounds good on paper,
but to do it well, NASA is spending way more money for this and the Russians were assholes,
not selling any rockets.
So you have to do it all yourself from scratch.
How do you build the team?
How do you launch rockets when if you fail a few times, you're going to go bankrupt?
I mean, it's just business-wise, I would rather build an app like Angry Birds, just launch
rockets.
You've got to give them credit.
You've got boulders for balls.
That's a good picture.
Yeah, thank you for that.
But maybe that's what, I mean, I think there's not enough first principle thinking on the
cryptocurrency side.
I think I agree with you on that.
But there's some aspect to which the seriousness of the cryptocurrency world is paralyzing.
So in some way, the innovation that you spoke to requires taking risks, requires not taking
everything so seriously, like being afraid to take those bold risks in the space of ideas,
not in the space of financials.
So in that way, I think that's one pro for Bitcoin is there's room, it's hungry for innovation.
But I think Cardano in that same way is hungry for innovation, just like you said, with some
more rigor and formalism behind it, and even Ethereum has a hunger for innovation.
That's where Bitcoin is a little bit more, I would say, conservative in terms of how
much innovating they're willing to do, in terms of the incentives they built into the
systems for the evolution of the cryptocurrency.
But yeah, I mean, it's difficult to psychoanalyze why Dogecoin is the thing that excites Elon
so much.
But at the same time, there's some power to the fun, it sounds ridiculous to say.
But the fun, this idea that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, there could be
something built into the physics of the universe that makes that true.
Because the viral nature of fun has power.
Well, it's a neuroscience thing.
We like dopamine, we like these chemicals in our brain, and when we have fun, we want
more of it.
So you tend to gravitate towards work activities and play activities that are enjoyable to
you.
And it is nice sometimes to kind of come and control an entire industry.
I can imagine he's probably at the time of his life.
It's the same as like taking Tesla private at 420, that kind of stuff.
And it's one thing when you do it with friends, it's another thing when you do it with the
whole industry and it hurts people financially.
And also I understand he hates short sellers and there's some things there.
And I can't speak for him because I only know the guy from a distance.
It's just I live in this space and I have to deal with the consequences and clean up
the messes.
You feel the pain.
Yeah.
And this results in a regulatory event, it's like I'm the guy who has to put on a suit
and go to Washington and go and sit in a Senate in Korea and all this stuff.
And he's the guy that, you know, just like laugh with his friends about how he crashed
the crypto market and how easy it was to do it.
And that's my only umbrage about this.
On the other hand, you know, if it brings a lot of cool new interesting things and people
into the space, that's a net positive.
And so, you know, it's not university bad or universally good.
And I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt.
And so I'm really hopeful to see what comes about this recent surge of interest and if
Elon actually puts his money where his mouth is and takes some of his enormous engineering
talent and, you know, capital and starts contributing and building something in the crypto currency
space.
It'd be really cool to see that happen.
There's a bunch of different technical aspects I want to ask you about on the Cardano side.
So first maybe on the scaling side, what is Hydra?
How does Hydra compare to other different ideas for scalability like rollups, main tradeoffs
with respect to security, UX and anything else you want to talk about?
You have to have a little bit more energy, Lex.
Come on.
You know what I need?
I need that Coke machine that you mentioned, the thing that converts water to cocaine.
Water to be cocaine from director Bullock.
We'll leave this said, right?
Yeah.
Isomorphic state channels, that's a great topic, right?
There's word salad of cryptographic terms.
Other lightning, Hydra, rollups, any of these things.
Really what you're trying to do is say, okay, if I do it on layer one, it's slow and expensive.
What I'm going to do is batch something somehow, some way, and then do it in a different system
where it's fast and cheap.
And what I'm doing with that is I'm losing some of the security guarantees of the base
layer and admitting a slight higher degree of centralization.
But then I get super fast settlement, I get super low-cost transactions, and potentially
I may even be able to get distributed computing, meaning that instead of having the smart contracts
run in a replicated system, they can run on a single node like a stake pool.
And their stuff is different from the other guy's stuff.
So you go from a system of capacity of whatever it is to a system of N for the totality of
all the stake pools.
So basically, Hydra is just the next generation of that when you have the ability to tinker
with the accounting model, and the layer two solution is co-designed with the layer one
solution.
So it's like what lightning would have been had lightning been co-developed when Bitcoin
came out.
There would have been special provisions made in Bitcoin specifically to accommodate lightning,
and it would have made it very easy for you then to move inside the system, outside of
the system, and have security properties preserved, like availability, for example, or fraud resistance,
say, oh, you can't steal the money, or these types of things.
Where things get really complex, and this is why Hydra's novel over lightning is when
you want to move beyond payments to state management.
So payments are just, I want to move between Alice to Bob as quickly as possible, as low
cost as possible.
So for example, I have a micro tipping application, like Change Tip on Twitter, or like a video,
I'm watching YouTube video, like maybe this video in the future, and people really like
it, and they click tip, and you get five cents, or something like that.
Okay, so that's an example of a perfect payment application, and that's great, but what happens
when you actually have a rich smart contract, like a DEX, or you want to do a video game
or something like that, you want to run that off chain, but then there's some reconciliation
on chain that happens.
So a state channel basically lets you do that, but it's a lot more complicated, and there's
a lot more to think about, so Hydra basically just has, and it's designed, a collection
of ideas of how to do that, and the current paper is for a single head.
The next thing you do is composition.
So you go multiple heads, and there's a routing protocol between them, and then eventually
create these tail protocols for when things get asynchronous.
So instead of always being aligned and always being available, what happens if they die
for a bit, and then they come back, and you can create all kinds of guarantees that your
funds won't be lost or locked forever, or things like that.
There's a failure recovery mode for this type of stuff, and basically the idea is leverage
what Lightning has already achieved with Bitcoin, but then take advantage of the fact that you
have a more expressive accounting model and a more expressive programming model, so you
can just physically do more, and you can put more crypto inside that thing.
Now contrast it with rollups, really that is the thing, you're going to take some thing,
batch a bunch of transactions together, and you're going to generate a proof, and then
what you can do is whenever you see some part of that history, you can check it against
that proof that's rolled up, and they're closely related concept of recursive snarks
that you'll see a lot.
There's things like the MENA protocol or other things, and basically the idea is that whenever
you see something, you can always generate two proofs, an existential proofs that the
coins exist and a non-existence of a double spend.
So you can always check those two properties, and the proof is verifiable and logarithmic
time, ideally.
So you can have giant amounts of data, but it's very small, the actual proof is concise.
So they're just different boats for different floats.
The advantage of a layer two network where there's actual channels and there's interaction
and there's service providers is the channels can eventually scale in the collection of
things that they can do, and eventually they can become interoperability networks between
cryptocurrencies.
So at some point we could modify the Boltzbeck and make it somewhat interoperable with Hydra,
and then what you could happen is you could use it as a bridge to actually do cross-chain
traffic and send transactions between the systems.
You don't really think about that too much when you're talking about roll-ups.
That's more of optimizing what you have within the system.
Within the chain.
So can you elaborate how it's possible to do cross-chain traffic?
Well, you already have the intermediary, you have the channel operator, and you already
have Lightning protocol, right?
And you just build a DEX that runs within that system, and they can swap assets, or
you can do wrapped assets.
So it would be like low cost, I guess you could just switch low.
Yeah, the same thing, let you batch things on one, we'll let you batch the other.
So if Lightning works on Bitcoin and Hydra works on Cardano, you can eventually bridge
these two together and create a way of moving back and forth.
And the same things that make transactions in and out of that network cheap will make
creating wrapped assets cheap, at least on the Bitcoin to Cardano side.
You can't create assets on Bitcoin, another flaw of Bitcoin that they've never fixed.
What's your thought about layer two technologies in general?
Is there stuff you're excited about?
We talked quite a bit about Lightning Network, Hydra.
These ideas, do you think there'll be somebody that wins out, or is this going to be this
kind of dynamic thing that we just keep building different ideas, and they all interact with
each other?
It goes back to biology, that cell differentiation concept, you have to build specialized tissue
to do things.
The point of layer two is to extend the network.
It's adding a foot, it's adding an arm, it's adding a brain, it's adding a heart, it's
adding eyes, giving you additional senses, you have ears now.
So when you add these layer two products, like a Tala Prism is a perfect example of
that.
We don't have identity at the base layer of Cardano.
It's a real bad deal to do that, because China will come in or US will come in and tell
you how to do that.
What you do is you build a layer two protocol that's blockchain agnostic, and then the user
can decide when and where they need an identity, and then bring that identity into the system.
And if you designed it right, when they bring it in, it's very easy, very fluid, and suddenly
the experience enhances.
Everything just gets better.
Oh, wow, okay, now I can use all these regulated things.
They go from gray to green in the app store.
That's so cool.
Or, oh, wow, now I can send it to human readable addresses, because if I have an identity and
you have an identity, we can alias them with some namespace, and now I send the Lex instead
of some horrible back 32 address structure.
Okay, so that's really what you need to do with layer two is say, okay, each layer two
protocol is meant to do something.
Each layer gives me payments or lower cost mark contracts or interoperability or identity,
and then it's a marketplace.
So you should have blockchain agnosticism with your layer two solutions.
And so you can mix and match and choose whichever collection of services you need.
And that's actually how IT works these days with microservices and these other things
and cloud software.
Every firm is an aggregation of dozens of providers, and basically that composition
of them is your software stack.
Moving around back to proof of work, what are non-interactive proofs of proof of work?
N-I-P-O-P-O-W-S.
Nip-a-Pow.
Nip-a-Pow.
Nip-a-Pow.
Nip-a-Pow.
It's fun to say, right?
Nip-a-Pow.
It's just one of those things that you notice that certain proofs of work, when you solve
them, come up less frequently than other ones.
And just by that nature, you can sample them and then construct proofs from them.
So you can, with that just set, have a more concise representation of an amount of work
for a range of the chain.
So that works-
I can say that again.
Yeah, I was going to say that works salad, basically the idea is, okay, so let's say
that this block, and I'm just simplifying the concept a lot, this block, you get a regular
green type of proof of work and then this block, you get a green and you keep going
and then suddenly you get a red one.
So it's still a valid proof of work, but it's more rare than the other ones.
So if you notice that particular pattern, what you can do is you can just start not
carrying so much about the green ones and you can just bookend your chain with red, okay?
And then you can just repeat that and repeat that, repeat that, and you can create this
really compressed representation of these things.
So what does it mean?
It means that suddenly when you have that, now you have a way of representing a long
range of history with a very small proof.
So you can use it for light wallets and you also can use it for sidechains, if both sidechains
use proof of work.
So when you see a transaction come in, you don't have a copy of the sidechain, but you
have a copy of the proof of work and it has the same algorithmic weight as the normal
longest chain because you don't have all the greens, but the reds only occur with a certain
sampling frequency.
So this is the brainchild of Dionysus Zindros and Agalos and it's just an amazing paper
and what's so cool about it is it doesn't require any structural changes to proof of
work.
It's just something you notice as an off-gas of proof of work.
It's like you're watching an engine operate and you notice like every 500 times a piston
will do a certain weird thing and so you take advantage of that.
You say, well, if I count 10 of them, now I have 5,000 pistons strikes because I observed
that pattern.
So it's the same concept there and it's just a property of the engine.
So you don't really need to hard fork it in, it's just there and because you can build
proofs that way, now you can use those proofs to do light clients and you can use those
proofs to do other things because you just use that as something that comes with the
history, you don't have to have the whole blockchain.
Now, is this a weird property of multiple proof of work chains?
It has to be key to the particular consensus algorithm but usually there's some portability
in this type of thing.
Like we're right now exploring can you do NEPA piles with Prism or any of these sharded
proof of work protocols but it looks like you can.
The closely related is log space mining.
So you can use this concept and instead of having the entire blockchain to be able to
mine, you can use a compressed representation of it.
We wrote a paper called log space mining that basically explains how to do that.
So your miner only has this very small micro ledger as opposed to the entire ledger.
How does it connect back to the entire ledger?
How does the compressed?
Because you have those red blocks, you have those special things and so you know that
the state you're working on is actually legitimate, right?
So the map goes both ways?
Yeah, pretty cool.
Wow, that's really interesting.
Yeah.
This is a genius, he's a really, really smart kid and he got his PhD under us.
He went to the University of Athens and he was an Acolysis graduate student and now he's
doing a postdoc at Stanford under David Shee and this is literally the only thing he does.
Does interoperability, sidechain stuff, NEPA piles and so forth and he's written a lot of
great papers on it and that was a testimony to hard work for getting the paper published
because the paper came out in 2016 but I think it took three or four years for it to go through
a peer review.
He kept trying to push it for one conference after a rejection, after another rejection
but he got it through, real proud of that kid and then he's just doing all this beautiful
derivative work now like log space mining and so forth.
So Reddit and he suddenly says, starts with Reddit, you know, it's going to be fun.
The top question on the Cardano subreddit, which is quite a wonderful place by the way,
was can you get Charles to play devil's advocate against Cardano?
If it's going to fail, what would failure look like and what are the most likely reasons
it would fail?
Okay.
Well, there's the failure.
For example, I said one of the project goals was to achieve self evolution.
So if it doesn't achieve that work and involve itself iteration by iteration, then obviously
the product didn't do what was intended.
If it continuously required the supervision of custodians in order for it to succeed,
the system just won't work.
The good news is we have a lot of data showing the opposite, you know, we used to run a federated
model and now we're completely decentralized for block production, but that didn't just
happen overnight.
I mean, there was a whole process with the incentivized test net and the stateful pioneers
program and the launch of Shelly and the decrementing of the decentralization parameter and every
step of the way people showed up and had to do things and we went from several to thousands
of people who are regularly maintaining the infrastructure.
But there's no guarantee that that would be sustainable.
And there's no guarantee that the next step, the smart contract step will achieve what
we want and the next step, the governance step will achieve what we want.
I mean, it's an experiment and all these types of things, all cryptocurrencies, all companies
are in a sense experiments when they are evolving the business model.
And as our case, our business's systems and society, we're offering to the world a vision
of how to run humanity in a different way.
And the only way the system can do that is by millions of people joining the system,
self-evolving the system and growing it in that particular direction.
Another failure scenario would be the system evolves in the wrong direction.
So it's self-evolving, but it goes into a more centralized dystopian way and that's
problematic as well.
What would that look like?
What would dystopia, self-evolution dystopia look like?
A small group of actors have total control over who gets to use the system and how they
get to use the system.
And your use of the system is monitored and shared with that small group of actors.
So social credit in China is a great example of that.
Small group of people have access to that and then your experience in Chinese society
is determined by it.
So that's an example of a failure mode.
And then another could be just network effect, we start experiencing a churn rate and inputs
don't match the outputs in that you lose more than you gain and then over time the system
dies off.
However, that's really hard in practice.
Once you reach a certain network effect, even if you become stagnant and stale, you tend
not to lose your users.
And our evangelism is unbelievable in the Cardano community.
I think we're number one for tattoos.
If you think about that, it's a strange metric to have, but there are brands that associate
that way, like Apple and Harley-Davidson and so forth.
People tend to actually tattoo the logo.
Those people don't leave.
They don't actually walk away from the ecosystem.
They're fanboys to the core.
So there's a lot of people that are here for life.
They don't care if it's dollar-ata, two-cent-ata.
They believe in the mission, vision, and value of what we wish to achieve and they've become
evangelists in that respect.
So the question is, does that community sustain itself and also does that community not make
the same sense and mistake of Bitcoin, where they become toxic and maximalistic and they
start becoming highly religious about whatever beliefs they have?
My hope is our community will be open and socratic and love the scientific method and
be willing to entertain ideas without adopting them and discard ideas that are proven to
be wrong, if we become dogmatic and embrace an orthodoxy that is counterproductive innovation,
then it'll stall out the ecosystem.
And notice I never said price in any of this.
I never said, hey, failure is if the price goes way down and success is if the price
goes way up.
That's unfortunately the metric that most people use, but I couldn't care less about
it because if the reality is if you construct a system that encompasses the entire globe
and has billions of users, it's probably going to be a pretty valuable system.
That's a secondary thing.
It's an after effect of having success and adoption, use, and utility.
Unfortunately, most people on Reddit and Twitter and other channels, they tend to just judge
your entire success based on that.
I had very few people when Shelley launched, even though it took us four years to get there,
a lot of work, say congratulations on Shelley, but I had a lot of people when I reached the
dollar say, we're so proud of you, amazing work, congratulations, and so forth.
And that's probably the most disheartening thing about the whole being around and doing
this stuff where all the things you do only matter as long as it's making someone else
rich.
And in a way, I feel almost like a failure because that mindset means that we haven't
yet inculcated the community in a proper way saying, hey, guys, this is about more than
money.
The value of ADA, what we're attempting to do here is re-engineer the way society works.
I'd like your voting to be different.
I'd like your property to be different.
I'd like you on your cell phone to have a universal wallet.
And when you go to Starbucks or wherever, you can buy your coffee with silver or gold
or airline miles or something like that, and they get paid whenever the hell they want
to get paid.
And I want those rails to be done with a system that puts you in charge, not someone else.
And they say, yeah, that's all fine and great, as long as ADA is $5, we're all happy.
You see?
So that's a problem.
There are, of course, other things that could fail.
We could lose project cohesion.
Lots of people could quit and die.
But again, there's so much momentum.
There's so many things here.
The ideas are already out there, and there's no intellectual property.
When you publish 100 papers, you write a million lines of code.
That's something, and it's permanent, and it's in the commons now.
So it's just as much yours as it is mine.
So there's no notion that somehow, if the core development company disappeared, then
that concept is lost forever, like the library of Alexandria burning to the ground.
It's there, and someone else will take it, fork it, and get it done.
I mean, first of all, that's fascinating.
The self-evolution, you don't know which trajectories that's going to take, but also
there could be singular events, like bugs in the system create an opportunity to hack
the system.
Is that something that you see as a potential failure case?
Yeah, it's always a possibility.
Bugs can exist.
There can be flaws in the protocol design.
Zcash was a great example of that, where there was a subtle flaw, and it damaged the fidelity
of the cryptocurrency in ways no other cryptocurrency has ever experienced.
Normally when you have a bug, the bug, you can see it like the Bitcoin overflow, the
value overflow incident.
Yes, Bitcoin can be created, but we can verify they weren't.
So the monetary policy is preserved.
When you have a bug with a private system like Zcash, and it exists on the shielded
side, there's no guarantee unless you can audit the total supply inside that shielded
side.
My understanding is you can't that somebody didn't exploit the bug and create trillions
of these coins out of thin air and just hiding them on that system and dripping them out.
So the monetary policy is forever damaged as a consequence of a bug like that.
It's probably the worst type of bug you can have for these types of products.
No matter how good of a job you do, they have great scientists.
There are great people there, great engineers there.
You can always have something like that, seep its way in, leak its way in, and that lurks
in the distance.
But if that's a problem shared with every one of your neighbors, it's like everybody
working on a nuclear power plant, well, yeah, you can all die of radiation poisoning.
Well, we all knew that, didn't we?
So it's like I don't really think too much about it.
I think the context of the question was more, what is Cardano specific over Ethereum or
Bitcoin or any of these other things and yeah, okay, existential lurking bug could happen.
It's lower probability for us than the other systems because we use formal methods and
we use peer review inside the protocol design.
So there's been more eyeballs and tools and techniques used to check things and we actually
have discovered a lot of weird wonky bugs before production and resolve those bugs.
So it shows you the system works, it's a lot of fun.
What about close kind of competitors, I don't know if you would put it that way, but if
you look in the space of ideas, competitor cryptocurrencies like Polkadot, what are some
interesting differences between Cardano and Polkadot, technically, philosophically, historically,
is that something you think about when you think about the future of Cardano?
Yeah, we do.
We actually have a whole group of people that do business intelligence and comparative analysis
and we're getting to a point where we want to start eventually forking their code and
running private versions of it and just playing around with things, getting better.
But Consensus actually does this, they actually did it with Eos and they wrote this lovely
report like Trashing Eos saying, hey, by the way, all those claims these guys made are just
not true.
But it's nice to do that, it's nice to use your competitor's technology or competing
protocol technology because you learn a lot along the process, it's not all bad.
There's always something there because they have different tradeoffs and customers that
potentially are more interesting.
Right now we're grocking, how do we want to do the side chain model of Cardano?
That's actually a tremendously useful piece of infrastructure for that conversation because
they copied part of our infrastructure.
Gavin's a trained computer scientist, he got his PhD from York and he read our papers obviously
and he realized that Ouroboros was a really good starting place for building a proof of
stake system.
So Polkadot's Consensus is very similar to ours.
And so if you're saying, hey, how do you do a good side chain model with an Ouroboros
style proof of stake?
Well, we already have this parachain thing, right?
So now by just looking at that, I can kind of get an idea of how, one way of doing it.
And so that's just beautiful that we live in a space where that's there, it's open source
and it's really good.
You just say, okay, well, we'll just take that and adopt that.
There's no shame, you know?
The other side of it is that Polkadot really has focused a lot on commercial adoption,
Silicon Valley adoption, getting real use in utility.
I say in a much more sustainable way than Ethereum is focused on.
Ethereum was kind of a spray and pray thing.
Polkadot was more of like, hey, let's go ahead and actually curate our ecosystem more carefully.
And we're going to build it in a way where there's predictable or as predictable a cost
as possible with the rollout of the infrastructure.
And that's so important for a business.
It's not necessarily important for an experiment or a startup where they're just trying to
get populations as quickly as possible, we'll figure out later.
But if you're actually sitting here saying, I need to know what my expenses are three
years, five years, 10 years into the future, you need predictability there.
I think they have a better shot of it than anything in F2 or with currently Ethereum.
The big contrast between the two systems, those, we actually have native multi-asset.
We have a different accounting model.
I think our base ledger is far more expressive.
Our rate of evolution with proof of stake is much faster than ours because they're based
on derivative work and we already have Oris Omega and other things there.
I think we have a better, ultimately, a better side chain model will come because we have
something called myth roll for that, but we learned a lot from their work.
The other thing is that we thought about governance a lot more carefully in my view.
And we have Catalyst and Voltaire and really the key there is saying, how do we make sure
that every single person who holds data can participate in the network?
That wasn't a high design priority of Polkadot.
It was more a fast commercial adoption, the acquisition of customers will come to governance
later and those were just different business philosophies, but it's nice to have a competitor
like that.
And oftentimes I've said that Polkadot is like Ethereum 1.5.
It's what F2 probably should have been.
There was what Vitalik wanted to do, which was incredibly aggressive and brilliant, but
it's a lot and there's so much execution risk in that plan.
And I think they've had like six years of playing around with it.
Had they gone down the Polkadot road, they probably would have been a market within 2018.
And because they already had the network effect, they would have had years of building on that,
iterating that.
And they already had a path to it too.
All they had to do was just give Elaine Shee and her cohorts at Cornell, you know, a $5-10
million grant.
Snow White would have been the dominant protocol, not Orboros in the proof-of-stake space.
So it's really fascinating historically when you look at these things and the rivalries
and what they did and what they didn't do, and Gavin had a chance to have C++ Ethereum
be used as IBM's enterprise blockchain.
The only reason they didn't do it is it was licensed GPL and I think they wanted to re-license
Apache.
If you ever talked to Bob Summerwall, he was there at the time and he had this amazing
story about like these terrible fights where it's like, guys, just re-license the goddamn
code.
Let's figure out a way to make this happen so that we can get this huge network effect
of being basically IBM's play.
They didn't do it.
They created fabric, these types of things.
So there's a lot of lore and stories, not respect, but the space is better because
of Polkadot and there's a lot of good people there.
Web3 is a good concept and we run into their people in Germany and Zurich a lot and they've
always been cordial and friendly and really affable.
Before I talked to you about governance, which is one of the most fascinating things about
Cardano is there's a lot of stuff to untangle there.
Since you mentioned some humans in this wonderful story, you did make a video before we talked
directed to me.
Thank you so much for that.
It came from a place of love.
But it was basically saying as we have been, you would love to talk about the technology
about the future that you're creating with Cardano and just the future of the cryptocurrency
space.
I think you're kind of worried that you'll be talking to a journalist that's looking
for clickbait content, that kind of thing.
But I'm fascinated by human beings.
I think you're all from an outsider perspective, incredible human beings.
I don't know about personal tensions, all those kinds of stuff, but I think you're changing
the world together in different ways.
And I just wanted to sort of give you an opportunity if there's in the name of love and friendship,
is there something from your history over the past decade or so outside of technology
and the human side of things that you draw inspiration from, you draw insight from, you're
just proud that happened.
I mean, it's like asking Paul McCartney about John Lennon.
Tell us about John Lennon.
How much do you hate Yoko?
We're almost eight years now.
It's just been this reoccurring pattern every interview.
Tell us about your time at Ethereum, those six months you spent there that were so pleasant
and enjoyable.
Tell us all about it and tell us about your relationship with Vitalik.
It's like, I barely talked to the guy, I see him every now and then.
Like every two years, we say, hey, he says, hey, it's like, okay, maybe 10, 20 years in
the future, Walt Mossberg or Robo-Walt will bring us together like he did Steve Jobs and
Bill Gates and we can talk about- That was a tense conversation, by the way.
The 2007 interview?
Yeah, the 2007.
That was great though, wasn't it?
Yeah, that was the body language.
That was art.
Yeah.
That was fascinating.
That was a fascinating study of human nature.
Yeah, so maybe that'll be us in like 10 or 20 years.
Who the hell knows?
The robot versions of all three of you.
Yeah, my only point though was that it's a closed chapter and it's funny.
I was there for six months.
I've been building Cardano for years.
We've done all this stuff.
I've been to 52 countries.
I love talking about those experiences and there's so many of them.
I've met heads of state.
I went to Mongolia like eagle hunting and getting bucked off horses and riding the sand dunes.
We've invented all this new cool technology that the space itself is using and we've had
a chance to sit on government panels, pass laws, 24 laws in Wyoming.
There's all this amazing stuff that's there and it's such a fun conversation.
There's so many superheroes in that conversation like Kailin Long and Taylor Limholm and there's
Alex Cherpinoy who we already mentioned that I met along the travels.
I met Ralph Merkle.
I met all these amazing people along the way.
I have fond memories of, by the way, you should interview him by the way, amazing guy does
nanotech now.
I met, I was hanging out with Sylvia McCauley and I remember before we launched Al Grant
I said, you should really just do a Bitcoin cash style play and airdrop Bitcoin.
What the hell are you doing distributing this?
He's like, trust me, I know what I'm doing.
It's like so many great conversations and so many great people and what I've really
noticed in this industry when you separate the tribalism, the maximum side, there really
is a love of creativity and building and there's like no other industry like it.
I've been in many different places in life and here people just love art.
They love beauty.
They love the unknown, they love pushing things, they love really, in some cases, not necessarily
the most socially beneficial way, but they really love the challenge.
That has been fun.
I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
The dark side of the industry is that people love labels.
They love saying this person's good, this person's evil, this person's a sociopath,
this person's not.
And by the way, they've never met that person, they've never interacted with that person
and they just say, well, I heard from this person, I read this book or I did that.
I was like, oh, so some books written by a journalist makes $50,000 a year who's looking
for a movie deal, say that somebody said this or did this in an unconfirmed way.
So what can you assume for slander?
So you just let it ride and you let it roll.
And if it was just ending there, that'd be great, but the problem is it cascades and
people just repost it and they relive it again and again and again.
And then what do you do about it?
You eventually just say, I'm not going to talk about it anymore.
I'm done with it.
And you move on and you say, you know what, if it's your problem, it's your problem,
it's your reality that you want to live in, I'll be defined by the things that I achieve
and do and the people that we help and the things that we build.
And since I started this industry, I've gotten to a point where not only do we have this
amazing company with these incredible people who work at this company, but we also have
the ability to pursue amazing different interests.
Like I met Ben Gortzel and Ben and I are going to do an AGI project together and of all places
for Wanda.
And he gave me this 85 fucking page paper.
He was wearing that damn hat that he always wears.
I think he showers with the hat on.
He never takes that thing off.
I think he refused, I interviewed him and he refused to tell me the story of the hat.
He wouldn't tell me either.
I interviewed him as well in Wyoming.
And every time I call him, he'll have his shirt off, he'll have the fucking hat on.
And now all I can think about is the hat.
I wonder what the story there is.
I know.
It's like, it's got to be...
That might be the AGI.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway, he gives me this 80 page paper and he says, Charles, it's like the culmination
of everything.
I want to...
This is how we're going to do AGI.
And I said, that's crazy, Ben.
I said, I'll throw some money at it.
So we're going to hire some developers and I have no idea where it's going to go.
But I mean, I get to hang out with Ben Gortzel.
That's fun.
That's the kind of stuff.
It's a really cool side of the space and it's what I enjoy.
In the Vitalik rival thing, the Ethereum thing, I try my best not to mention it.
I hate the fact that still when Bloomberg or anybody else writes a story about me, they'll
say, Ethereum co-founder, can you say something else?
Well, I think if I've learned anything from the internet, you can't resist that kind of
stuff.
You just have to...
This is Elon.
It's the joke.
Joke it away.
I've noticed this.
This is already starting to happen with me.
It's like, people just make up stuff.
They haven't made up anything interesting yet, but they could.
And I've seen that with Bill Gates, for example, just stuff being made up.
I mean, probably half of it is true.
Sorry, internet.
I'm sorry.
But I guess what I realized, this is the dark side of memes, is you can just make something
up and it'll spread and then that's it.
That's what happens.
And the problem is half the world will believe it.
It could be good stuff or it could be bad stuff.
So I guess the hope is it balances out in the end.
I tend to believe you almost want to play with that and not take it seriously.
Just kind of laugh it off and enjoy life and keep creating, keep doing awesome stuff.
Operating both in the physical space with other humans and in the digital space with
humans and AI systems and just have fun.
Because most of us in the long arc of history will be completely forgotten.
None of it will matter.
It will all be some kind of just like H Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy will just be one sentence
that summarizes all of our existence.
And the sad thing is most of us will not be part of that sentence or all of us.
Well, thanks for all the fish, Lex.
Thanks for all the fish.
The dolphins are running this thing and they're talking to the UFOs recently, which is very
interesting because the UFOs keep going to the water.
So we humans assume that the UFOs are here to visit, the aliens are here to visit us,
but it's probably the fish.
No, I just think it's next generation aircraft that we're using.
Oh, that we're just not aware of.
Yeah.
But why are they talking to the fish?
Well, that's the place you test hypersonic aircraft is over oceans.
So that's the Russians with their hypersonic nuclear weapons.
That's what we're watching.
Rods from God, man.
Rods from God.
So let me try to transition from UFOs to Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln said that nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.
Do you think power and money can corrupt most people?
And if so, do you worry of this corrupting force on your own mind?
You're one of the leading minds in the cryptocurrency space.
You're the leader of the Cardano project.
You're the king of the rats.
Of the rats.
This corrupts your mind, both the power and the money of it.
Yeah.
I mean, you see this most pervasively with people who inherit a large amount of money
or title like, you know, dynasties like the melons or the Rockefellers or other people.
It's the worst thing you can do to somebody is just hand them an enormous amount of power
that they're not prepared for.
And the challenge with this space is like everybody's young and we're all billionaires
now and we have these cult followings and do all these things, right?
Nobody really says no to you.
For example, I have this ranch up in Wyoming and it has 400 bison on it.
So now I'm a bison rancher, like if somebody was like, you know, monitoring, auditing,
that'd be like, Charles, do you have any experience racing, taking care of bison?
I'd be like, no.
So you think it's really a good idea to have this ranch with 400 bison running around.
What the hell are you going to do with bison?
I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with these bison.
So, you know, we'll make a video game, we'll do crypto bison.
But you're going to get one.
I'm not pulling it.
Thank you.
I'd love to.
I'm not pulling it that string just yet.
So I'm wondering how you're going to connect this back to power.
Right.
And so, but my point is that when you are unrestrained, like literally no one can say no or you have
the ability to distort reality around yourself and you're not constrained by social customs,
it creates a situation where you start losing perspective.
You're not grounded anymore, I think.
So it's less of a question of will you become evil or not?
It's more of a question of will you lose so much touch with humanity that you just can't
relate or understand people and then you inadvertently, by your actions, start harming people, either
through the policies that you pursue or, you know, the things that you start building and
so forth.
So I think the best inoculation against that is to surround yourself with activities that
are utterly divorced from your reputation and status.
The best thing are animals and gardening because, you know, a donkey doesn't care if you're
a billionaire or broke, he'll shit on you exactly the same way.
And so there's a humility behind these types of activities and these things and there's
a honest work component, like when you grow hay or whatever, you have to plant, you have
to actually water, you have to irrigate, you have to actually be there and you can't use
some excuse.
While I was meeting the president of El Salvador, I was doing this, I was like, hey, it doesn't
give a shit.
It's heady, right?
So it grounds it connects you.
The other thing is you have to get used to giving away.
All the best things in my life have come as a consequence of first giving.
Like I got started in the cryptocurrency space by giving away a free class, Bitcoin or how
we learn to stop wearing your love crypto.
You did a free podcast, right?
In life, if you give and you develop that mindset of I'm not attached to the things
I have and if push comes to shove, it goes away, usually you get more back.
Like I gave away all my ether, I never received any of it, 293,000 ether.
But the all-time high over $1.2 billion.
I give it to my secretary.
I had no idea if it was going to be worth anything or not, but he kind of got shafted
and I was like, well, they don't like me, so they don't like you by the transitive property
of relationships.
So you're screwed.
And he's like, well, I'm going to go back and my wife is probably going to divorce me
and all this stuff.
And what do I do?
I said, well, I'll give you my ether.
I don't know if it's going to be worth anything.
So he's still pretty good.
But then again, regardless of doing that, I now have Cardano, I have this great career.
I've done all these amazing things.
So I think there's a single best way of handling power is you have to do things to keep yourself
grounded.
In the case of Washington, he was deeply connected to Mount Vernon during the Revolutionary
War.
He was like sending letters talking about the irrigation ditches and the barn and things
like that.
He was always connected to that.
And then also develop a mindset that you're only here temporarily.
Everything you have is finite.
It's going to go away at some point.
No matter how much you want to keep it, you will die and somebody else will have it.
So you live for the next generation.
You don't live for yourself.
You look to the future and you say, what am I going to leave behind?
What am I going to transmit?
And then in that kind of mindset always forces you to be more gracious, cooperative and collaborative
with people.
All these dictators, they are egomaniacs and they get connected to these fantasies and
they live for themselves.
Look at Xi and China.
He's unraveling a power structure that was what made China-China today.
After Mao, they said, we probably shouldn't have another one of those guys.
And so they said, let's build something where there's checks and balances and no one person
is going to run the whole show or else it'll descend and regress and we'll have problems.
And then what he's done, he's thinking only about himself, not the best interest of China.
So he's systematically unraveling a system they've been embracing for over 40 years.
And to what end?
After he dies, the next guy who comes in, even as Xi is super competent, the next guy is
going to horrifically abuse that power structure.
And the same thing happened with the Romans.
After Augustus, the great emperor, then suddenly down the line you have Caligula and Nero and
all these other terrible emperors that just destroyed everything that the republic and
the empire sought to achieve.
So you have to think for the future.
You have to think in institutions and systems.
You have to have things that crown yourself and you have to be fully prepared to lose
everything and give up everything.
After I left Ethereum, I had nothing, okay?
Reputation was damaged, not a lot of money, nobody really want to work with me, no one
pick up a phone for two whole years.
It was horrible.
And so I was at bedrock in that experience and now look where I'm at.
I built all the way up to that and so that wasn't by accident.
It was, I had to surround myself with amazing people.
Why would amazing people want to surround themselves with me?
If I was this narcissistic asshole who just looks like it's me, me, me, everything would
be a transactional relationship.
It would be, okay, we'll get as much as we can and then run away as quickly as possible.
Instead, it was, I'm going to invest in you and maybe I'll win.
Maybe I won't win, but I'll be the last guy to leave the boat.
If we're freezing to death, you get my coat and I'll just deal with the cold, that kind
of mindset.
You have to have that.
I got that from my dad.
He got it from his father, my grandfather and great-grandfather, my dad, so I grew up
in Montana and they were like products of the Homestead Act, very rough Montana.
A lot of people died and froze to death up there eating by animals or something and were
shot by their neighbors and nobody investigates anything because it's Montana.
So the only way you survive is by taking care of each other and being a good member of that
community.
And if somebody gets big, you have this implicit desire to go and give back and take care of
the community that you came from and invest in that community.
Like I came from the mathematical community.
I never completed a PhD, but one of the things that I'm doing is I'm going to put $20 million
in set up a center to do automated theorem proving and we're going to heavily invest
in LEAN because I'm super excited about mechanizing math and making machine understandable.
I know all these guys who do this work, there's like all these mathematicians and computer
scientists and no one pays attention to them and they're kind of like the red-headed step
children of mathematics and they live on the boundaries and periphery.
Meanwhile, they're super passionate and they absolutely love what they do.
And if only they had the right resources within 50 or 100 years, what they're doing can probably
come the dominant model of how to do mathematics.
So I'm now in a position where I have the financial means to take care of these guys.
So all I have to do is just call them up and say, Hey, would you like to work with?
Oh, absolutely.
And cut a check and it's done.
So the interesting tension here, so we talked about ways to prevent power from corrupting
a human being that's in a leadership position.
There's an interesting case in the cryptocurrency space of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto that
basically doesn't have a leader.
So the benefit of a leader is somebody that perhaps even when they don't carry power maintains
a little bit of a flame of vision, I suppose Bitcoin has that with the original work by
Satoshi Nakamoto and the sort of that even though it's anonymous, the idea still lives
on through the community, but nevertheless, the leader is anonymous.
Do you think this is an interesting case study about leadership is for the leader to maintain
anonymity?
It was a saying from Sun Tzu paraphrasing it, the best leaders are felt, but never seen.
So I think that's exactly right.
The less the leader can be in the room and the more the principles of the leader are
in the room, the better for the firm because what you're doing is creating more leaders
that way.
You're inspiring the next generation, the next wave, the next circle out to act with
those principles, but contribute in their own way and their own flair.
And so you gain collective intelligence inside the organization instead of just constraining
yourself to however the great the leader can be.
The other side of it is if the leader's principles are too strong, so this is the dark side of
it.
You end up with what happened in Disney with Walt Disney after he died for 20 years, people
said, well, we don't do that because Walt Disney wouldn't do it that way.
Or to a lesser extent, Apple is the only don't do that because Steve Jobs wouldn't do it
that way.
Well, he's dead.
He's gone.
Move on.
So somebody, I think, asked you whether you're a clone or a deep fake and you said that
you admitted, you slipped up on video saying that you're a deep fake.
So on that...
I'm actually a poker playing robot that escaped a lab.
The truth finally comes out.
But I said on that topic, who do you think is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Is it possible that you are, in fact, Satoshi Nakamoto?
No.
If you have a preponderance of the evidence, I think the most likely candidate would be
Adam Back.
He's the Occam's razor candidate and mostly because he's the right place, right time,
right age, right skill set.
If you look at the design of Bitcoin, the types of decisions like the use of forth,
the scripting language, that was pretty common in English and European pedagogy in the 1980s
and 1990s.
It's like an example language for a stack-based assembly and little stuff like that, little
quirks like that.
Also, he created HashCash, which was the predecessor of Proof of Work.
He just kind of got a chip on his shoulder that Microsoft never did anything with it.
So he's probably looking for something.
He grew up with all the cipherpunks.
He knew of Hal Finney.
He knew of all these people.
He knew Phil Zimmerman.
You don't think it's Hal Finney.
Well, no, because the code was not good enough.
Hal was a UNIX, Linux guy.
He was a talented programmer.
He was a talented developer.
The initial code for Bitcoin was developed to look like on a Windows machine.
Adam worked at Microsoft, go figure.
And also, it was very academic and it had to be cleaned up and a lot of things had to
be patched up and fixed.
If Hal developed it, it probably had less of the, let's use SecP246K1 and these types
of things and more of like, hey, let's build this cool engineering thing and we'll figure
out the protocol design later on.
It just stinks of an older academic, the initial design of Bitcoin and the initial rollout
of Bitcoin.
And then brilliant people like Greg Maxwell and others, they came and cleaned it all up.
And lo and behold, where is Adam?
He's like the CEO of the largest Bitcoin development company in the space who's trying to keep
working on and building up Bitcoin.
And where the hell was Adam when Satoshi was around?
I don't think there was any overlap where they were both together at the same period
of time.
But I mean, if you really care, you can even do this.
There's a lovely paper written by the US Army.
If you just Google like code, stalometry, US Army, it's a technique where you can use
ML and a few other things to actually kind of develop a fingerprint for the way that
people write code.
So all you got to do is take the original Bitcoin source code and then take all the open source
repos from around that time period and before and see if there's a match between those two.
Now, if he's really good at creating an alias, probably not so good at obfuscating the code
that was written.
So the odds are that you'd probably find a match to a repo that's connected to a real
life human identity or at least a weaker opsec because you're younger, you have weaker
opsec.
Do you know if people have tried that?
I don't think anybody's actually done it.
But there's actually a beautiful paper that's like 94% accurate at the code stalometry.
So for various reasons, I've worked with people that work on stalometry of natural language.
And I think it matches closest to Nick Sabo if you actually do the written stalometry
analysis of Satoshi's writings to...
So I meant stalometry as a field.
I didn't actually look for application for this particular problem.
So you're saying Nick Sabo is the closest match.
Yeah.
Somebody did it years ago.
I didn't look at if the model was a sound or not, but I just remember reading on a Bitcoin
talk and Sabo is another one of the common candidates.
How many Sabo and Adam are probably the top three things that people could listen to?
What do you think about this idea of anonymity, of publishing something anonymously?
Would you ever consider publishing a paper?
You've been part of, I mean, the Cardano ecosystem has published a lot of incredible papers.
Is there ever a value to publish anonymously?
Well, every paper that goes through the referee process, the authors are ripped off.
So you don't actually see the authorship when you submit to the conference.
So that's just best practice.
But the question is, do you preserve the anonymity post-conference and actually not refuel the
author of the paper?
It's a detriment for the deals we make because the whole premise of working with our company
as an academic is that you're going to have amazing coauthors and your work is going to
appear in great conferences, great journals, and as a consequence, you get tenure.
If you publish anonymously, it's like doing clearance work in high-energy physics or
something like that.
After 30 years of this amazing career working on nuclear weapons and classified reactors,
you finish and then you go to apply for a job and they're like, so what have you done
for the last 30 years?
Stuff.
Where is it on your CV?
Well, I can't really talk about it.
Okay, welcome to community college.
So you get really screwed if you do that.
So there's a misalignment of incentives in the academic world towards anonymity.
And generally, it's only done when you're doing something very controversial or there's
a whistleblowing type of a component.
It's not typically done for foundational work.
And Satoshi was really one of the first things because if there was a Satoshi doxed himself,
and I don't think it's possible anymore, but if he or she did that, that's like a Nobel
Prize in economics, likely.
You're on the shortlist for that.
These enormous accolades that would come beyond the monetary incentives of being able
to dox yourself.
But that'd be cool if they give a Nobel Prize in economics to an anonymous to Satoshi Nakamoto.
It's been proposed and it was turned down.
So yeah, I mean, there are a few people in our company that have done Sadonymous publications
like the, if you look at the Chimerical Edgers paper, that's a, it's not a real name.
It's a crazy name.
It's a Sadonymous publication.
But that's usually for throwaway work.
There is one project we inherited from an anonymous person, which is fascinating.
It's called Qedidas.
And it's basically an extension of the QED manifesto from the 90s.
And the pseudonym is Bill White.
And I think it's some anonymous mathematician, but I can't figure out which one it is.
But basically it's a marketplace for deduction.
So it's like a, it's like this magic machine where you can create incentives for people
to write mathematical proofs and a theorem prover and make some money from it.
So there's, there's some cool work that's there and it's sad that Bill stayed anonymous
because I think that could have been easily published and there was a lot of really cool
things that could have been done with Qedidas.
So you did say the success of Cardano, sort of the vision you have is for you to have
less and less power over time.
So this idea of governance, what's your vision for a decentralized, secure governance system?
So the first thing you have to do is you got to look at meaningful metrics, not vanity
metrics.
So what does it mean to have legitimacy in a governance system?
You can build any governance system you want, you have a dictator, right?
Like Bob is in charge, it's like, whether you like Bob or not, you know, he's in charge.
It's not very legitimate.
And you can have pure democracy where every single person votes and then nothing ever
gets done.
You know, county dog catchers, like a six year election or something like that.
So there's a spectrum there between absolute power to one and perfectly egalitarian power
to every single potential participant inside the system.
And then the question is, okay, well, how do you have an architecture?
How do you handle choice architecture on that?
So like, are you asking your people about every question?
Or are you asking your people about a subset of questions related to a particular set of
topics, but then they're not allowed to talk about other topics?
Like for example, are they allowed to change the tax rate, but they can't change freedom
of speech, that kind of a thing.
So the first thing you have to do when you build these types of systems and they get
to a certain scale is you have to build some mechanism for people who are interested in
governance to self-select and participate.
Just create a collection bucket.
In Bitcoin, we had Bitcoin Talk and Bitcoin Reddit and these things.
And eventually the GitHub repos and these things, there was a place to go if you were
interested.
And you need some sort of change management system where people who want to evolve the
system can write it down in a very careful way.
So in Bitcoin's case, it was Bitcoin Improvement Proposal and Ethereum, it's the Ethereum
Improvement Proposal.
And for us, it's the CIP, the Cardano Improvement Proposal, but it's just a structured way
of discussing how you wish to change.
Then there's a question of, do you want to do this implicitly or explicitly?
In the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, it's an implicit system.
So there's no on-chain voting.
There's no like five people said this and four people said this.
So we do this.
In the case of Cardano, we're actually explicitly inviting this.
This is one of the biggest differentiators between Cardano Polkadotios and these other
things is that we're really serious about governance to the extent that we're actually
doing foundational research in e-voting.
We're building new voting systems, we're exploring preference voting and quadratic voting.
And the long and the short is that we want more and more people to participate in voting
for things.
And you have to start somewhere.
So our hypothesis is we can bootstrap the system with the treasury system.
So in Cardano, some of the inflation goes to the block producers, just like any other
cryptocurrency, but some goes into a decentralized treasury.
It now has over a billion dollars of ADA in it, so it's a lot of money.
And that treasury is not on our mind control or the foundation's control.
It's actually controlled by the community as a whole through a program called Catalyst.
And so all these people can come together, they can submit spending ballots and other
people who hold ADA can vote to approve that.
What's nice about it is you have a growth engine to improve two accesses.
One is absolute participation.
So increase the amount of people who hold ADA participating, so the absolute number of people
participating.
And the other is meaningful participation, so the depth of participation.
Did you just show up and vote or did you spend hours debating things on idea scale, the innovation
management platform, interacting with the funding proposal, going back and forth.
And there's dozens of little things like that.
Now my hypothesis is if you run this with enough iterations, eventually you get to a
certain critical mass, like over 50% absolute participation and a high level of meaningful
participation, where you can move beyond funding and you can start actually having meaningful
questions about protocol design and improvement proposals and so forth.
And then what you can do is you can roll out new voting systems and new social structures
and you can let them start voting on training wheels like system parameters, like for example,
the minimum transaction fee or that K parameter for the amount of stake pools or these types
of things.
Okay.
Then they build enough competency there and they move up a next level and they actually
start talking about hard forks using the update system, the hard fork combinator system.
See?
So that's how you- Voting on a hard fork.
Voting on a hard fork.
You can't do it unless your social dynamics are right and your voting system is right.
And by the way, you also need to write a constitution around the same time because not all hard
forks are created equally.
The kinds of things that would add support for a new cryptographic primitive are distinctly
different from the kinds of things that would change your monetary policy of the system.
So the constitution would be written and maybe you can comment on what is the innovation
management proposal system?
It's a company.
So we partnered with a company called IdeaScale and they run a kind of a side platform.
So people who are interested, that's kind of our version of a forum.
They sign up and there's special tools in that platform for discussions that are productive.
So they don't descend into kind of like trolley Reddit style conversations, but they're much
more focused around how is your product building out.
And by the way, we're going to add more infrastructure over time.
In fact, our chief of staff, Tamara Hasen, she's working on setting up an incubator
and accelerator and we have lots of cool partners we've talked with in that space.
And it's the same concept.
Your idea comes in, what enters the system should not be what gets approved on the other
side.
It should go through some sort of gauntlet, some sort of crucible where you iterate your
way through and there's all kinds of optimizations and upgrades and evolutions and combinations
and destructions that occur.
And then by the time you get to the other side, either the idea just dies on the vine
because it was a bad idea or it's a significantly stronger, far more fundable thing and potentially
even gets attached with accountability.
So you don't just fund the idea, you'd actually fund the auditor at the same time who actually
holds the person accountable because the blockchain is not a real company.
It's a ethereal thing.
You need a counterparty to hold someone accountable who's real for that type of stuff and that
type of funding.
So that's what we're doing this year is like we have a whole team of people, partners
like Governance Live and IdeaScale and papers we've written and about 30,000, 40,000 people
regularly participating in this.
So it's a huge social experiment and we're learning an enormous amount and then our goal
is by the end of the year to have a meaningful percentage of the entire cardinal population
inside of it, like 40, 50%.
Then once you're at that threshold, now you have democratic majority of the entire system
and you can have a real conversation about, okay, how do we read a constitution for this
type of a system?
I'm sorry to interrupt, but so the constitution, people still argue about it because natural
language much like poetry lends itself to multiple interpretations.
Is it possible to formalize some of these ideas that reduce the ambiguity?
Everything is old is new again.
We were talking about loge bond back in the day, right?
So there's definitely formal languages you can use to express these things.
That's why I'm so interested in things like Idris and Coq and Agda and theorem proving
because that's exactly what you're attempting to do is to express some concept or desire
or construction in a language that's machine understandable and manipulatable.
In particular, how does the system know its own design?
So what is the reference of a cryptocurrency?
Usually it's a canonical code base like here's Bitcoin Core and the C++ code is the canonical
code base.
But actually that's not right.
You should have specifications, blueprints that are implementation agnostic as your canonical
code base.
Your system know those specifications, understand those specifications, and can your change
management system be for that?
And then can you provide a proof that your client is by similar to that specification?
So that's 10 years in the future, but that's where you would go with that kind of a concept.
But you're tending towards the formalism with it?
Eventually, but that's not necessary for the system in the short term.
It's good enough just to have an anointed winner and say the Haskell client is that.
And then what you basically do is you vote on a SIP and then once it's approved, then
you go and implement that.
And there's some mechanism to trigger the update system to update the reference client.
Do you have an example of a SIP or Cardano improvement proposal?
Yeah, like the Curb Benefit Pledge, SIP 007.
So the 007, that's a good...
Everybody loves that.
I'm going to change my luggage code now, Alex.
What is that?
You explain.
Basically, it just has to do with the Pledge.
So Pledge is a certain amount of ADA that a stake pool operator will set aside and connect
to his pool in order to be listed in the registry.
And actually, it's connected to how much income you make as a pool operator.
So if you set it too high, you have a consolidation and you have lots of pools.
If you set it too low, what will happen is larger pools will tend to fragment and actually
run multiple instances of themselves.
So there's this delicate parameter that you have to tweak.
And so we have a formula for it, our formal specification that's quite involved.
And so one of the community members came and said, well, I think we can massively simplify
this design and actually get a better result for smaller stake pool operators.
And so it's SIP 007.
And there's actually a lot of conversation and people are thinking about it.
And it was just stunning for me because to understand how to write a SIP like this, you
actually have to read like 100 pages of mathematical prose and the formal specification.
So the guys who wrote it, I was like, fuck yeah, this is great.
I'll just say an example of a SIP, but that's one thing, but it can be as big as, hey, I
want to add like quantum resistance to this system.
And here's how you do that, you know, like quantum VRF and I want to put XMSS and all
this other stuff.
So there's a lot you can do and you can do it indirectly or implicitly where there's
some social process outside of the system where you eventually approve a SIP or you
would explicitly where you directly vote or some representative democracy, some group
of representatives directly votes.
And then once you've decided it's there, the constitution is necessary because you need
to know the decision threshold.
Is it super majority or majority?
And also the voting process.
Like a lot of policy experts believe that if Brexit was a multi-stage vote, it would
have never passed because people would have done the initial stage and all the horrors
of Brexit would have been broadcasted to society.
And then there would have been some reluctance and buyer's remorse on it.
And then the second round would have failed or something like that.
But because it was just a singular event, you know, it's like they passed it now, British
are all passive aggressive about it with no sign.
Very well, we shall remove from Europe.
And so your voting system has a lot to do with, you know, the outcome you get.
The other thing is, you know, what type of voting is it just an absolute or is it preference
voting?
Like, so, you know, you pick your favorite SIP, follow your second favorite SIP or something
like that.
You know, Condorcet or Borda or two examples of systems.
Are you a fan of those like the rank choice vote?
I love them so much, especially for political diversity, because this whole concept of throwing
your vote away.
If it's Alice or Bob, you're always going to get a, it's self-parked it at best, right?
The giant...
Turd.
Yeah, yeah, you know, you know the one.
Turd versus I forget what else, douche versus turd.
Douche versus turd, self-park.
So if it's ranked order, you know, or preference voting, you never have that situation because
you always pick your favorite and you get a lot more diversity on the ballot.
Then you have arrows, paradox and you know, all these other things that come up.
So it's, there's no perfect system and really you have to be comfortable with governance
in a game of inches and you start by some guiding principles.
The guiding principles is more as better and productive interactions are better than destructive
interactions and you have to be able to quantify those things.
As long as you have an engine that allows you to grow in those directions, then you
have a lot more people along for the ride when you actually start talking about these
bigger and bigger things.
The other challenge was that we had to decentralize development of the protocol and the brain
of the protocol.
We have fully decentralized the brain of the protocol.
The peer review academic process means that there's now an academic incentive for graduate
students, postdocs and professors to spend enormous amounts of time writing papers in
our ecosystem because they want tenure, you know, they want to, and we show that you can
get it.
You know, there's been a lot of people who've gotten great academic careers from working
with us.
So yeah, keep adding to that pile of 105 papers.
This is great and that doesn't need Charles Hoskins and it doesn't need IOHK funding
or anything like that.
They're on.
We're already seeing unfunded derivative work from people who are completely disconnected
from us writing papers about stuff in our ecosystem.
So just continue to develop that, but that's looking good.
The centralized development, we're working on that as well.
Our goal is sometime in the next few years to make sure there's at least three independent
clients, so three completely independent teams and code bases, and also to get a separation
of the commercial clients from the reference code and turn the reference code into like
a formal specification, a formal blueprint, and then have that change management be completely
decentralized.
The core developers are actually voted on and, you know, the SIP process is used to
change that, and then some way of proving that your client follows the specification
as use of the protocol.
Is there beyond the Cardano ecosystem, these ideas of distributed governance, do you see
ways it could revolutionize politics, you know, or governments?
Oh, yeah.
Like the Ethiopia deal, for example, you know, we have five million people that we brought
in with the DIT system there.
That's going to follow them throughout their whole life.
Right now, they're high school students, but when they're in their 20s, 30s, they're going
to want to use that for e-voting and for payments and so forth.
Can you describe the Ethiopia project because that's fascinating.
Yeah.
So we spent four years in Ethiopia.
I went there in 2017 and shook a lot of hands, kissed a lot of babies, and they said, oh,
yeah, we'll have it all done in six months.
Everything is a lot of fun there, but it takes a little bit longer than you'd think to get
anything done.
And that's okay.
I really love Ethiopia.
It's a beautiful country.
So we spent four years.
We trained a whole cohort of developers, and then we started a relationship with the Ministry
of Education, and they care a lot about proper credentials.
One of the biggest problems they have is when someone graduates, it's really hard for them
to prove the quality of the credentials that they have, and it's really hard for them to
prove the knowledge that they have.
So if you want to be an ICT outsourcer, how does somebody know that this is a real programmer,
or how does somebody really know that this is a real doctor, or whatever the hell you're
outsourcing?
So they said, can you come and build a digital identity system for credentials?
So every student in the country at some point will get a did, a decentralized identifier,
and then you can prove all sorts of things about them, like GPA, or what particular diploma
they hold, or blah, blah, blah.
And then the beautiful thing is the way we designed it is it's extensible to include
payments, extensible to include proofs about themselves, like are you over the age of 21,
that kind of stuff, and then eventually it can be used to link into a cryptocurrency
system.
In this case, we built it for Cardano.
So Italo Prism is the framework we're using for it.
Every student will get one, and then those students will be able to use those credentials
in the Cardano ecosystem, eventually for DeFi, like lending and so forth.
So it's the largest blockchain deal of its kind, and it probably will grow to 20 million
people over the next 24 months.
The other beautiful thing about Ethiopia that people don't know is the prime minister
is a cryptographer.
He's like 40s, 50s, a young guy, and he can actually read the papers if you're right.
And so he's a really bright guy, and he's written this beautiful agenda called Digital
Ethiopia 2025, and one of his things in the agenda is digital identity.
He wants every person in the country to have a digital identity by 2025, and he wants to
implement an e-voting system at some point for that.
So when you ask about governance, all these governance tools that we're constructing for
Cardano are completely reusable for a nation state, a company, and by the way, if you create
a Cardano application, it will eventually be reusable for you, because if you have a
DeFi protocol, you need a voting system, why the fuck do you have to re-implement that?
Native multi-asset, anything that works on ADA works with a native multi-asset.
You can use our voting system for your asset, so you get a government in a box that you
can parameterize any way you want.
And similarly, when a government does something with Cardano, not only did they get all this
amazing infrastructure, but wait, there's more.
They actually get this amazing voting system that they can use for smaller, large-scale
decisions that they want to do.
On the US side, we're thinking about trying to roll something like this out in the state
of Wyoming.
There's been tons of laws that are passed, it's a very friendly crypto place.
The very least, it'd be fun to see if we can do the Republican Democrat primaries with
preference voting and voter registration this way and do it completely online with an e-voting
system.
So that's something we'll be pursuing in 2022.
You think there's some openness to that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the one good thing about the craziness of Trump.
I mean, like half of America, I think the election system is completely, irreparably
broken.
So you walk in, it's like, we're going to go kill Dominion, and then they're like, yay,
that's great.
Let's go do that.
Whether you believe that or not, it's created a market opportunity, created a lack of faith
and credibility in the system.
To improve.
Yeah.
To improve the system.
Exactly.
Exactly.
What do you think about El Salvador becoming the first country to approve a cryptocurrency,
Bitcoin in this case, as legal currency?
And where's this trend going?
First of all, this event, if you mentioned the Bitcoin conference, the Bitcoin folks
believe that this is a monumental event.
Do you think this is a start or something new?
Well, they're both right, the critics and the pro people.
So the critics are saying, this is a nothing burger, and it's just a publicity event for
El Salvador.
And then the people say, this is the most monumental event.
They may actually be right because there's reciprocal agreements.
When a country issues a currency, other countries honor that, usually, and it trades on forex
exchanges.
So if Bitcoin becomes a recognized currency of a country, then it may be the case that
the United States and the European Union, others, can't actually stop them from trading
on forex exchanges and being treated as a currency from a regulatory perspective.
So it was like a really clever backdoor into the League of Nations.
And actually, we had this crazy harebrained idea years ago.
We were down in Mexico at the Satoshi Roundtable, and we're like, hey, let's go buy a country.
Let's go to Tuvalu.
Get them to do something with the cryptocurrency because they sell everything in Tuvalu, like
the.tv extension and their fishing rights, and Taiwan pays them money to recognize them,
and so forth.
So I'm like, man, maybe we can convince Tuvalu to do something with crypto.
That didn't work out so well.
But now El Salvador is actually playing the game, and that's a real country.
It's got like 5 million people and so forth.
So we know the president's brother, and we've had some conversations there.
So maybe we'll go in the next few months and see what's going on there and do a state
visit and talk to the president.
But it's an interesting development, and it's one of those things that it can't quite be
ignored because the nation-state's doing it.
On the other hand, you have to manage expectations.
Is the central bank taking a position in Bitcoin?
Are they actually switching over to a cryptocurrency as their unit of account?
Are they now getting off of BIS, and they're all using the settlement rails of central
banks?
Are they actually blockchaining the entire country, and they have some broad, ambitious
agenda to go and do all that?
That remains to be seen, and so it really is a commitment there.
The other thing is that if you're autocratic, these systems are not so good for you because
the minute you adopt these types of systems, you're pushing a lot of power to the edges.
So there's a world of difference between optics and actual commitment.
An actual commitment is I'm prepared to accept the consequences that the state is going to
lose a lot of power along the way.
And the problem is it's not clear to me, some of these politicians who are pro-blockchain
and I'm not making a statement on El Salvador in particular, I'm just saying in general,
are fully aware of that reality.
A lot of them seem to think that somehow they can contain the blockchain genie in the bottle
and blockchain their whole country, but stay president for life.
That doesn't work once they have that power, they're gone.
So do you think once they realize that this is one of the failure cases, one of the things
that people are concerned about is governments banning cryptocurrency?
Well, that's the China case, right?
They started realizing this was a legitimate threat to capital controls and to the autocratic
system that they've constructed there.
And then suddenly China started to build its own People's Bank of China blockchain and
Bitcoin is now the redheaded stepchild.
They didn't really care too much because it was great for corruption.
You could have a capital control since all the well-connected people, they're, oh yeah,
Bitcoin's bad, but then they'd have Bitcoin of their own and they could use it to send
money around.
But now the government has gotten very serious about it.
They're saying, okay, we want to control and dominate this whole thing and it's a threat
to our plan for the digital you want to become the world standard to displace the dollar.
But so the moment you have a Salvadoran, just more and more countries say there'll be a
country in Europe, for example, that accepts Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, Cardano.
The idea is it would put a lot of pressure on you.
So there'll be like this kind of ripple effect that you've, and then the individual governments
will be able to help and eventually there'll be a superpower like, I don't know, Russia
or the United States and or, I don't know, Canada.
So do you see that sort of an inevitable trend where cryptocurrency takes over the world
as a store of value and as a method of payments?
Yeah, probably.
I mean, you can do just so much more with programmable finance.
Transactions in general have five properties.
You have the asset that runs on the rail.
That's what we always think about.
And you can transact that, you know, and then you have the identity and you transact that
either like one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many, and then you have metadata.
So that's the story of the transactions, like where did it take place, these types of things.
And then you have the contractual relationship.
So that's the smart contract component.
And then you embed that within regulation.
So transactions always live within jurisdictions.
This is relevant to the conversation, well, digital currencies take over because those
things are right now done separately in a very fragmented and fractured way and they're
not completely globalized.
And so super expensive to hoist up this entire system and automate things like compliance.
It's usually a huge part of every bank's balance sheet.
So when you look at the concept of a digital currency, you're saying all five of those
things are programmable.
And so they could be like library-driven and say, oh, I want to be in compliance with the
Eritrea.
Okay, pull up the Eritrea and library.
Now you are.
And then you are built into the transaction.
Previously it's like, go hire some lawyers and go figure out the entire code and translate
some things and rah, rah, rah.
It's crazy.
So just the orders of magnitude efficiency gains that you get and the increased liquidity
you get and the fact that you can now represent all assets with a universal way, that financial
stem cell, there's an inevitability to the victory of our industry.
The challenge is, how do we deal with this with the squabbling of superpowers?
China wants to be the new world standard, America wants to preserve that, and the rest
of the world is trying to figure out how do we create something that's a bit more fair
and balanced.
And so crypto comes in and it potentially is both an ally and a competitor to those
desires because if you do too much crypto, you don't need a nation state anymore.
If you do too little crypto, well, it's China or America.
So what's that sweet spot?
Do you hope that in the process of cryptocurrency pushing power to the edges, to the people,
that we would be able to alleviate some of the suffering in the world caused by centralized
power and the abuses of power and corruption, all those kinds of things?
A hundred percent.
I'm in a very angry video months ago.
I make angry videos.
I should drink, Lex.
I really should.
I mean, you should drink more.
I know, right?
It depends on who you ask.
I made a video a little while.
I said, our industry is an industry of frustration.
It exists because we weren't the industry that charged 85% interest to the poorest people
in the world for loans.
We weren't the industry that charged 15% to move money for a maid sending money home
to mom and Manila.
We weren't the industry that laundered hundreds of billions of dollars of drug money and funded
arms dealers in Africa and all these things or permitted oil for food to exist and so
forth.
The people who did these things aren't in jail, they're rich.
They're billionaires.
They fly private jets.
Our industry is the antidote to these types of things.
We say, guys, we want a system that's fair.
That's it.
We want everybody to be treated equally.
That doesn't mean everybody's going to win.
It doesn't mean that when you lose, somebody's going to come out on a white horse and bail
you out, you're going to have winners and losers, but it's fair.
That's all we want.
That's all we've ever wanted.
There's no coincidence that Bitcoin was created right around the same time as the 2008 financial
crisis.
It's not like these were just unrelated events.
They're highly correlated to each other.
I'd say perhaps even causal, go figure.
Everything we've done as an industry from that moment to today and beyond has been about
that endless, relentless desire to make things a little bit less corrupt, a little bit less
nepotistic and a bit more open.
It's gotten so insane that you have these things in Wyoming called speedy banks where
you're full reserve banks.
They have 100% of their balance sheet is accounted for.
They don't lend.
Then you have the people in the banking community saying, well, those are a risk to banking.
We're scared that these speedy banks are going to default.
It's like, what world are you living in?
You have fractional reserves, sometimes like 2% assets on the balance sheet, and then you're
worried that the guys who actually have a dollar for every dollar they say they have
are the ones that are going to collapse.
It's like the 1984 level doublespeak when you see the system and negative interest rates
and all these other things.
I absolutely believe the direction and course of this industry is to make things more honest
and fair.
Also, by its very existence, it exposes double standards, hypocrisy, and corruption.
Just the fact that it's there because it's one thing to say that, well, it just can't
be because of the nature of global finance.
There's no way to do it otherwise.
It's another thing to see it there as an example and say, well, that thing is doing it.
Why can't you guys be this way?
That's why I'm so passionate about Africa because they don't like the systems they have
and everybody's really young and they are going to throw all the systems out in the
next 20 years and they're going to replace them with something else.
If we get this stuff into Africa, 1.2 billion people will be living in a considerably better
system than the rest of the world.
Then everybody else will look at that and say, why the hell are those guys so rich?
Why are those guys making the money?
Why are those guys doing so well?
It's not satisfying here.
Well, Africa is just better.
No one's going to say that.
They're going to say, okay, yeah, it's nepotism and corruption and lack of transparency and
these types of things.
I think absolutely it has the potential to improve the human condition, but humans have
to get out of the way.
Humans have ingrained in themselves selfishness and it is a desire to maximize them for themselves
and their family and not thinking systems.
We have to evolve capitalism at the same time.
What I mean by that is right now, you're trying to maximize the amount of resources you get
today.
What we need to do is start thinking about how do we create future versions of ourselves
in 2100 and create a resource for that time period and then the name of the game is to
maximize that or balance that with what you get in the short term.
Then suddenly you're saying to yourself, well, if I'm doing things that are good for me today
but compromising then, I make less money.
So capitalism as an engine is okay.
The problem is it's misparameterized.
Almost like inject long term incentives into the capitalist system.
Exactly.
And cryptocurrency space is the only economic system where that's actually possible.
You can create a tokenomics scheme where doing things that are beneficial for people
you'll never meet because you're long dead actually makes you money today.
You can't do that in a legacy financial system and so forth.
So I think that that's the real impact capital conversation that has to be had as you explore
these things is you have to talk to people and say, look, it's not about communism or
socialism versus capitalism.
It's not about, hey, let's donate and save the world or try to be charity and make things
better.
It's all about how do you use the fact that we have a better toolkit to create a different
system, a different incentive model where the default configuration of the system is long
term thinking.
And the default consideration of the system is to get rid of all these negative externalities
that marketplaces have and judge the success of society not by how the greatest of society
are doing, but by how the least of society are doing, you know, HDI, not GDP, this kind
of thinking.
And I think crypto can actually be the vanguard that kind of pushes us there and the first
countries to adopt that are going to be just significantly better places to live.
And the people who envy them will force the other countries to change.
That's right.
That'd be a ripple effect.
If you wake up in the morning or as you sleep like a baby, wake up multiple times in the
middle of the night, do you feel the burden of this kind of future that's in your hands
and not to mess it up?
Like what is it, Big Lebowski?
Her life is in your hands, dude.
Don't worry about them, they're nihilists, honey.
Do you feel the burden of like, because we're talking about all these, you know, 100 plus
papers and the academic beauty of the algorithms we're talking about, but then there's millions
of human lives that stay here.
I mean, you always feel the burden, especially in my own company, I mean, I have all these
people work for me and, you know, they eat because I pay them, right?
So if I can't pay them, then that's my fault.
So you have to, as a leader, you always have to be cognizant that there's all these people
who've signed up for your crazy vision and you have to be larger than life.
You know, you always have to be good.
You don't, you're not allowed to have a bad day, you know, you're not allowed to feel
like shit.
You always have to show up.
You always have to be pushing forward.
And so that's a huge burden on many respects because there's Charles the person and then,
you know, Charles the CEO and these are very different things in terms of expectations,
the very least.
And so it's heavy in that respect.
That said, what gives you solace is that you're not in an alone, you know, it's lonely, but
you're not alone.
You have so many amazing people around you that are willing to help and actually take
some of that burden.
And my life has gotten considerably better when I learned how to delegate and trust.
And even if people screw up and fail, it's worth the risk because ultimately you're amplifying
yourself.
The other thing is that it's okay not to get all the way.
You want to, you want to push there, but make sure whatever the hell you do, you leave something
for somebody else to pick up and carry on.
That's why we care so much about the publication process and open source code.
We'll never file a patent in our entire history because whatever we do, it's yours as much
as it is mine.
And maybe I can only get you 70% of the way and I'll plop over dead from a heart attack
or get killed by an eagle or something like that.
Maybe somebody brings the...
Eagle.
Maybe somebody brings the hasteagle back and it kills me, you know, so it could happen.
They're bringing the woolly mammoth back, talking to George Church about that.
It's a good way to go.
Yeah, I know.
Either the eagle or the mammoth.
I'd rather be crushed by a mammoth because eagles actually fly you up and drop you.
Oh, so you won't die via slow death and they probably peck at you?
Yeah, exactly.
You'd just be grievously wounded on the ground and the eagle's slowly devouring you.
Yeah, don't go down that way.
I've lost my trade of thought.
The point is that you feel deeply grateful to a bunch of people around you and then you
give...
Yeah, you delegate.
You delegate.
And somebody fights the eagle and then other people takes care of that and this, that and
that.
You just do the best you can.
You're in the arena.
You fight as hard as you can.
You leave nothing for home.
You could put it all on the field and then when you go home, you have pride in what you've
done and you know that you've at least made a slight difference.
You know, one person can make a huge difference.
Look at Norman Borlaug.
I mean, just one or a whole world teaching people how to grow crops that he saved a billion
lives over the course of his life.
Billion people didn't start to death because of one guy.
It's amazing the asymmetry and the returns on that type of a thing just for the knowledge
transfer of all things and yet not a household name.
So that's the other side of it, of the burdens.
You know, people always want something for something.
So they say, oh, if I endured all these burdens, I should be given something.
I entered into this space fully expecting that probably the most likely outcome was jail.
That's what my dad told me and other people told me.
And it was because it's like, look at where we came from, the Liberty Dollar, Eagle, all
these things.
They didn't innovate the monetary system, you know, either end up like Gaddafi or they
end up in prison or they end up like nepotistic corrupt banker or something like that.
And so, you know, the financial regulations are not built for rapid innovation.
They're not built for Bitcoin.
There's a reason Satoshi was anonymous.
It wasn't because, you know, he enjoyed the anonymity because there was legitimate criminal
risk for this type of activity.
So the fact that I've gotten this far and I'm doing pretty good, that's a win.
Now you take that, life is good.
What is a productive day in the life of Charles Hoskinson look like?
Now, we're getting to the details here.
Diet, like fasting or not, maybe coffee, non-coffee, exercise, sleep, scheduling, like periods
of deep work, programming, then the social media stuff that you do.
You clearly enjoy being on social media and also live streaming, educating, inspiring the
world or getting drunk and ranting at the computer.
Well, first off, you do a wet year and a dry year.
That's what prevents you from becoming an alcoholic.
So unfortunately, the way that schedule worked, 2020 was my dry year, like I didn't drink
the entire year.
Now, single sip of alcohol was the worst.
On purpose.
Yeah.
You do a dry year and then you do a wet year.
Oh, so this is one of your ideas about life is you alternate.
Yeah.
You have to alternate.
You know, never do too much of any one thing.
Well, Churchill never alternate.
He just kept drinking throughout his life, he did pretty good, just to push back against
you.
Yeah, him and Alfred North Whitehead.
Although, didn't Churchill get kicked out as Prime Minister at some point?
So maybe he took one dry year.
Yeah, he was sober, happy in shape, Churchill.
He would have let it Britain for 30 fucking years.
See Lex?
Yeah.
That's why we can't have nice things.
Hunter S. Thompson.
Maybe you're onto something.
Oh, it's really crazy if you go to Aspen and see the bar he used to go to.
I actually met a waitress who knew him really well and he'd go in there like two, three
times a day and she's like, yeah, he'd do cocaine right here on the table and he'd
come in with lots of pills and just put them all out on the table and be taking them at
different hours.
They were all clearly illegal substances, but we just give him coffee for whatever he
wanted.
He's a great guy.
But then we asked the day in the life of Charles.
I fast, I tried to intermittent fasting 16, 8, the longest fast I ever did for a long
term fast was two weeks, which was just crazy.
Wow.
Oh my God.
Tim, you took me to the journey of philosophically what was going on in your mind.
So normally when I do an extended fast, it's about three, four days because that's the
sweet spot before you start losing muscle mass and other things start happening.
People know so much more about this than I do, but I just feel pretty good and you
kind of get addicted to the fast high.
You don't have to eat, you have no downtime, you're just going, your energy never dips.
And so I used to do like three, five days, maybe three, four was, was the sweet spot.
But then after about a week, I was like, how long do I, can I make this go?
And so I started talking to some people who said, well, Angus Barbary did 384 days.
Of course, I'm not as fat as Angus.
So I said, oh, I can do two weeks.
So I just kept going and kept going and kept going and kept going and right around the
two week mark, you know, I fainted for a little bit in a chair and I was like, okay, maybe
I should start eating again, but then I was legitimately worried about like refeeding
syndrome and this stuff like, okay, how do I, how do I take care of that?
So my brother's a doctor and I called him and I said, hey, Willie, you know, I haven't
eaten in two weeks.
How do I, how do I start eating again?
And he's like, what?
Slowly.
Slowly.
Yeah.
So in the usual routine intermittent fasting, although I haven't been as good about it as
I should be, and I used to work out, I don't do as much as that the stress and the work
life balance has been horrible the last 24 months and I've gained a lot of weight and
all that stuff, but I'll fix that.
But I do try a lot of things like I use the call map and I do meditation.
Recently I started doing photobiomodulation.
You ever heard of that?
No.
It's crazy headset called a V light.
You saw that picture of me with like the weird thing with the red lights on.
It actually shoots lights into your brain.
It's really cool stuff, but it proves blood flow and actually there's some peer-reviewed
studies that show that it does neurogenesis.
So you actually generate new neurons and things like that.
It's really cool stuff.
So I do that and it actually helps a lot and it's every day is a little different.
Do you get a few hours of like a long time to work to think?
Yeah.
Deep work is so important.
There's even a book on that like deep work.
Yeah.
By Cal Newport.
I think you interviewed him, didn't you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everyone should listen to this podcast.
Deep questions.
He's awesome.
He's a mathematician, a theoretical computer scientist.
So those guys really need their time alone to really think.
That's the one thing I deeply miss.
When you're a CEO, you're the master of the five-minute deal.
You come in, you talk to people for a minute, you make a decision, you move on the next
thing, you move on the next thing.
And I used to be used to like really deep focus.
You'd sit down and think about something for 10 hours, 15 hours, 20 hours, and that's
that.
And I enjoyed it.
It was just so beautiful to get lost into something and just go and go and go.
And then you become a CEO and it's like you never can go and go.
You're lucky if you read a four-page thing because there's something else that comes
up and you have to try, we have to do that.
So I've been trying lately to have, and actually our chief of staff recommended, like Fridays
is do not disturb day.
So it's for deep work.
You don't have meetings and any of these things.
So far I have not committed to that, but everybody else in the organization has started
to move there.
But my hope is next month that I can actually get serious about that.
The other time I'm lost in thought is I do a lot of float tanks.
Have you ever done isolation tanks?
But I really want to.
It's one of the most amazing things you can do.
You come out on the other side and all your stress worries, they're just gone.
And you have so much productivity and clarity.
If you combine that with daily naps, that's the way to go.
Yeah.
I'm a huge fan of naps.
So what about the social media stuff and like you doing the live streams?
Do you ever dread those?
Do you, are you energized by those?
So because you're exceptionally good at communicating all the different kinds of ideas and being
very transparent with the community, all those kinds of things.
I really enjoy the live streams.
It's fun.
It's never been a chore because it's for them.
It's a chance for people in the community who've been loyal and they really love it
to actually just be there, ask some questions.
And I try to make it as entertaining as possible and you have your trolls and you have your
love and it's actually nice to have a mixture of the two because sometimes you can beat
down trolls just for fun, that kind of stuff.
And it's grown to a cult following.
I think there's like 40, 50,000 people.
And it's almost like fight club in a certain respect.
So I was in Vancouver years ago and I was at Air Canada checking in just about to fly
back to Colorado and it's getting this weird vibe from the guy that was checking me in.
And then right after he takes my bag, he kind of leans over to me.
He's like, I love Ada.
And I was like, really?
He's like, yeah, I watch your live streams.
And then I was flying into London.
I was in London.
He threw airport and the passport control guy was there and I was just about to take my
passport out.
Welcome to London, Mr. Hoskinson.
I was like, oh God, am I going to jail in London?
Why does the border patrol guy know who I am?
This is a bad deal for me.
And it turned out he watched my live streams and so there's a lot of that and that's so
much fun.
In fact, here in Austin, I was in a Mexican restaurant just down close to this place.
And while eating there, two different people recognized me and I took a picture with one
of them.
And again, they watched the live streams.
So that's- Well, if it's anything like Fight Club, you have to wonder if some of those
people or all of them are just figments of your imagination.
Right.
I don't have an answer for that.
I could be a figment of your imagination, it just proves that yes.
Yeah, but honestly, if I was capable of that level of delusion, why the hell don't I look
like Brad Pitt?
Good point.
Okay.
So on this topic, let me ask you about mushrooms.
You're interested in mushrooms, growing mushrooms.
I believe you are also interested in the mind expanding capabilities of psychedelics.
At least you mentioned kind of the interesting place where your interest in non-psychedelic
mushrooms might go.
Can you explain the nature of your interest in mushrooms?
Is it personal?
Is it business?
Is it both?
Well, it's a little bit of everything.
It's just an underexplored area of science and botany that ought to be explored because
there's so much cool, interesting stuff there.
Mushrooms do so much.
They have these things called courtrecepts and they are like a zombie fungus that infects
insects, takes them over and then it will have them kind of get to other insects and
then burst out of their head like an alien and spray spores on them and repeat the process.
I mean, they even made a damn game about this, the last of us or something like that.
And this is a real thing.
Like you can Google it and see like these dead hands with these fungal stabs coming out
of them.
Holy God, this is crazy and in the same topic, you go all the way to Lion's Mane and it
could actually help treat Alzheimer's and treat depression and Parkinson's and regrow
nerves and so forth.
Other things, they've shown some effectiveness against COVID.
It's just so crazy the diversity in the mushroom kingdom of the medicinal applications, the
pesticide applications.
You can use it a lot to kind of save hay and trees.
There's a lot of things you can do to combat all kinds of invasive species.
And it's true.
There's a lot of cool stuff with psychedelic mushrooms and there's a great book from Michael
Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, where he was really the first journalist a long time
to go and Roland Krifus worked his way through the Johns Hopkins studies.
But the longest short for me when I read that book, like, okay, mind expansion is great,
but look at the effectiveness of psychedelics, you know, philosophy mushrooms with SSRIs,
selective serotonin readup take inhibitors for the treatment of depression.
They showed in the Johns Hopkins studies that they're equal or better in effectiveness
in many cases for the treatment of depression than a drug that you have to take forever.
And this is just one or two treatments and then you desist from it.
That's a miracle because there's so many people suffer from severe depression and it's
a lifetime element.
And the fact that we have something in the toolbox that we've underexplored is a very
powerful thing.
The other thing was end of life issues.
A lot of people get cancer, I've lost people in the family from cancer.
And it's so hard those last two, three months because they kind of have this, they're in
a horrific pain, they're trying to find meaning and why is this happening to me?
And if you can just give them a substance that on the other side of it, there's a good
chance they can come to peace with everything and die with a lot more dignity and happiness.
That alone justifies an enormous amount of study.
And the fact that these things are super cheap and they grow pretty much anywhere, it's pretty
cool.
Now on the commercial side, you can make a lot of money from mushrooms and I'm working
with a company called Farmbox Foods and it's one of the, they do both vertical hydropartic
farming.
They also do mushroom and they put these amazing labs and shipping containers that are kind
of like controlled environments and you grow 400 pounds of gourmet mushrooms a single week
off of that.
And your margins can be up to 30% per year if you're just selling them for food consumption,
if you're doing supplements, they can be even higher than that.
So it just kind of made sense from a diversification of assets to say, hey, let's do some stuff
in hydroponics and aquaponics and in mushrooms.
But the more I do, the more I learn that community, just the cooler that community is.
Like I went to this beautiful mushroom festival in Cape Springs down in Georgia and I met this
guy named Bill Yule and he's just looks like a druid and it's just like, like he lives
in a tree and he opens up the tree and goes out and everything.
And I was like, Bill, what do you do?
I go and I try to study beetles and bull eats in a very particular type of beetle and they
mate in the most crazy way is like this, this beetle will fuse on top of another beetle
and they'll vibrate.
And if they make the right harmony, she'll mate with them, otherwise they'll kick her
off.
And they'll only make the harmony while you're on a specific type of bull eat mushroom.
If it's anywhere else, the harmony, it's like, who the fuck does this?
It's like 20 years, 30 years, just thinking about goddamn beetles and bull eat mushrooms.
But that's that community and they're the happiest people you'll ever meet.
And they're just so much fun to talk to.
And there's just so much lore there that's not discovered.
The other thing is there's a ton of undiscovered mushrooms.
So you know, you go to my ranch up in Wyoming, go out that national forest next to it.
You probably discover six or seven new species, just doing some gene sequencing and things
like that.
So there's like a gold rush for new things to discover to treat all kinds of things.
So love mushrooms, love that community.
I think there's a lot of wonderful medicinal properties and everybody there is just a lot
of fun to hang out with.
The other passion is aquaponics and hydroponics and I got a lot more serious after COVID.
I go to the supermarket, all the store shelves are barren.
I say, guys, can you imagine if like we had a real big thing, what this would be like?
We need to have domestic food production.
We need to have resilience at the community level.
So let's go build a $40, $50 million aquaponics facility next to every major city.
So at least you have some local production of food and people won't starve to death.
Otherwise it's very bad.
And again, the margins are phenomenal there, 20%, 30%.
If you actually do it right and alternate your crops properly and so forth, and you
create a lot of high paying jobs with it as well.
And so you kind of draw a lot of value from staying close to nature and all of these kinds
of ways to keeping you humble.
Like you said, what is it?
The goat is still going to crap on you.
Oh yeah, the doggies will shit on you whether you're broke or a billionaire.
That's a good line.
That's the line you'll be remembered for if the universe has a sense of humor.
It's a neo-Yogi-bera.
So I think mushrooms is a good place to ask about my friend Joe Rogan.
So I'll keep folks from the Cardano community, keep saying things like Legs podcast first
then Joe Rogan experience.
I guess I'm the moon and Joe is Mars in this metaphor.
Since I'm a CS person, I can talk a little bit more fluently about cryptocurrency because
fundamentally cryptocurrency is a computational idea.
And then there's somebody like Joe, who's more like an everyman and he does not necessarily
know the technical intricacies of cryptocurrencies.
And I don't think he's had a cryptocurrency person on.
Did he interview Andreas on Tenopolis?
Oh, he did.
That's right.
A long, long time ago.
But that was almost like the cryptocurrency space goes through phases and I think we're
in a new era of some kind.
And how do you talk to Joe about Cardano?
How do you talk to Joe about what the heck, I remember some of you tried to explain to
him what Dogecoin is.
How do you explain this whole space of what Bitcoin is, of where Ethereum is, of where
Cardano smart contracts and some of this Puthas work with this Puthas stake ideas that we'll
be talking about?
You don't.
What you do is you start with applications that they're interested in.
So he's an Elk Hunter and so he's probably interested in Elk tags, right?
So you start there and you say that whole system can be put on a blockchain and here's
how it's going to be better for you.
You say that's what you do.
You always connect it to something they know and love and then once they get that, they
say, oh, that's really cool.
And then they ask, what else can you do with it?
What else can you sell me on it?
And you kind of work your way outwards there.
The problem technologists make is they're so damn in love with the technology.
They have that tail wagging the dog where they just want to talk about the technology and
how incredibly cool it is.
And that's fun.
It's like talking about math.
Oh, God, let's talk about co-bordisms.
That's fun.
Everybody's eyes glazed over, you know, you always have to connect it to the interests
of the particular person and what they care about, what they love, what they need.
Royalty payments.
He's a big guy.
He's got the Spotify thing, he's got all these things going on.
Intellectual property is probably pretty important, Joe, at some juncture.
So NFTs, we can talk about this concept of perpetual royalties.
So for example, let's say that you create a piece of art.
You can build into the token itself a perpetual royalty to something you care about.
Maybe every time it sells, it pays it back to you.
Or maybe every time it sells a donate to some clean water charity or something like that.
The point is that the actual acquisition of the NFT requires adherence to that smart contract.
So people can't deviate from your desire even after you die.
So you know, stuff from Andy Warhol or from Picasso, that can still be generating some
donation every time a Picasso sells to something else.
You can do that with NFTs.
NC starts thinking, God, what else can I do?
I do shows, maybe I can do my tickets with these types of things, maybe I can do loyalty
points for my fans.
So now you've got to engage, and he's thinking of all the opportunities for him, and it gives
him an incentive to anchor and connect to those concepts.
Then over time, he starts asking questions, well, how do we know it's secure?
Then we can talk about proof of work or proof of stake or these types of things.
Well, so this is how it stays secure if you're really interested.
And there's an incentive to have the attention span necessary to do the homework, eat the
broccoli, and get over that hill.
It's also an opportunity, at least it was for me, especially with Bitcoin a while ago,
is to take another look at the monetary system, or even look at the, you know, I've been looking
quite a bit at the history of the 20th century, and sort of look at that history through the
perspective of the monetary system, the gold standard, and all those kinds of things.
Just add that little layer of consideration of how much money, of how money can be used
to buy people in power to control the populace.
It's fascinating to look at the history from that perspective, and then that allows you
to look at the future of how we can change that in order to empower people.
And then, of course, the governance thing that you're working on is fascinating because,
I mean, I don't know, but it seems like a deeply broken aspect of our government is
just the voting system, and discussing how that could be revolutionized is fascinating.
Because a lot of conversations end up being on the internet about, like, number go up,
which is like financial side, and to me, personally, at least, I think that's the same for Joe.
That's just boring, like, it's the investing, the financial side of it.
I know it has a lot of impact, but it's kind of boring, because long-term it's not going
to have any impact.
The idea is a strong long-term it's going to win.
The idea is a weak long-term it's going to lose.
The ups and downs of the short-term don't matter.
That's just like casino games that you play.
Speaking of games, video games, got to ask you about those.
Okay.
You mentioned Diablo.
Maybe you're a fan of Diablo.
Yeah, Diablo 2 was great.
If you like Skyrim.
If you like Skyrim, it was great.
Skyrim was great, too.
Like the Elder Scrolls.
I actually bought the game that the Elder Scrolls was based on, do you know that?
So, way back in the day, the Elder Scrolls series was inspired by a game called Legends
of Valor that I played when I was a little kid, and it doesn't actually have an ending.
They ran out of money before they finished it, so they just kind of like put this little
thing on and said, okay, but you never finish it.
So I actually bought all the intellectual property from the game.
I saw that.
I didn't know there was a connection to Legends of Valor.
Yeah.
I forget the name.
The guy was at Todd's something at Bethesda.
He played it and he was inspired by it, and then he created Arena right after playing it.
That was such a good game.
Arena Daggerfall.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a copy of Daggerfall when I was a kid, but it had a bug in, so when you left the
dungeon, it would crash, and this was before, like, you can get an easy patch for it.
So I never actually played Daggerfall.
I entered in through Morrowind.
Yeah.
No, the Daggerfall was the fascinating thing, which jumping all over, but we'll return to
Legends of Valor because I don't want to ask you about that, but Daggerfall was fascinating
because I think of all of the Elder Scroll games, it was the largest because it was randomly
generated.
Right.
It would randomly generate the worlds, the dungeons, and so on, which is fascinating
to think about how big can you make the world, both in actuality and feel.
It's incredible to have a video game.
I don't know how many video games do this well, where the feeling is you can be lost
here forever.
You can live here because most video games have, like, a bottom.
It feels like you can run out of stuff, but Daggerfall was like, I can just keep doing
this.
Right.
At least that's what I felt at the time.
But yeah, what the heck, Legends of Valor, what's the idea there?
Well, I mean, there's really nothing about it that's super compelling today.
I mean, there's a nostalgia of youth that's there, but I mean, it doesn't even have a
class system, a level system.
The combat system is terrible.
There's no journal.
The magic system is terrible, and so forth, and so I just wanted to start somewhere, and
I felt like that would be an incredibly fun overhaul project.
I kind of got the idea from Beamedog Studios when they did another one of my favorite games.
Remember Baldur's Gate?
Mm-hmm.
I love that Baldur's Gate, too.
Oh, yeah.
The enhanced edition was great.
They should have never just done Throne of Ball.
They should have done an actual proper sequel, and I got down that whole road.
But anyway, I got the idea there.
I said, well, take some old piece of IP, and then you can retrofit it and clean it up.
What's nice about Legends of Valor is it's a blank slate.
You can do your own elder scrolls.
You can create your own class system and level system and so forth.
You could write some beautiful, exciting, fun narratives for that.
Also, it gives me a chance to explore a lot of things that I think should be dragged into
game development, like algorithmically generated music is one example.
The problem with games, as you mentioned, you play lots and lots of hours, but your
sound content is much smaller, so you have tons of repetition in the soundtrack.
What if you could connect the music to the state of the game world, and it automatically,
through some process, will generate music?
There's actually people who study this.
That's one dimension.
The other thing is you have things like GPT-3 and so forth.
There was a great game, Event Zero, and it came out in 2016, where you could actually
have a dialogue with an AI, and you're like a marooned astronaut on a space station that's
abandoned, and you have to somehow work with this AI through communicating with it to convince
you to take you home.
The AI is a bit duplicitous, and I don't want to spoil a plot of the game because it's such
a cool game, but it's actually like a paint by numbers.
It's almost like Zork, where you don't have pre-selected dialogue.
You actually type in the terminal, and the AI will reply to you back and forth.
This was 2016, and it's like things have gotten an order of magnitude better.
The evolution of that tech, I think, within the next five years brought into video games,
could you give you incredibly cool dialogue inside the game?
Algorithmically-generated music, better dialogue, better gameplay mechanics.
Also, I'd love to explore alternative physics systems, alternative geometries like hyperbolic
geometry or these types of things.
There's actually Hyperbolic, which is a game that does that, and you can do down the Euclidean
geometry as well, and bring those elements into a game design, and that's what we'll
do as Legends of Valor.
It'll be like Skyrim, but with a lot of really cool new shit.
I saw Aerosmith years ago, and he was out there, he was like, do you like the old shit?
Do you like new shit?
Kind of middle shit.
So you're going for the middle.
Yeah, I'm going to try to do some of the old and some of the new, and bring it in.
That'll be a lot of fun.
What's nice about it is that there is a lot of new play in the market because of the Microsoft
acquisition of Bethesda.
They've been losing employees like crazy, and there's a lot of belief that Elder Scrolls
6 will not live up to expectations because Microsoft will kill it.
I will tweet it.
Okay, listen to me.
I will go into, I'm all about love on the internet, but I will go hard at you, Microsoft,
if you screw up Elder Scrolls.
Well, we might have to do a spiritual successor, right?
It might have to happen with Legends of Valor, you never know.
But it's a passion project, so I have no time for it at all.
It's like so low on my list of things to do.
I'll probably do it in 2022, 2023, and we'll build a nice crew, and we'll do it in Wyoming,
probably in Wheatland or some really small town, and we'll import everybody, and then
we'll have to build the whole city up like Elon is doing here in Texas.
It'll be a fun project.
Well, I like programmatically generated music.
You mentioned Baldur's Gate.
By the way, Haskell frameworks for that.
Utterpy is one.
For generating music?
Yeah.
For doing it.
I wonder how successful that could be because I remember Baldur's Gate was the first game
where I realized music is so important to the game.
It was the thing I remembered about the game.
It was the thing I thought about when I was away from the game is the feeling it created
that music.
I don't even remember the music anymore, but I remember the music.
Jeremy Soul, I think, was the composer.
Yeah.
It was great.
And actually getting like Ramanjuati or Bear McCready-en to do that would be so cool.
Okay.
Okay.
This is awesome.
Ridiculous question.
What's the, maybe let's say, top three great video games of all time?
Yeah.
Baldur's Gate is definitely in the top three.
Arkaneum is my favorite game.
And Arkaneum was, Troika Games was just this amazing studio where they took the time to
build probably the most compelling game worlds.
In the case of Arkaneum, it takes place in like kind of like a 19th century Victorian
England play.
Like Steampunk, but then there's also Magic inside this game world.
And there's this crazy juxtaposition between Magic and technology.
And the more technology you have, Magic stops working.
The more Magic you have, it disrupts technology.
So all the people on the Magic side hate the technology people and vice versa.
And so you're just this character in this game world and you're just trying to figure
out like, where do you fit?
And it has this incredible plot where you're kind of just a stowaway on a Zeppelin that
gets shot down and you get dragged into this conspiracy and you have to kind of figure
out the conspiracy as you go through the whole game world.
And you meet all these different races like the elves and the dwarves and so forth.
And they've all been impacted by the proliferation of technology in different ways.
Like the humans, you steam engines to clear cut all the forest and it caused a lot of
problems.
The dwarves leaked that technology to the humans.
And so they kind of got exiled for it and so forth.
And you have to decide like, where do you fit all this?
And you have a lot of choices as a player.
You can be on the Magic side, the technology side, kind of be neutral.
And there's like 40 different endings for the game.
It's just incredible.
And this is all like 2000.
And you talk about a procedurally generated world, you have a quick travel.
But if you want, you just walk and the world randomly generates.
But it's not like Daggerfall where there's interesting things along the way.
So it was really ahead of its time and it was kind of the last of a generation of games.
It was based on the same framework that Interplay used for Fallout, the original Fallout 2.
So that was really a cool setup.
How were the graphics?
They were not essential to the game?
Oh, it's isometric top down.
So yeah, kind of like the Fallout look.
And so it doesn't hold up super well today, but that was never the point.
It was a more of a story driven game.
But it was in one of the very few games where at the very end of the game, you could actually
talk the villain into killing himself instead of fighting you.
And you had to really work at it.
You had to become a master of persuasion and get your charisma score maxed out and learn
all this stuff along the way.
And you have this philosophical debate over the nature of life and death with him.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
And then you're just like, by the way, you're wrong.
And here's why.
And he's like, oh yeah, you got a point.
I'm just going to kill myself.
I was like, wow, this is great.
Planescape Torment is the other one I think is probably the greatest.
Was it called Planescape?
Yeah.
It's another one on the Infinity engine, which was what was used for Baldur's Gate.
So it looks like Baldur's Gate.
And God, that was such an incredibly well-written game.
You play this character called the Nameless One, this little blue guy, and you wake up
in a morgue, and it turns out that you're immortal, and every time you die, you lose
all your memories.
And so you've just been apparently living this life for a very long time, and you meet
all these people in this crazy city called Sigil who know you, but you don't know yourself,
and you're trying to figure out your name, your identity, and why do you have this curse
where you live forever, but you keep forgetting every time you get killed.
And it turns out you weren't such a nice person throughout this entire game world.
But then again, it's this question of, well, if you can start over and you lose all your
memories, do you have a chance for redemption or not?
So it's an incredible game, Planescape Torment.
And it's actually another one of those games where you can never actually have a fight.
You can just kind of talk your way out of everything, and there's probably like a thousand
pages of dialogue inside the game.
Those guys had a lot of fun and a lot of drugs making that game.
Do you think these three games are the kinds that would still be okay to play today or
are they forever lost in time because we sort of got desensitized to the richness of computer
graphics and all those kinds of things in modern games?
I think you can enhance these games because your storytelling medium is so much more engaging.
You know, I was at the movie theater before COVID, and the person to the left of me was
looking at their cell phone during the movie, and the person to the right of me was looking
at their cell phone.
They're just not engaged anymore.
Everybody is attention-starved.
And the video game is one of the last mediums where you have undivided attention of people.
They're really into it.
They're all into that thing.
And so I think the fact that you have VR and AR and enhanced graphics and all these new
gameplay mechanics, it's a value add instead of a value negative.
Because ultimately, what are you doing?
You're telling stories, and you're trying to connect people to something.
Maybe it's the nature of life and death, or are we truly real?
Are we in a simulation or not or something like that?
It'd be great to do 13th floor as a game or something like that.
And the question is, well, how good of a story can you tell while you're constrained by your
storytelling tools and technology?
The fact that games are so much more advanced now means that you now have many more dimensions
of storytelling available to you.
And actually with AI now coming in, and really good AI coming in the next five or 10 years,
your storytelling is not static anymore.
The person can actually majorly participate and change the outcome in ways that were previously
unpredictable.
The other thing is they're still educational.
You can teach people concepts that they never knew before.
And it's like, if you want to teach people about bizarre geometries or like Minecraft
is a great example, a lot of people learned how computers work from Redstone.
Think about that.
It's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, as we said, we're more and more going to be living in the video game worlds
might as well sort of as opposed to just make it fun, also expand our knowledge, expand
our ability to think, like explore different ideas and do education broadly defined within
those video game worlds.
So we can do the entirety, the entirety of life in the video game worlds.
Hopefully it doesn't look like Minecraft, but we'll see.
Do you have advice for young people today, aside from playing lots of video games, high
schoolers, college students, thinking about their career, thinking about life?
Well, we no longer live in a world where you get one skill set, you do it for 40 years
and retire.
I mean, that ship has sailed a long time ago.
So learn how to learn and learn an appreciation and love for learning.
So that's the first thing, you know, Josh Waitkins wrote this beautiful book, The Art
of Learning, if you ever read it, stuff like that.
So good study skills, you know, slip box notes, these things.
What was it, Zettel Kastin or whatever it was, yeah, there's lots of little techniques
that you can pick up along the way.
And basically the teacher had to process lots of information very quickly, retain it, and
then decide what's useful to you for that moment.
The second thing is do not undervalue EQ, emotional intelligence.
We've lived for a long time in a society where IQ is dominant.
It's like how smart you are, excuses, everything else.
You could be a horrible human being, but he's a really bright guy, right?
The asshole mathematician or physicist.
We now live in a world where the balance is far more important.
You have to be smart, but you also have to be a nice guy and don't undervalue that.
So learn things like close circuit communication and active listening.
These skill sets will always pay enormous dividends along the way.
A third, remember that you're judged for the things that you have and what you do with
those things.
You know, if you have very little, you still have to do something with, you have a lot,
you have to do even more.
So learn how to give and do that early on.
Learn how to give back, volunteerism, charity, mentoring, these types of things.
Those are so incredibly valuable to a person's development.
The people that you mentored in the academic world, you learn this, you have graduate students.
They one day will be professors and it might just so happen, they might eclipse you.
Remember Gauss had a doctoral advisor.
Never forget that.
And so did Feynman.
Make sure that you mentor people, you give back and you learn how to learn and you learn
how to teach.
Super important for your development as a person.
Now you'll notice all those things are agnostic to whatever domain you happen to have chosen.
You can be in medicine or law or technology, whatever that's your fancy, whatever your
passion happens to be.
And don't conflate your earning in your career.
People try to keep putting these things together.
They're increasingly becoming decoupled.
There's a lot of cases where people do their passions and they do it for free or, you know,
for sustenance.
But then they have something else they do on the side to also augment or supplement their
income.
Probably best that way.
When you conflate the two, you tend to get burned out terribly.
You see this a lot with musicians or other people and they just, they want to make music
but they have to tour or whatever because they got to pay bills.
Stuff like that happens.
Other than that, I mean, I'm not a guru.
I'm not at any particular position.
You showed up in a robe which I thought was kind of weird and you had a crown and you
kept calling yourself king.
King of the rats.
And then I was in a robe that was a Yukata.
Okay.
Thank you for clarifying.
The audience, he's joking.
Reddit.
I heard somebody is going to write blog posts.
Charles Hoskinson walks around with a crown.
Let me ask you a ridiculously big and the most important question, what's the meaning
of this whole thing?
Of life.
Well, I got a story for that.
Does this have something to do with a farm?
Well, no, no, no, it's from Japan.
I used to live in Japan.
I live in Osaka, next to Namba, a beautiful area.
It's like, if you're going to live anywhere in Japan, live in Osaka and you live anywhere
in Osaka, live next to the restaurant district at four o'clock in the morning and get good
ramen.
These are the things in life that make you who you are.
So there was a shogun and he was kind of a badass.
He was really good at killing people, really good at running his empire and then he got
a bit disgruntled in his late 40s and he said, you know, I'm just going to give it all to
my son and I'm going to wander around Japan until I find the perfect cherry blossom.
That's what I'm going to do.
Everybody thought he went crazy.
He said, no, no, no, that's what I'm going to do.
He took his whole entourage with him and so his son is now the shogun and then he's just
wandering throughout Japan and having all these incredible crazy adventures as he's
wandering throughout Japan.
He got fighting bandits and loving beautiful women and so forth.
And then 30 years later, he's passing these two geisha gals and one of them turns around
and they notice them slumped over next to a cherry tree and so she goes over to try to
rouse them and he's dead and in his hands is a wilted cherry blossom.
That's a very Japanese story, right?
The point is that it's not the actual blossom, finding the perfection that matters.
It's the things you do on a day-to-day basis.
The places you go, the people you meet, the experiences you have and the joy you take
and the things that you do here in the moment now.
You have to get there.
If you look at Jiro Dreams of Sushi, there's this guy 70 years of his life making the same
damn piece of sushi again and again and again.
He's the happiest guy around.
Albert Camus and his story of Sisyphus, you know, Sisyphus should be miserable.
It's the Greek curse.
No, he's happy.
He has total clarity of purpose and every day he gets to basically roll that stone just
a little bit better than the day before, a different way than the day before.
And it's not the destination.
It isn't getting the stone up at the top of the hill that matters.
It's the fact that the act, you find that joy in that act, that icky guy, that way of life,
that purpose of life.
That I think is the closest thing a human can get to a meaning.
You're a blip.
You know, you didn't exist.
You're dead.
And if you compare it to the size of the universe in that time, it's just a little blip.
So all you can do with what you have is just find meaning in the things that you do on a
daily basis.
And you can't predict the macro.
We have all this wealth and power in America.
If a world war breaks out, we could be destitute like Walmart, Germany.
And so, you know, you could be a big guy.
You could be now living on the street side.
Would you be miserable?
The point of life is getting to a point that no matter what comes your way, what misfortune
comes your way, you're in a position where you can find a modicum of happiness and love
and empathy for others in that moment.
And then the highest pursuit of life is the ability to share that mindset with other people
and give it to them somehow.
And that's, that's really hard, you know, because everybody comes in, they're always
Eeyore, doom and gloom and cynical, you know, but this and that and reputation, this, you
have to somehow transcend all of it and say, you know, that doesn't matter.
Look at the cherry blossoms.
Aren't they beautiful today?
And let's find a better one tomorrow.
See, the, you're also a fan of fishing, I've read somewhere.
And one of my favorite books is Old Man in the Sea, where there's an old man sort of
battling a big fish and basically closing out the last chapter of his life in this battle.
So I think another aspect of life with this boulder, it feels like the boulder gets bigger
and bigger as we get closer to death.
And you know, you find yourself married to a particular struggle in life that eventually
just kind of overtakes the entirety of meaning of your existence.
Do you think, I know what it is for me.
Do you have something like that, the broader vision that you nice your work with Cardano
and everything you've done in life, the big fish that you're going to end up in the dark
of night struggling with in the last chapter of your life, like the big problem you're
taking on?
Well, in mathematics, it was the Goldbach conjecture.
I'd like to prove that.
That's probably not going to happen.
That's a really big fish.
So do you still have a love for mathematics?
Oh, God, yeah, of course I do.
You never lose that.
You never lose it.
You lose the ability to do deep work and you don't have the creativity and the raw inspiration.
This is why I've gotten to automated theorem proving because what I lack in, because I'm
getting older, I can now have computers understand it and use AI to just solve this stuff.
It's like the cheat codes for math, you know, so fuck those guys, we'll still do that.
But you know, mathematics still has those last passions and you know, there's all kinds
of cool things that I'd like to see done, like quota complexes allow you to unify topology
and number theory and really novel ways and there are all kinds of cool things, who cares?
Everybody has those white whales.
Another thing I love to do is bring back the woolly mammoth.
You know, that's George Church's, you know, hidden pleasure and five to 10 years, it's
actually going to happen.
And I have this beautiful ranch in Wyoming and I got to find a way to convince George
to let me raise his clone mammoth fence on my ranch.
Among the bison.
Among the bison, they'd probably get along really well.
And then I have to learn all these cool things about woolly mammoths, like, you know, do
you shave them in the summertime and let them get shaggy during the winter or do you just
let that coat go and then fall?
Who knows?
It's an undiscovered country.
I just had the image of Charles Hoskinson alone on a bison farm, trying to raise a woolly
mammoth.
Just start wearing a white suit and say welcome to Hoskinson's ranch.
I'll have a cane with amber on it.
Yeah.
And before that, you keep scrambling on like the beautiful mind in the movie and you have
voices talking to you.
Oh, the schizophrenia has already come.
You guys are all figments of my imagination anyway.
Now, one of my goals though, you know, I love catfish and they live a long time.
They get really damn big if you see this guy.
I'd love to catch one now and be in my sixties and catch the same fish twice and recognize
it.
Maybe I'll lift a scar or something.
You know, that'd be really cool.
Going back to the fish thing, you know?
Yeah.
Because both the fish has gone through a lot.
I've gone through a lot.
We can just be like whole.
That's my goodness.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And then I'll die of a heart attack and my mammoth will eat me.
That's something to look forward to, Charles.
This was one of the most amazing conversations I've ever had.
It's truly an honor that you would spend your valuable time with me.
And I'm glad you exist in the cryptocurrency and the technology space and I can see your
love for mathematics and your love for life just to radiate through everything you do
so.
Thank you for being you and thank you for talking to me today.
That's a lot of fun.
Thank you so much, Lex.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Charles Hoskinson.
And thank you to Gala Games, All Form, Indeed, ExpressVPN and Eight Sleep.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you with some words from William Faulkner.
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.