The following is a conversation with Sergey Nazarov, CEO of Chainlink, which is a decentralized
Oracle network that provides data to smart contracts.
He and his team have done seminal research and engineering in the space of smart contracts.
Check out the Chainlink 2.0 white paper that I found to be a great overview of their technology
and vision.
It's 136 pages, but very accessible.
Quick mention of our sponsors.
Wine Access, Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, and BetterHelp.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that externally connected smart contracts that combine the
ocean of data out there with the security of the blockchain are fascinating to me, both
technically and philosophically.
Data is knowledge, and knowledge is power.
I think the more reliable data sources we integrate into our decision making, especially
when those decisions are executed by programs, the more efficient and productive our decisions
become.
There are interactions between humans that should not be formalized digitally, like love,
for example, but for all the others, there's no reason for smart contracts not to automate
away the menial parts of life.
Making more room for good conversation over brisket and maybe some vodka with old and
new friends.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Sergey Nazarov.
Is that Yosyuk there?
So I gave away everything I own a few times in my life, and he accidentally survived,
and I don't like stuffed animals.
What I really liked about, I got them in a thrift store, what I liked about them is
because I'd never seen a stuffed animal that looks pissed off at life.
They're usually smiling in the dumbest of ways, and this guy was just pissed.
Yeah, I gotta tell you, that's actually pretty funny.
I like this guy.
If you had to live only in the digital world or the physical world, which would you choose?
So I think this is actually a question more about what the fidelity of the digital world
would be versus the physical world.
I think this type of question and this whole simulation thing actually comes from papers
about 20, 30 years ago in the philosophical world, where people tried to make this thought
experiment of, would you be comfortable if everything that was happening to you happened
in a simulation?
What they were trying to do is they were intuitively trying to understand, is there some kind of
intuitive personal connection we have to something being the real world, right?
And then the Matrix movie actually came out of these papers, and then these ideas made
their way into the public consciousness.
I personally think that if I had the choice to be in the digital world at the same fidelity
as the real world with immortality, I would absolutely go with the digital world.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
How'd you add the immortality part?
That's a...
Don't get immortality.
If you think about how we would go into the digital world, our brain patterns would be
mapped onto some kind of probably virtual machine, right?
And that would mean immortality, right?
Because the virtual machine has no limit to how long it can exist.
Well, don't you think there would be a versioning system?
This is a soft fork versus hard fork question.
Whether Sergey version 2.0 would be different from Sergey version 1.0, there would be an
upgrade.
So that's immortality.
Sergey 1.0 would die in the digital world.
You get a software update, and then that's it.
Well, yeah.
When people go into the Star Trek transporter, are they killed or are they transported?
I don't really know.
I haven't read any papers on this.
I haven't really thought about it too much.
There's no white paper on the transporter.
Not at this point.
What does fidelity mean exactly to you?
Is it strictly...
So the fidelity of the physical world is maybe now questions of physics, quantum mechanics.
What is at the bottom of it all?
Or do you mean the fidelity of the actual experience?
It's just perception.
It's just perception.
But that's limited by human cognitive capabilities.
It is, but I don't really have anything else.
I think all of these papers that brought up these questions of assimilation, they were
like in epistemology and metaphysics.
And what they were trying to do, I think, was they were trying to put people through
a thought experiment where they would come out on the other end and say the reality of
life is really worth something.
And I don't, you know, ignorance isn't bliss, which is that consistent statement in the
matrix, right?
Ignorance is bliss.
That's what one of the guys says when he's like, you know, doing something wrong and
trying to get back into the matrix.
And the question is, is ignorance bliss?
And it's like a different version of that.
I think from a perceptual point of view, if my perceptions aren't in any way different,
so fidelity is very good, it doesn't matter.
I don't know, right?
So if I don't know something, it doesn't really exist.
And if it doesn't exist in my perception or my consciousness, then it doesn't exist.
Period for me, at least.
And then whether it exists in some, you know, more metaphysical version of things, I personally
never really got into the metaphysics stuff because I could never really, I couldn't understand
what the point of it was, right?
It's one of these things where I couldn't really get what the practical application
of it was.
And this is from those realm of questions, right?
If there was something about the world, but you didn't have a capacity to perceive it,
would it matter to you?
To me, it wouldn't matter.
Right.
To me, by the way, the simulation thing is a really interesting engineering question,
which is how difficult is it to engineer a virtual reality, a digital world that is
sufficiently of high fidelity, where you would want to live in it?
I think that's a really testable and a fascinating engineering question, because my intuition
says it's not as difficult as we think.
It's not nearly as difficult as having to create a quantum mechanical simulation that's
large enough to capture the full human experience.
It might be just as simple as just a really nice quake game, like with a nice engine,
that just creating all the basic visual elements that trick our cognitive, our visual cortex
into believing that we're actually in the physical environment.
And I think that if that's true, then that's quite, you know, that a high fidelity digital
world is actually achievable within, you know, a century.
And that changes things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe in our lifetime.
I'm really hoping for that.
I'm hoping somebody can copy my brain waves onto a virtual machine.
And, you know, allow that consciousness to continue to exist, whether that's death or
not, I don't know.
But I think it's actually going to require some serious leaps.
Like even the VR headsets, right, they don't work if they go below 90 frame rates, right?
People start getting freaked out.
So you have to go from one gaming screen of, you know, 60 frames per second to two screens
of 90 frames per second.
And so the people's hardware today can't even handle that.
And that's for these, for these two little screens by your eyeballs, what it's going
to take to like, you know, completely trick my consciousness into not knowing the difference
in terms of like, you know, all the sensory inputs, um, my, I'm, I'm keeping my fingers
crossed whoever, whoever, whoever does that and, and is close to doing that, they should
contact me.
I want to have my brainwaves turned into a virtual machine.
Would you, in that context, if Morpheus came to you, would you take the blue pill or the
red pill?
Meaning would you be happy just living in that world and not knowing that you're living
inside that virtual world that's running a computer, or would you want to know the truth
of it?
Well, actually, I think that's a very different question, right?
There's a, there's a, there's a, actually moral ethical question there about whether
you should allow a bunch of people to get, you know, manipulated and killed and enslaved
because in the matrix, they're all enslaved and as, as, as, as, as like a, you know, a
AAA battery to me, turn a human being into the battery, right?
Um, uh, so I think the, the moral and ethical question of that, fascinating enough isn't
actually different than the more unethical questions we face today in modern daily life.
But I probably have given the choice of just completely going along or going against it.
I would probably go against it if I had to make this kind of binary choice because going,
going along with it, um, I think at that scale of scary, you know, stuff happening to people
is, is probably something really, um, really, really difficult.
But for your individual life, it's way more fun to go along with it.
So you're saying you value the opposing a system that includes the suffering of others
versus just for yourself and enjoying the ride.
I mean, what's, what's, if there is such a binary choice, why choose the opposing system?
I think it's the nature of, um, kind of the ethical dilemma that you face in that situation.
There's kind of some, you know, this is obviously not something that's happening now.
Right?
We don't know this, right?
At the end of the day, at, at that scale of, of something like that happening, yeah,
that scale of, of people being, um, you know, manipulated and harmed, then I think pretty
much almost all people have an obligation to go, to go against it.
Uh, probably that's what that, that looks like in my opinion.
So you've talked about the concept of definitive truth.
What is it?
In general, what is the nature of truth and human civilization?
And just talking about the digital age, uh, the nature of truth in the digital age.
So the interesting thing about definitive truth is that it actually exists on, um,
on this, uh, at least in my mind on this spectrum between objective truth and just, you know,
somebody, uh, made something up and nobody else agrees.
So what I, what I, what I think definitive truth is, is it somewhere in the middle on
that spectrum where if you and me def, define, uh, what truth is, right?
Like if you and me have an agreement of some kind and we say as long as the weather is
sunny or the weather isn't, there is no rain on that day, then there will be an insurance
policy that results and you and me both agree that as long as three sensors, three monitoring,
weather monitoring stations all say that, then the definitive truth for us and for that agreement
is the result of, of those systems coming to consensus about what happened out in the
real world.
I think the objective, um, truth definition from, from kind of the philosophical world
is really, really stringent and very, very hard to attain.
And that's not, that's not what this is.
And that's actually not what commerce or the ability for people to interact about contracts
needs.
But I think the world of commerce needs is an upgrade from someone can you'd and laterally
decide what the truth is to there can be a pre-agreed set of conditions where we define
what the truth is under those conditions.
And then, you know, you and me basically say, if these 20 nodes are of these 30 data sources
come to consensus within, you know, this method of consensus with this threshold of agreement,
then definitive truth has been achieved for you and me in our relationship for this specific
agreement and the specificity and, and our shared agreement to that kind of truth or
that definitive truth being acceptable to both, both of us is, is probably what's, what's
um, kind of necessary and sufficient for everything to move forward in a better way.
In any case, much better than, you know, I'm a bank or an insurance company, I'm going
to unilaterally decide what happens.
It's definitely an upgrade from that.
Do you think it's possible to define formally in this way a definitive truth for many things
in this world?
Like you talked about whether it's basically defining that if three sensors of whether agree
then that we're going to agree that that is a definitive useful truth for us to operate
under.
So, how many things in this world can be formalized in this way, do you think?
A huge, a huge amount, so, so there's, there's actually two, two things going on here.
One thing is the amount of data that already exists, right?
And the pieces of data coming off of, you know, markets, IOT, shipment of goods, any,
any number of other things, like even, even your YouTube channel has a certain amount
of likes or a certain amount of clicks or a certain amount of views and even that's
quantifiable, right?
So even to a certain degree, what we do here today, you and me right now can be quantified
as far as the amount of views, the amount of clicks, the amount of any number of other
things.
Yeah, you, the viewer have power of data in your hands by clicking like or dislike right
now or the subscribe button or the unsubscribe button, which I encourage you to do.
Anyway, okay, so there's data flowing into all interactions in this world.
There's data.
There's more and more data, right?
More and more data.
More and more data.
That data is more and more accessible to everybody and that accessibility and the fact that there's
more of it means we can form more definitive truth proofs.
We can form more and more proofs and as we form those proofs, well, we can provide them
to these blockchains and smart contract systems that consume them and then they're tamper proof,
right?
So they can't be manipulated.
And so now we've combined a system that can prove things with a system that guarantees
a certain outcomes and we have a better system of contracts, which is, which is actually an
unbelievably powerful tool that has never existed before.
Can we talk about the world of commerce and finance, decentralized finance?
What is it?
What's its promise from both the philosophical and technical perspective, if we just zoom
in on that particular space of the digital world?
Sure.
So the decentralized finance is the instantiation of a specific type of smart contract, right?
Or what I call hybrid smart contracts, which are these contracts that combine the on-chain
code together with the off-chain proofs that something happened.
That's they're called a hybrid because they basically use both of these systems, right?
The blockchain and the proofs about what happened.
And what DeFi is, is one specific type of hybrid smart contract that is taking on the
contractual agreements you traditionally find in the global financial system, right?
And that's basically the world of lending, the world of yield generation for people
giving me or giving whoever their money and somebody giving back them yield back to them,
which is what bonds do and what treasury is doing, what a lot of the global financial
markets do, as well as the ability to gain exposure and protection from different types
of events and risks.
That's a lot of what derivatives do, right?
Consumers allow us to say, hey, something's going to happen, and I'm either going to protect
myself by getting paid if it happens, or I'm going to benefit from it happening by basically
saying it's going to happen, putting money down on that, and that prediction will get
me a return.
Now that's a very large part of the global financial system, excluding all the stuff
for global trade and letters of credit and all the stuff that facilitates international
trade.
So excluding that, at least for now.
So if we look at what decentralized finance does, it takes all of those agreements about
generating yield, lending, and all of these types of things you find in global finance
and the world of derivatives and a few other types of financial products, and it basically
puts them into a different format, right?
So the format you have for centralized financial agreements is that you go to a bank, even
if you're a hedge fund, even if you're like the richest people, you go to a bank, they
make a product for you and you hope that they honor the product that they made for you.
Or you do a deal with another hedge fund or whoever, some counterparty, and you hope
that that deal is honored.
And then a number of very freaky things start to take place.
One of them is people don't have clarity about what the agreement is, right?
So a lot of people don't know exactly what the agreement is between those parties because
they can't actually see it.
Those agreements are kept very private or parts of them are kept private, and that keeps
other counterparties, other people in the system from understanding what's going on.
This is actually partly what happened with the mortgage crisis.
The mortgage crisis in 2008 was basically, there were a lot of agreements, there were
a lot of assets, but because the centralized financial system worked in such an opaque way,
it was so unbelievably difficult to understand what was going on, right?
And so that lack of understanding for the global financial system basically led to a
big boom and then correspondingly very, very big bust, which amazingly enough had a huge
impact on everybody, even though they didn't participate in the boom part of the equation.
In any case, what decentralized finance does is it takes these financial contracts that
power the global financial system, it puts them in this new blockchain-based format that
basically at this point provides three very powerful things.
The first thing that it provides is complete transparency over what's going on with your
financial product.
So this means when you use a financial product in the DeFi format, you and you as a technical
person actually can drill down very, very, very deeply and you can understand where the
collateral is, you can understand how much collateral there is, you can understand what
format it's in, you can understand how it's changing, you can understand this on a second
to second or block to block basis, right?
So you have complete transparency into what's going on in the financial protocol that you
have your assets in, which is because blockchains and infrastructure, all of these things are
built on, forced that transparency, right?
Whereas the centralized financial system is very, very good at hiding it.
It's very good at hiding it and packaging things in a glossy wrapper, creating a boom
then a bust.
The centralized finance is built on infrastructure that forces transparency such that everyone
can understand what the financial product does from day one and in fact escaping that
property is practically impossible or if someone tries to escape it, it becomes immediately
obvious and people don't use their financial product.
So that's number one.
Number two is control.
So if you look at what happened with Robinhood, everybody thought the system worked a certain
way, right?
Everybody thought I have a brokerage account, I can trade things under a certain set of
market conditions and then the market conditions changed within the band of what people thought
they could do and everybody was fascinated to find out that, oh my God, I thought my
band of market conditions in which I can control my assets is X, but it is actually Y, is actually
much, much smaller band.
And the reason it is a much, much smaller group of market conditions is that the system
doesn't work the way people think it works.
The system was wrapped up in a nice glossy wrapper and given to them to get them to participate
in the system because the system requires and needs their participation.
But if you actually look at how the system works underneath, you will see that it does
not work the way people think that it works.
And this is actually another reason that DeFi is so powerful because DeFi actually and these
blockchain contracts give people the version of the world they think they already have,
which is why they don't beg for it, right?
So everybody thinks they're in a certain version of the world that works in this reliable,
transparent way.
They're not.
They don't realize it.
And so they're confused when you tell them, I'm going to make the world work this way
because they think they're already in that world.
But then things like Robinhood make it immediately painfully clear that that's not how the world
works so that the second real property of DeFi is control, which means that you control
your assets, not a bank, not a broker, not a third party, you, you control your bitcoins,
you control your tokens and the finance protocol.
If you don't like how something's going in that protocol, you can remove it.
You can send it to another protocol or you can use a feature of the protocol to do something
it's supposed to do.
And guess what?
Nobody can just say, oops, you know, that feature, that isn't so good for my friends
over here.
You know, that feature is actually, you know, we're just going to pause that feature in
the critical moment when you need it to, to, to, to execute your, you know, your strategy,
which is why you took all the risk to begin with.
And then the final reason, you know, the final thing to know about DeFi is that DeFi is inherently
global and actually right now provides better yield globally.
So if you go to a bank right now with the US dollar, you get 1% or less.
If you go to DeFi with the US dollar, you get 7 or 8%.
So if we think about that in a world where there's a lot of inflation coming down the
road and we think about, well, you know, a lot more systems might be failing soon and,
and, and they might be highlighting this types of problems that were there for, or as a result
of the type of control that you see in, in, in Robinhood.
And people are more and more concerned about both transparency and control and they're
looking for yield to combat inflation.
I think that's what DeFi is about in a practical sense.
It is this clarity about your risk.
It is control over your assets.
And amazingly, at the same time as having those two unbelievably useful properties,
it is actually superior yield, which, which, which, which, which just leads me to the very
obvious conclusion that the only reason DeFi is more used is because more people don't
know about it.
And by virtue of this long kind of, you know, explanation here and here and elsewhere, more
people will know about it.
And it's just such an obviously superior solution that I haven't heard a single explanation
as to why, um, no, no, don't earn 8% and take less risk and have more transparency with
your assets, earn 7% less, take more risk and, um, give people the ability to change
the rules on you at their discretion.
Go do that.
Who's going to do that?
And in general, on the first two of transparency and control, first of all, I do think maybe
you can correct me, but from my perspective, they're, they're like deeply tied together
in the sense that transparency gives control.
Transparency creates accountability.
And there's this kind of game being played game, game theoretic game, where if I know,
if you know, I'm going to discover your deviation, you're not going to deviate.
Yes.
This could be a whole nother conversation, but just as a small aside on the social network
side of things, which I've been thinking deeply about in the past year or so of how to do
it right there, how to fix our social media.
And I tend to believe that human beings, if they're given clear transparency about which
data is being stored, how it's being used, where it's being moved about, just all a clear,
simple transparency of how their data is being used and them having the control at the very
minimal level of being able to participate or to walk away, and walk away means delete
everything you ever known about me, that that will create a much, much better world that
currently there's a complete lack of transparency on social media, how the data is being used
for your own protection.
I mean, there's a lot of parallels to the central bank situation.
And there's not a control element of being able to walk away, like being able to delete
all your data, delete your account on Facebook is very difficult.
It doesn't take a single click, which I think is what it should take.
There should be a big red button that says, delete everything you've ever known about
me or like, forget me.
So I think that couple together can create a very different kind of world and create
an incentivization that will lead to progress and innovation and just like a much better
social network and a really good business for the future social networks.
But so I tend to see like control as naturally being a sort of an outgrowth from the transparency.
It should all start at the transparency, which is why the smart contract formulation is fascinating.
Because like you're formalizing in a simple, clear way any agreements that you're participating
in.
And as a side comment also, what's really inspiring to me is that I think there's a
greater, I don't know if this is always the case, but it seems like from having talked
to people on the psychological element, there's a hunger amongst people for transparency and
for control.
Like transparency, another word for that is authenticity.
If you look at the kind of stuff that people hunger for now, they want to know the reality
of who you are as an individual.
So that means you can create businesses, you can create tools that are built on authenticity
or transparency.
And then the same I'm inspired by the intelligence of people.
If you give them control, if you give them power, that they would make good choices.
That's really exciting.
Of course, not everybody, but that means that decentralized power can create effective systems.
So a couple of that, there's a hunger for transparency, so we can move to a world where
everyone's being just like real, conveying their genuine human nature.
And people are sufficiently intelligent that if they're given power in a distributed mass
scale sense that we're going to build a better world to that as opposed to centralized, supervised
control or only a small percent of the population know what the hell they're doing.
Everybody else is clueless sheep.
So those two coupled together is really to me inspiring.
Just a really quickly comment on the stuff that you just said, which I think is super,
super, super fascinating.
I think that's all exactly right.
I think everything that you said is right.
And I think it's actually going to be the same for social media and banking and every
other type of contract is that all of those systems that house people's value for them
and take control of either their social media value or their financial value or whatever
for them, all of that is going to be made available to people in this autonomous piece
of code that does the same thing that the centralized entity used to do.
So they get all the features, but the autonomous piece of code gives them the ability to have
control while getting all the features.
So banks give you features, social media sites give you features, whatever other system that
you use online gives you features, and then it takes your data and it takes control of
your assets from you in return for those features.
I think the whole big difference here partly in line with the definition of smart contracts
and its evolution is that there's this autonomous piece of code that's giving you all those
features without requiring the ownership and lock-in and control and unilateral ownership
of your data or your value or whatever it is that you're giving it.
And I think what this will lead to fundamentally is just more of a free market dynamic among
how people make...
I think with the social media folks, you should just make some kind of law or something where
you can just export all your data from them.
Everyone should be able to get their data exported by another application.
And then the network effect of all these social media sites will crumble because people
will just combine your Twitter data with your Facebook data with everything else into an
application that you control and there will just be thousands of different interfaces
competing for how to consume all the social media data because it isn't locked in in one
centralized actor's control.
And so this is just the recurring pattern of what I think all of this will do is it'll
give...
It gives people a better deal.
It gives them features without ownership of data, without ownership of value, and that's
really the difference.
So I think this is a good place to talk about smart contracts then.
Can you tell me the history of smart contracts and the basic sort of definitions of what
is it?
Sure.
So I think smart contracts as a definition has actually gone through some kind of changes
or a small evolution.
Initially, I think it was actually a conception of a digital agreement that was tamper-proof
and could know things about the world, right?
So it could get proof and it could define that something happened and it could conclude
an outcome and release payment or do something else.
That's actually the definition of smart contracts that I began working in this industry with
seven or eight years ago when I started making smart contracts.
That is the conception that I had of a smart contract.
Then what happened was that was really hard to do, right?
Building that type of tamper-proof digital agreement that could also know things about
the real world and release payments back to people about those events that were codified
in this tamper-proof format was actually a very tall order, turns out it's consistent
of three parts.
It's consisting of the contract, the proof about what happened, and the release of value.
The way things have evolved so far is that the definition has now come to mean on-chain
code, right?
So it's come to mean the codification of contractual agreement on a blockchain, right?
So there's some code somewhere on some blockchain that defines what the agreement is.
Now that eliminates the part of the definition that's related to knowing things about the
world and that partly eliminates the definition about payments and stuff like that.
But basically it's on-chain code, right?
We in our recent work on a second white paper have actually put out a different definition
that we call hybrid smart contracts that actually tries to go back to the initial definition
that I started with seven or eight years ago, which basically says that there's some proof
somewhere that's proven to the contract and the contract can know that and the contract
can gain proof.
Then it can use that proof to settle the agreement that's codified on a blockchain.
So you both need a mechanism to provide proof.
You need a mechanism to codify the contract in a tamper-proof way on something like a
blockchain.
And then as with all contracts, there's a presumption that there's some kind of release
of value.
So I think a smart contract in our industry right now means on-chain code, which limits
it to whatever can be done on-chain only.
And then in our internal definition for us and for us at Chainlink and for me, it's
hybrid smart contracts, which is actually the original definition.
It's the idea that a contract can both know what happened and automatically resolve to
the proper outcome based on what happened.
So you're referring to the Chainlink 2.0 white paper, which is a paper that I recommend
people look.
It's a very easy read and very well-structured and very thorough.
So I really enjoyed it, very recently released, I guess.
Can you dig in deeper what is a hybrid smart contract?
You mentioned sort of this idea of data or knowing about the world and on-chain and off-chain.
So what are the different roles in this?
So hybrid, by the way, refers to the fact that it's on-chain and off-chain contracts.
So maybe digging deeper of what the heck is it and what does it mean to know stuff about
the world?
How do you actually achieve that?
Yeah, absolutely.
So the on-chain part is where the agreement itself is.
That's the smart contract itself.
And that's where you codify certain conditions such as the conditions under which an interest
payment is made or the conditions under which the contract pays out the full amount that
it holds to someone based on a derivative outcome or something like that.
Now what the on-chain code is very good at is creating transparency about what the core
conditions of the contract are.
It's very good at taking in money from other private keys that send it tokens and send
it value to hold.
And then it's also very good at returning money or returning value back to other addresses
or other private keys.
It can also be involved in governance.
It can be involved in a few other private key signature-based operations.
But primarily the on-chain part of a hybrid smart contract from what I've seen so far
defines the agreement, takes in value, and returns value based upon the conditions codified
in the agreement on a blockchain.
The second and equally important off-chain part is where the term oracle and oracle comes
in or an oracle mechanism or a decentralized oracle network, as we describe it in the paper.
And this is another decentralized computational system that has a different goal.
So blockchains have the goal of packaging transactions into blocks and connecting them
in a cryptographically unique way to create security and assurance about that chain of
transactions.
Oracles and decentralized oracle networks achieve consensus and they achieve decentralization
about the topic of what happened.
So blockchains structure transactions.
Some of those transactions might be the state changes in different pieces of on-chain code.
And then those on-chain pieces of code require input.
I think the thing that people get kind of a little bit thrown by is despite being called
smart contracts, the on-chain code on a blockchain cannot actually speak to any other system.
So blockchains are valuable and useful as far as they're tamper-proof and secure.
And to be tamper-proof and secure, they're made this kind of walled garden that is able
to know and interact only with the highly reliable information that's within that system, which
is basically tokens and private key signatures.
All the other world's information is not available in a blockchain inherently.
And a smart contract or a piece of on-chain code can't just say, hey, I'm going to go
get some data from over here because the API they would get it from creates a whole bunch
of security concerns for the blockchain itself and a whole bunch of consensus issues about
how to agree on what that API said or what the truth of the world is, right?
Because it's not even agreeing on what one API said.
It's more so creating a reliable form of decentralized computation that can give you a definitive
proof of what happened and not just what one API said.
So for example, some of our most widely used networks have well over 30 nodes and well
over 10 data sources that are all providing information about the same type of data.
And then there's consensus on that one piece of data, which is then written in and essentially
given back into the on-chain code to tell it what happened because you can't really
make an agreement unless you know what happened, right?
If you and me were to make an agreement and set some contractual conditions, but our agreement
could never know what happened, it would be completely useless.
However, if you and me made an agreement and there was another system called an oracle
mechanism or decentralized oracle network that proved what happened definitively and
you and me pre-agreed that whatever this mechanism says is what happened, then we can achieve
an entirely new level of automation, right?
We can suddenly say, there's this piece of on-chain code that's highly reliable.
We can give it millions, billions, eventually trillions of dollars in value and it is controlled
by this other system over here that's also highly reliable under this configurable set
of definitive truth and decentralization conditions, which we all agree are sufficiently
stringent to control that much value and therefore the combination of this tamper-proof on-chain
representation of a contract and this mutually agreed upon definition of a trigger or a proof
system combined is a hybrid smart contract, which as you can see probably already does
a lot more than just a contract on-chain, right?
Can you talk about this consensus mechanism, which by the way is just fascinating.
So there is the on-chain consensus mechanism of proof of work and proof of stake and then
there is this oracle network consensus mechanism of what is true.
So how do you, can you compare the two?
How do you achieve that kind of consensus?
How do you achieve security in integrating data about the world in a way that's definitively
true in a way that is usefully true such that we can rely on it in making major agreements
that as you said, involve billions of trillions of dollars?
Right.
So this is the challenging, this is the challenging question, right?
This is the challenging problem that oracle networks, oracles, we had chain link that
we work on in order to create this definitive truth to trigger and create hyper-automation
in this more advanced form, more advanced form of hybrid smart contracts.
The reality I think of this problem is that it is very specific to each use case and this
is actually how we've architected our system is in a very flexible way.
So for example, you need an ability for an oracle network to grow in the amount of nodes
that it has relative to the value it secures, right?
So if you have an oracle network that secures $100,000 in like a beta of a financial product,
maybe it can be fine with only seven nodes and only two or three data sources, right?
Because the risk to that oracle network is relatively low based on the value it secures.
So the first question is actually how do you scale security relative to value secured by
that oracle network?
Because it wouldn't be very efficient to have 1,000 nodes securing $100,000 worth of value.
So one of the first questions is how do we properly scale and how do we compose ensembles
of nodes in a decentralized way where we can know that, okay, we're going from seven nodes
in a network to 15, to 31, to 57, to 105, to 1,000, right?
So that's one dimension of the problem.
So you have to be scaling the number of nodes relative to the value that's derived from
the truth integrated into those nodes.
Well, that's not the only problem, right?
The other side of this is that you're trying to create a deterministic result, a deterministic
output from a set of non-deterministic disparate systems, data sources, or places that prove
that.
Can you also just as a side, what is an oracle node?
What is the role of an oracle node?
Sure.
So an oracle node essentially exists in both places.
It exists in both worlds.
It exists as an on-chain contract that represents either an oracle network or an oracle node.
So there's an on-chain interface in the form of a contract that says, I exist to give you
this list of inputs.
You can request weather data for me, you can request price data for me, you can ask me
to send a payment somewhere.
It's like an API.
So it's a pointer to API that provides truth about this world, buys data about this world.
It's an interface.
So just like an API is an interface for Web 2.0 engineers, oracle networks and the contracts
that represent them or individual nodes are the interface of Web 3.0's use of services.
And services includes all services, data, payment systems, messaging systems, whatever
Web 2.0 or any kind of computing service that you can conceptualize, needs an interface
on-chain in the form of a contract that says, here are the services I can provide for you.
Here are the transactions you need to send me to get back this data or that computation
or this result.
And then what you actually see is that the centralized oracle networks, because they're
uniquely capable of generating their own computations in a decentralized way around the data that
they have access to, you actually see the centralized oracle networks generating a lot
of these services.
So for example, we have a randomness service, a verifiable randomness function service that
basically provides randomness on-chain.
And that randomness is then used in lotteries and various other contracts that need randomness.
But that randomness, it's not a piece of data that comes from somewhere else.
We don't go to another data source and get it.
We generate it within an oracle node that then provides it over into oracle nodes oracle
nodes that provide it into the contracts themselves.
So what do you say oracle nodes are nondeterministic?
Well, they are as far as they come to consensus.
But see, there's this kind of different problem here.
The blockchains are very focused on generating blocks of transactions within a smaller universe
of transaction types, a certain block size, and a certain set of conditions.
And then they have an economic system that says, I will perpetually generate blocks
of this size with these transaction types in this kind of limited set of transaction
types, whether those are UTXO transactions or scripted, Solidity, or whatever it is.
Oracles and oracle networks, we don't have a blockchain, for example.
There is no chain link blockchain.
Our goal is not to generate a certain set of very clearly predetermined transaction types
into a set of transactions that are put into blocks and will infinitely be done that way.
Our goal is actually to create what we call a meta-layer, a decentralized meta-layer between
the nondeterministic, highly unreliable world and the highly hyperreliable world of blockchains
so that the unreliable world can be passed through this decentralized meta-layer.
And it can coexist with the reliable chain, the on-chain world.
Exactly.
It can coexist, and in some cases, the meta-layer might generate it.
So the problem in giving you this straight answer is that there's just such a wide array
of services.
If you were to say, well, Sergey, how do we generate randomness from a data source?
Well, we don't use a data source to generate the randomness.
That's the type of service that can be generated in an oracle network itself.
And so there will be certain computations that oracle networks themselves generate themselves
to augment and improve blockchains.
And it is actually the goal of oracles to consistently do that.
So if you were to think about the stack in a very generic high level, you would see blockchains
or databases.
They're basically the data structures that retain a lot of information in this transparent,
highly reliable form.
Smart contract code is the application logic.
It is the logic under which all of this kind of activity occurs, storing data in the data
structure in the blockchain as a database in a certain conceptualization of it.
And then oracles and oracle networks are all the services that are used by the application
code.
So by analogy, let's take Uber.
Uber initially, some core code goes and gets the GPS API from Google Maps about the user's
location, sends a message to the user through Twilio, pays the driver through Stripe.
If those services weren't available to the people who made Uber, they wouldn't have
made Uber, right?
Because they would have written their core code on some database and then they would
have had to make a geolocation company, a telecom messaging company, and the global
payments company.
And they wouldn't have done that because it's too hard.
And that's the weird scenario that a lot of people in our industry are in.
And that's the problem that oracles and oracle networks fix is they provide these decentralized
services to take this developer ecosystem, the blockchain and smart contract developer
ecosystem from, hey, I can have a database and write some application logic about tokenization
and voting and private key signing, all of which is super useful and is a critical foundation.
But now, if you just layer on all the world services, whether that's market data, weather
data, randomness, suddenly people can build DeFi, fraud-proof gaming, fraud-proof global
trade, fraud-proof ad networks.
And that's why this world of decentralized services and decentralized oracle networks
is particularly, in my opinion, important to our industry.
Yeah, it's funny.
You talk about that the current sort of decentralized world of DeFi, but decentralized services world
is primarily just tokens and it's basically just financial transactions.
And the kind of thing, the reason why it's super exciting, the kind of thing you do with
chain link and oracle networks is that you can basically open up the whole world of services
to this kind of decentralized smart contract world.
I mean, you're talking about just orders of magnitude, greater impact financially and
just socially and philosophically.
Are there interesting near-term and long-term applications that excite you?
Yeah, there's a lot that excites me and that is how I think about it, that it's not just
about we made a decentralized oracle network, it's about we made a decentralized service
or collection of services that's going from hundreds to thousands and then people are
able to build the hybrid smart contracts, which I think will redefine what our industry
is about.
Because for example, for the people that only learned about blockchains through the lens
of NFTs, they understand blockchains through NFTs, not through speculative tokens or bitcoins.
And I think that will continue.
I think the use cases that excite me, they vary between the developed market, the developed
world's economies and emerging markets.
I think in the developed world, what you will see is that transparency, creating a
new level of information for how markets work and the risk that is in markets and the dynamics
that put the global financial system at systemic financial risk like 2008.
And my hope is that all of this infrastructure will soften the boom and bust cycles by making
information immediately available to all market participants, which is by the way, what all
market participants want, except for the very, very, very small minority that are able to
game the system and their benefit and benefit from booms but avoid busts because of their
asymmetric access to information, which really everybody should have and which this technically
solves.
I think in the process of doing that, and which is happening, I think right about now,
you see a polishing of the technology such that it can be made available to emerging
markets. And on a personal level, I feel that the emerging markets will benefit much more
from this technology, just like the emerging markets benefit much more from the internet
or from those $50 Android phones that people can have because it's such a massive shift
in how people's lives work.
I have always had access to books and a library, which has been fantastic and very important.
But there are places in the world where people don't have libraries, but now they have the
internet and a $50 Android phone and they can watch the same Stanford lecture that I
watch.
I mean, that's kind of mind blowing realistically, right?
They just went from zero to one in a very, very dramatic way.
I think all of these smart contracts and in my case, I think the one that I seem to keep
coming back to is crop insurance, partly because it doesn't have a tokenization component,
partly because it's actually much more important than it might seem.
What is crop insurance?
Right. So this is the nature of why it's sometimes hard to see the full value of what
our industry does because it solves all these kinds of back end problems that we don't have,
right?
So crop insurance is if I own a farm and it doesn't rain, I get an insurance payout,
so I don't need to close down my farm because if it didn't rain, I don't have crops, right?
So people in the developed world can get crop insurance and there's all kinds of systems
that basically pay them out and then they can argue with the insurance company if they
don't get paid out properly and whatever.
And this allows people to smooth out risk.
In fact, a lot of the global options markets were about this, right?
They were initially about people selling their produce or their crops ahead of time so that
if there was a risk of drought, they weren't impacted by it, right?
And that's where a lot of options trading and all this kind of stuff came from, even
though it's now turned into this kind of global casino.
But in the emerging market, there are literally people that if they don't have rain for two
seasons, they need to close down their farm and become a migrant worker of some kind.
And now they have a $50 Android phone where they can read Wikipedia, but they're still
decades away from an insurance company coming to their geography and offering them insurance
because their local legal system simply doesn't allow that type of thing to exist.
No insurance company is going to go and create an insurance entity and offer them insurance
because the levels of fraud and the ability to resolve that fraud through courts would
just not exist.
So now these people have to wait for decades to have this very basic form of financial
protection or something like a bank account even.
And with this technology, they don't, right?
So with this technology, if I have a $50 Android phone and the smart contract has data from
satellites or weather stations about the weather conditions in the geography that my farm
is in, I can put value into the smart contract.
And the smart contract will automatically pay me back out at my Android phone.
And guess what?
I just leapfrogged past my corrupt government not being able to provide a legal infrastructure
to create insurance.
I just leapfrogged past dealing with insurance companies that will probably price gouge me
and often not pay out.
And I leapfrogged into the world of hyper-reliable kind of guaranteed smart contract outcomes
that are as good or in many cases better than what farmers in all parts of other parts of
the world have.
And this type of dynamic for the emerging markets of creating a way for people to control
and manage risk in their economic life, I think extends way past insurance.
It extends to them having bank accounts to combat local inflation.
It extends to them being able to sell their goods on the global free market of global
trade without middlemen.
It extends to all these things that we don't really care about, right?
Because we're not farmers, but are unbelievably impactful for people that don't have a bank
account and their inflation rate in their country is double digits, or their farm completely
depends on rain, or their livelihood completely depends on their ability to sell goods.
And they can't sell those goods because there's a middleman who essentially controls all
the trust relationships.
But now now we have the internet and smart contracts, and that might not have to be the
case in the next five or 10 years.
Yes.
So that definitely has a quality of life impact on the particular farmer's life.
But I suspect it has a huge like down the line ripple effect on the whole supply chain.
So if you think about farmers, but any other people that produce things that are part of
a large logistics network, like supply chain network, that means when you increase reliability,
you increase transparency and control, but where anyone know in that supply chain network
can formalize the way it operates in its agreements with others, then you could just have a very
like at scale, transformative effect on how people that down the line use the services
that you provide, the products that you create operate.
So like, it's almost hard to imagine the possible ways it might transform the world.
I wonder how much friction there is in the system, I guess, currently that smart contracts
might remove.
That's almost unknown.
You can sort of hypothesize and stuff, but I wonder, I've seen enough bureaucracy in
my life to know that smart contracts in many cases would remove bureaucracy.
And I wonder how the world will be once you remove much of the bureaucracy coming from
the Soviet Union, where I just has seen the life sucked out of the innovative spirit of
human nature by bureaucracy.
I wonder the kind of amazing world that could be created once bureaucracy is removed.
Yeah, I think it's fascinating how the world can evolve.
I think this extends a lot further than people think into many, many different parts of the
global economy.
It might start with NFTs for art, or it might start with DeFi, or it might start with fraud-proof
ad networks next.
We don't know what it's going to go to next, but I think the implication of people being
in a system of contracts that holds them accountable and guarantees contractual outcomes, regardless
of a local legal system, is something that I think extends to the supply chain.
You can prove that goods were sourced in an ethical way, and you can prove that in
a way that can't be gained.
That'll change buying power and supplier power and how people produce goods that we all
consume.
On the political level, I personally think that in a number of decades, we could literally
be in a place where politicians can commit to a certain set of smart contract kind of
budget definitional kind of results.
For example, we discovered oil.
I promised as a politician, I'm going to take the oil and I'm going to redistribute it to
all of you.
Well, that's wonderful.
That's a great idea.
Sounds very nice when you're running for office.
Why don't we codify that in a smart contract, and why don't we put those conditions very
solidly on a blockchain, and then once you've been elected, we'll just turn that one on,
and it'll distribute the money just like you said, and everything will be fine.
I personally think that this new level of systems that allows trustworthy collaboration
between everybody, between supply chain partners, ad network users, the financial system, insurance
companies, and farmers, all of these are just interactions that require a trusted entity,
or in this case, a trusted piece of code, to orchestrate the interaction in the way
that everyone agrees.
Yeah.
One of the things that makes the United States fascinating is the founding documents, and
it's fascinating to think of us moving into the new in the 21st century to a digital version
of that.
So the constitution, a smart constitution, no offense to the paper constitution, and
that would have transformative effects on politicians and governments, holding people
accountable.
Oh man, that's so exciting to think that we might enforce accountability through the
smart contract process.
Exactly.
Why can't that happen?
Anything that we could codify into a smart contract, and anything that we all agree
is the way the world should work, and then anything that we can get proof about, anything
that a system somewhere could tell us happened, those are the pieces of the puzzle.
We need a trusted piece of code.
We need to have agreement that that's how the world should work, and we need a system
that'll tell that trusted piece of code what happened.
As long as we have those three things, we can theoretically codify any set of agreements
about anything where those three properties take hold.
I wonder if you can apply that to military conflict and so on.
Recently, the Biden announced that we're going to pull off from Afghanistan after 20 years
in the war.
I wonder, there's a lot of debacles around war in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq,
all those kinds of things.
I wonder if that was instead formulated as a smart contract.
That might have actually huge impact on the way we do conflict.
You think of a smart contract as a kind of win-win situation where you're doing financial
transactions or something like that, but you could see that also about military conflict
or whenever two nations are at tension with each other, different scales of conflict,
that you could have conflict codified.
That would potentially resolve conflict much faster because there's honest transparency
and control within that conflict, because there's conflict in this world.
Again, very inspiring to think about the effects it might have on the negative kinds
of contracts and the tense, painful kinds of contracts.
I haven't thought about that as much as actually scary the stuff you're thinking through now
with the war contracts or something.
That's not in the white paper.
We don't have anything about war contracts or anything.
Again, we're both Russian, but I'm a little more Russian in the suffering side.
Maybe I read way too much Dostoevsky and military kind of ideas, but anyway, holding politicians
accountable in all forms, I think is really powerful.
Is there something you could say as a small aside on how smart contracts actually work
if we look at the code?
Is there some nice way to say technically, what is a smart contract?
What does it mean to codify these agreements, the actual process for people who might not
at all be familiar?
I think you just write it into code that operates in this kind of decentralized infrastructure.
You usually write code that runs in a central server somewhere.
Now you write code that runs across a lot of different machines in this decentralized
way.
Then after you write it, you need services.
That's where oracles come in.
They provide all the services.
Just like you would be writing code in Web 2.0 land running it on a server somewhere
and using an API.
Here you'd be writing code, putting it on a decentralized infrastructure like a blockchain
or a smart contract platform like Ethereum.
Then you would be using various services in the form of oracles.
They'll just be called oracles or decentralized services instead of APIs.
You're basically composing the same type of architecture except it's hyper-reliable.
At the moment, it's a little bit less efficient because there's an early stage to our industry,
but it provides this extreme level of reliability and transparency, which for certain use cases
is an absolute critical component and is completely reinventing how they work.
I think people should look at what are the use cases where that trust dynamic can be
so heavily improved.
That's probably the ones where this is maybe initially useful.
But I mean, just to emphasize, I don't think people realize when you say code that we're
talking about non-obfuscated actual program, you can read it, you can understand it.
There's something about, maybe this is my computer science perspective, like software
engineering perspective, but there's something about the formalism of programming languages
which enforces simplicity and clarity and transparency.
Because it's seen to everybody, simplicity is enforced.
There's something about natural language, like language as written in the Constitution,
for example, where there's so many interpretations.
With the nice thing about programs, there's not going to be a huge number of books written
about what was meant by this particular line because it's pretty clear.
Programming languages have a clarity to them that natural language does not.
They don't have ambiguity, which I think it's important to pause on because it's really
powerful.
It's really difficult to think about.
I think we live in a world where all the philosophers and legal minds don't know how
to program, so I think not all, most don't.
We don't often see the philosophical impact of this kind of idea that the agreements
between humans can be written in a programming language.
That's a really transformative idea.
It's an idea that's not just technical, it's not just financial, it's philosophical, it's
rethinking human nature from a digital perspective.
What is human civilization?
It's interaction between humans and rethinking that interaction as a digital interaction that
is managed by programming languages, by programs, by code.
That's fascinating that we'll look back at this time potentially as one where us little
descendants of apes did not realize how important this moment in history is.
Human beings might be totally different a century from now because we codified the interaction
between humans.
That might have more of an impact than anything else we do today.
You think about the impact of the internet, one of the cool things is digitization of
data, but we have not yet integrated the tools, the mechanisms fully that use that data and
interact with humans yet, and that's what smart contracts do.
I wonder if you think about the role of artificial intelligence in all of this because your smart
contracts are kind of agreements, maybe you disagree with this, but at least the way I'm
thinking about it is agreements between humans or groups of humans, but it seems like because
everything's operating in the digital space that you can integrate non-humans into this
or AI systems that help out humans, manage by humans.
What do you think about a world of hybrid smart contracts codifying agreements between
hybrid intelligent being networks of humans and AI systems?
Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense.
In terms of AI, I'm not an expert, so it might be a bit simplistic or naive my ideas in this
field.
I think everyone saw the Terminator movie.
Everybody saw the Terminator movie in the 90s and it was like, this is really scary.
I personally think AI is amazing and makes perfect sense.
I think it will evolve to a place where people have, just to understand, I work in the world
of trust issues.
I work in the world of how can technology solve trust and collaboration issues using encryption,
using cryptographically guaranteed systems, using decentralized infrastructure.
That's the world that I've been inhabiting for many, many years now, building smart contracts
for seven or eight, doing stuff before that.
It's kind of what I'm focused on.
I view AI through that same lens and my brain naturally asks, well, what is the trust issue
that people might have with AI?
My natural kind of response is, well, let's say AI continues to be built and improve at
some point, I have no clue where we are on this now, I've seen different ideas that were
very far from this.
I've seen other ideas very close to this.
At a certain point, we'd arrive at a place with AI where we would be a little bit worried
about just how much it could do.
We might be worried that AI could do things we don't want it to do, but we still want
to give AI a level of control over our lives.
In my world, that's a trust issue.
The way that that trust issue would be solved with blockchains is actually very straightforward
and I think in its simplicity, quite powerful.
You could have an AI that has an ability to do and control key parts of your and our lives.
But then you could limit it with private keys and blockchains and create certain guardrails
and firm walls and limits to what the AI could never go past, assuming that encryption continues
to work.
Assuming that if it's not that AI's specialization to break encryption, that it wouldn't be able
to do that.
If you have an AI that controls something very important, whatever it is, shipping or
something in defense or something in the financial system, whatever it is, but you're sitting
there and you're worried, hey, this thing is unbelievable.
It's coming up with things we wouldn't have thought of in 100 years, but maybe it's a
little too unbelievable.
How do you limit it?
Well, if you bake in private keys and you bake in these blockchain-based limitations,
you can create the conditions beyond which an AI could never act.
This could once again be codified in the very specific unambiguous terms in which you described,
which once again in my trust issue-focused world would solve the trust issue for users
and make them comfortable with using the AI or ceding control to the AI, which I think
in more advanced versions of AI will continue to be a concern.
This is fascinating.
Our contracts actually provide a mechanism for human supervision of AI systems.
With encryption, very encryption heavy.
It's not about, is it smarter than us?
It's about, will the encryption hold up?
So that's based on the assumption that encryption holds up.
I think that's a safe assumption.
We can get into that whole discussion from quantum computing, but cracking encryption
is very difficult.
That's a whole other discussion.
I think we're on the safe ground for quite a long time assuming encryption holds.
There's a space that is at the cutting edge of general intelligence research in the AI
community, which is the space of program synthesis or AI generating programs.
That's different than what you're referring to is AI being able to generate smart contracts.
And that to me is kind of fascinating to think of especially two AI systems between each
other generating contracts, sort of almost creating a world where most of the contracts
are between non-human beings.
I think an AI system, as I think about it, and once again, this is not my field.
This is something I might watch a YouTube video on or just see something interesting
about at some point.
I think if I were to just reason through it even now, I think the highly deterministic
and guaranteed nature of smart contracts would probably be preferable to an AI because I'm
guessing an AI would have a lot of problems with dealing with the human element of how
contracts work today.
An AI, for example, couldn't pick up the phone and call Dave at a bank to do a derivative
and discuss with Dave and have a call with him and have a conversation and get him comfortable
and tell him it's going to be fine and smooth out all the weird social cues that have to
do with making certain derivatives.
I'm assuming that that's a pretty complicated neural map AI problem.
If I think about it, the deterministic guaranteed nature of smart contracts, and assuming they're
accessible to AIs, could actually, interestingly enough, be the format that they prefer to codify
their relationship with non-AI systems and very possibly other AI systems because it
is pretty guaranteed.
All the other types of contracts that an AI could go out there and seek to do would require
some language processing around the law.
I think, I don't know if this is a term, but probably not a smart AI or a good AI or whatever
the term is for a high quality AI, would probably realize some of the limitations and the risks.
Yeah.
AI definitely dislikes ambiguity and would prefer the deterministic nature of smart contracts.
I do wonder about this particular problem and maybe you could speak to it of how smart
contracts can take over certain industries in a sense or how certain industries can convert
their sets of agreements into smart contracts, which is, you mentioned that we're talking
today from the bank, many of our laws, many of our agreements are currently through natural
language, through words, and so there is a process of mapping that has to occur in order
to convert the legal agreements, legal contracts of today to smart contracts that by the way
AI may be able to help with, but by way of question, how do you think we convert the
legal contracts on which many industries currently function today or not even legal contracts
but ambiguous kind of agreements, maybe they're loose sometimes into more formal deterministic
agreements that are represented by smart contracts?
So I think there's two, maybe two sides to this.
I think the first one is actually not a huge problem where you have things like the ISTA
master agreement for derivatives or you have these agreements that basically already reference
a system somewhere, like for example, many legal agreements already accept e-signature
and so they're saying, hey, I'm going to use this computing system over here around signatures
and there's laws around that and there's clauses that say e-signature is good enough for this
agreement.
I actually don't think this is a big problem for the vast majority of legal agreements
that use systems already, so what you'll do is you'll swap out one repository or one or
one set of system of contract settlement and you'll just say, hey, this blockchain system
over here is my new system of contract settlement, whatever it says is the state of the agreement
instead of the centralized system over there.
And so there's actually a huge amount of agreements that are already able to do that and I think
we'll do that.
I think there's another side to your question, which is the amount of agreements that are
very ambiguous that can be turned into smart contracts and I think the limitation there
is two-fold.
First of all, like you said earlier, the highly reliable smart contract and the lack of opaqueness
and the clarity of smart contracts is very high and very powerful and very clear and
it's in my opinion going to be much, much easier to take a smart contract and turn it
into a set of natural language explanations and just say, hey, this is what this does.
So I think that many contracts and even now in decentralized finance and DeFi and in
decentralized insurance, they're basically being rebuilt in this format and that rebuilding
will make them clearer, like you said, and then restating those in natural language and
explaining to people, well, if the weather does this, I think it'll actually be a lot
simpler to explain to people what the contract is about.
Like mapping smart contracts, it's a natural language, I didn't even think about that.
So you're saying that's doable and natural and easy to do.
Because there's so much clear, right?
There's that forced clarity that you talked about.
I think the second aspect of this problem is the nuance around what contracts can be
made unambiguous and I think that often comes down to proving what happened, which is where
Oracle Networks and Decentralized Oracle Networks and Chainlink would come in and our experience
there is quite extensive over the many years that we've worked on many different contract
types.
I think what it fundamentally comes down to is whether there is data.
So we're not going to be able to make a hybrid smart contract about whether somebody painted
your house the right color blue.
We're just not going to be doing that because there's no data feed that tells us that your
house was painted blue or that it was the right color of blue unless somebody sets up
a drone with a color analysis tool and they generate that data.
Which by the way, it could be possible, right?
If there's enough demand, then the service would be created that has drones flying around
that's telling you about the colors of all this kind of stuff.
So if there's actual demand that that would be created and because there would be value
to connect that data feed to the smart contracts and so on.
I think you have it unbelievably right because there are already insurance companies that
use drones to monitor construction sites from overhead and see how many people are wearing
hard hats.
And if the percentage of people wearing hard hats isn't sufficiently high, then the policy
is voided.
And so in that case, there is a data source and that data source can be put into a hybrid
smart contract.
So the limitation of hybrid smart contracts is, is there a data source or a set of data
sources to create definitive truth, to settle the contract and eliminate ambiguity?
And then as you said, I think as people realize that smart contracts are a format in which
they can form agreement about things like that insurance product around, you know, how
many people are wearing hard hats.
If I'm the construction site owner, well, you know, I would really like a guarantee
that your insurance policy is going to pay me out if everyone is wearing hard hats.
And in that case, there is demand for the data and people will generate the data.
And I actually think the insurance industry is interestingly a precursor of this because
they're so data driven.
You already see insurance companies paying IOT companies to put data into their customers
infrastructure at the cost of the insurance company to generate the data that the insurance
company uses to make a policy for the customer.
So you basically already have people who really want to price data into their agreements
when they're sufficiently high value paying for their own customers to get data sensors
into their infrastructure.
And I think as smart contracts become more of a requested format or data driven contracts
become more of a format, there will be a growing demand about proving what happened through
data.
Providing totally new data fees being created.
By the way, the insurance industry broadly, the revolutions there will be huge.
I've worked quite a bit with autonomous vehicles, semi-autonomous and just vehicles in general.
The insurance industry there by the way, makes a huge amount of money, but is using very
crappy data fees, revolutionizing how like not by crap, I mean very crude, like literally
the insurance is based on things like age, like basic demographic information as opposed
to really high resolution information about you as an individual, which you may or may
not want to provide.
So you can choose from an individual perspective to provide a data feed and there like the
power of insurance to enable the individual to empower the individual could be huge because
ultimately smart contracts motivate the use of data, the creation of new data feeds, but
leveraging the whatever service it provides in truth as opposed to some kind of very loose
notion of who you are.
So that, again, not sure how that would change things in terms of the fundamental experience
of life.
Because I think we all rely on insurance, not just in business, but in life.
And grounding that insurance and more and more accurate representation of reality might
just have transformative effects on society.
Well, just to mention one quick thing that you said, where I noticed another trust issue,
you said the user might not want to share their data.
So what you could actually do and what we've already worked on is you can have a smart
contract that holds the data and evaluates the data of the user without sharing it with
the insurance company.
And the insurance company knows that the smart contract will evaluate it according to the
policy.
They don't need the data and the user can provide the data knowing it'll never touch the insurance
company because it's only provided to the smart contract and suddenly you've solved another
trust issue because an autonomous piece of code can evaluate information separately from
the interests of both of the counterparties.
And so this is the recurring theme.
I think you're seeing this recurring theme where there's a trust issue.
People can't use a system.
They can't collaborate.
They can't share information that would make a better agreement for both of them.
They can't solve a risk in their daily life.
They can't participate in a market.
They can't have a bank account because nobody will give it to them because they can't give
it to them in that legal system.
And once you have an autonomous piece of code that can also know what's going on thanks
to Oracle Networks and that combination of the code and the Oracle Network for the hybrid
smart contract, the same pattern just recurs.
It's really the same pattern.
And this is why I keep saying trust issues.
Because I basically almost every contractual trust issue that I see where there is a piece
of data to prove and settle the trust issue in a way that works for both parties.
There is no reason not to use an autonomous, highly reliable contract and piece of code.
And I have to tell you, I've seen this in a lot of different industries.
I've seen it insurance, ad networks, global finance, global trade.
Those are all multi-trillion dollar industries.
And then there are other smaller industries.
Like even one of the first smart contracts we worked on many years ago was for search
engine optimization firms where they would tell you, hey, I'm going to raise your search
engine ranking, give me the money.
And people wouldn't want to give them the money because they never knew if they were
going to do it.
And then the search engine firm doesn't want to do any work thinking they'll never get
any money.
So we just initially even came up with a system where you could put Bitcoin into a smart contract
and it would be released based on whether the search rank of a website got to a certain
level on Google for a certain keyword.
And so the trust problem was solved.
But it's just the same story.
It's kind of like trust issues around AI, trust issues around financial products, trust
issues around insurance, trust issues around social media, whatever it is.
I think that's what people looking at this industry really need to understand.
And once they do understand, they realize what this is all about.
This is about redefining how everyone collaborates with everyone about everything where we can
prove something through data.
You've mentioned confidentiality and privacy that the parties don't need to necessarily
know private data in this interaction.
You talk about confidentiality in the white paper for Chainlink 2.0.
Can you talk more about how to achieve confidentiality in this process?
Sure, absolutely.
So I think you once again need to think of the contract as existing in two parts.
You have the on-chain code and then you have this off-chain system called the decentralized
Oracle network.
So the question is really what portion of the contract should live in what part of these
two systems?
So if you want to create transparency, you should put more information on chain because
that's what blockchains are very good at.
They're public, transparent, but they don't necessarily have privacy.
Well, you can see how those two things are a little bit completely diametrically opposed.
So I do think and I do see blockchains working on on-chain encrypted smart contracts.
That's very inefficient.
It has a lot of nuances around it.
That I think will appear at some point.
I think until it appears, you have an option of taking a part of the computation and putting
it into the decentralized Oracle network.
We actually did an entire paper about this that we presented at Stanford in February
of last year, something called Mixacles, which basically talks about how you can take an
Oracle network and you can put a portion of the computation into the Oracle network, assuming
that you're comfortable with that limited set of nodes, knowing what the computation
is, and you can actually provide additional confidentiality through special hard work
called trusted execution environments that all those nodes are forced to run so they
won't even know what they're operating.
And so at the end of the day, if you look at a hybrid smart contract as gaining functionality
from its on-chain code and gaining other functionality from its off-chain, decentralized
Oracle network component, you can place the part of the computation that you would like
to be private in the decentralized Oracle network because you can control the set of
nodes, you can control the committee of nodes, and you can require that they run certain
hardware to keep the information private, right?
So you could basically make a derivative that or a binary option is the example used in
the Mixacles paper where the payout happened on chain, but it was actually impossible to
tell what the outcome of the contract was.
So the outcome of the contract was computed in the decentralized Oracle network, and then
there was a switch that triggered who received the payment.
But from the point of view of analyzing the on-chain transactions and seeing who received
the payment or what the outcome of the contract was, you couldn't derive that, you couldn't
backward engineer what that was.
But the users of that hybrid smart contract still had on-chain code that guaranteed them
that as long as the decentralized Oracle network found a certain outcome, determined a certain
outcome that the relevant user would get paid and there was still a place to put value.
So there is this kind of fundamental tension between confidentiality, privacy, which is
very important for many contracts, which is critical to many contracts, and the public
and transparent nature of blockchains, which I think eventually will be solved through
encrypted on-chain smart contracts.
That'll take some time.
I think that'll take years, in my opinion.
And before we arrive there, I think people will put the private portion into the centralized
Oracle network.
Once again, going back to what the decentralized Oracle networks do, they seek to provide these
services.
So the ability to do a privacy-preserving computation is perhaps a service without which
a certain type of contract might never come into existence in the form of an on-chain
hybrid smart contract.
And so this is, once again, what we see decentralized Oracle networks and decentralized services
doing is providing people these tools and building blocks to compose, like, I'm great
at making these derivatives contracts, but I can't make them unless I can retain the
privacy of them.
And our goal is to provide the infrastructure that gives you as a developer and as a creator
of smart contracts that capability.
And what we've seen is that as we provide that capability, people create more, which
is also really the story of the internet.
The story of the internet is it was really tough to do e-commerce while everything was
an HTTP and credit cards were transmitted publicly.
And so e-commerce was kind of tough because how am I going to send my credit card over
public unencrypted channels, right?
But the second HTTPS appears, e-commerce becomes a lot easier because I can put in my credit
card number and it can be sent over an encrypted channel and, you know, it's not at risk.
And so I can participate in e-commerce as long as I have a credit card.
I think those types, and I'm sure that was unexpected, right?
I'm sure at the time that was an unexpected outcome from that technology.
And so I think this is why we sometimes have this focus on privacy because in our work
with contracts and their transition into this hybrid smart contract form, we see a substantial
amount of need for privacy as an inherent property of these contracts.
And it'll take a while before that's possible to create the kind of technology innovation
required to do that on chain.
I know there's a few ideas that are being floating about, but so the currently distributed
Oracle network to provide that feature, which is essential to many contracts.
What brings to mind in this whole space, again, it might be outside of your expertise, but
within the world which I'm passionate about, which is machine learning, and it seems like
very naturally because current machine learning systems are very data hungry.
And much of the value mined by companies in the digital space are from data.
They often want their data to maintain privacy.
So you think about an autonomous vehicle space, Tesla is collecting a huge amount of data,
Waymo is collecting a huge amount of data.
It seems like it'll be very beneficial to form contracts where one could use the data
from the other in some kind of privacy preserving way, but also where all the uses of data
are codified and you can exchange value cleanly, basically contracts over data, over machine
learning systems use of different data.
I don't know, do you talk to machine learning folks that use ideas of smart contracts or
is that outside of your interest?
Because it seems like exceptionally applicable set of, when we talk about different services
that might be created and revolutionized by smart, especially hybrid smart contracts,
I think machine learning systems comes to mind to me in all industries.
I don't know if you've gotten a chance to interact with those folks, with those services.
I think what you're talking about is more data marketplaces in the data marketplace side
of things.
Well, this is actually once again very applicable because there's a trust issue.
At the end of the day, let's say I'm trying to sell you some data.
You don't know the quality of the data, so you don't know what you want to pay for it,
and I can't give you the data for you to determine the quality because I've given you the data.
Guess what?
We need an autonomous, impartial agent.
We need an impartial computational kind of agent, an on-chain smart contract with an
Oracle network to assess my data, to basically take random cross-section samples of the data
and assess it for quality, assess it for signal from the algorithm you have, which you don't
want to share with me because you don't want to know the algorithm you're working on, right?
You don't want me to know what you want the data for.
So now the autonomous agent takes your algorithm, keeping it private from me and takes my data,
keeping it private from you, assesses it on a random cross-section sampling for quality
of data, returns the scoring back to you, allows you to determine a price, and now both
you and me know that we've arrived at a fair price for the quality of my data for what
you want to do with it.
And that's, once again, from what I've seen in the data marketplaces, which are full of
people who want that data for these learning models, often for financial markets, often
for other reasons, this is their fundamental problem, which, amazingly enough, there's a
trust issue that is getting solved.
And I think you can see, even on the face of it, once that trust issue is solved, those
markets can work a lot better, right?
I don't need to know your algorithm.
You don't need to know my data.
We both know that the autonomous agent is not under either of our control and gave us
a fair assessment and a fair price, and that's it.
And we're all very comfortable with that.
I could even make conditions that your algorithm isn't analyzing the data for something I don't
want you to analyze it for, or you could make conditions that the data has to have any number
of properties.
And once again, you haven't leaked any signal to me, and I haven't leaked any data to you,
which is, once again, just another type of trust issue that all of this saw.
So it's the same pattern.
If you work in this industry long enough, or if you really look at these use cases long
enough, you'll simply come to the question, and this is the useful question, what is the
trust issue this is solving?
And then if you can get an answer to that question on a case-by-case basis, that's when
you'll understand why blockchains are relevant.
And then once you do that with enough use cases, it becomes a little bit mind-block.
You've mentioned trust quite a bit.
You also mentioned trust minimization in the chain link white paper.
Can we dig into trust a little bit more?
What is the nature of trust that you think about in these smart contracts?
What is trust minimization?
How do we accomplish achieve trust minimization?
Sure.
Sure.
I think it's important maybe to have a conception of what the alternative is, right?
What is highly reliable trust minimized off-chain and on-chain computation and alternative to?
So this is just kind of how I see the world in these two camps.
One camp is the traditional what I call brand-based or paper-guarantee camp.
And this is the world as pretty much most or all people know it today.
This is the world where there is a bank logo or an insurance company logo or some kind of
logo.
There's a very big building with marble arches and columns.
It's the biggest building in the town, it's bigger than the church, and everybody feels
very good.
Everybody's got such a nice logo.
It's such a big building.
Why don't I give them my money?
Why don't I interact with them on the basis of any kind of agreement?
And that's good.
And that is definitely better than that not being there.
And that is definitely a huge improvement for how people conduct commerce, letters of
credit from branded entities are very important for global trade to take place in the early
stages of global trade.
So that's good.
But it is fundamentally just a paper agreement with a legal framework behind it.
And if the paper agreement you have would say Robinhood or somebody else suddenly has
to change, well, it changes.
And you can't really do anything about it.
You won't be able to change anything about what happened there.
There's some long terms of service.
There's some other agreements around all this stuff.
At the end of the day, that's the brand based and paper guarantee world where it's all very
vague and opaque, and you're kind of hoping for the best because there's a nice logo.
It's been around 100 years, there's a lot of marble, a big building, lots of marbles.
This is why banks have such nice buildings, right?
It's not because they want to spend money on buildings.
It's to create confidence in them as an entity in order for people to transact through them.
This is why all these kind of go to cities that had gold rushes, go to cities that needed
banking as a service in certain time periods, they're the most beautiful buildings, at
least in the United States.
So this is the brand based paper guarantee model for which up until now there has never
been an alternative.
So up until now, if you had a bad experience with a bank or insurance company or some logo
somewhere, you would only have one option.
Your option would be to go across the road and down the block to another building with
another color of marble and another set of agreements that are fundamentally still paper
brand agreements.
Now for the first time, you have mathematical agreements.
You have mathematically guaranteed encryption secured, decentralized infrastructure powered
agreements, right?
This is really the shift.
This is really the comparison and the alternative through which people should view all of this,
in my opinion, because there's once again this conception that everything is fine, everything
works very well.
Well, it does.
It works fine and very well as long as nothing goes wrong.
And then in the cases when things go wrong, which they pretty much invariably at some
point do, then you find out that, well, turns out they don't have to pay me or turns out
I can't trade or turns out the ATMs can be locked up and only give me 66 euros per day,
whether I'm a business or an individual, like what happened in Greece a few years ago, right?
And the reality is that once that becomes a strong enough kind of realization for people,
I think they will all just migrate to mathematically guaranteed contracts because why wouldn't you?
So in the world of mathematically guaranteed contracts, kind of how do we, and cryptographically
secured and decentralized infrastructure powered, how do we evolve into that world?
Well, at the end of the day, it comes down to consensus, right?
It comes down to a collection of independent nodes, a collection of provably independent
computing systems arriving at the same conclusion impartially.
That conclusion might be the transaction is valid between address A and address B address
A has one Bitcoin wants to send it to address B now address B has one Bitcoin, right?
So that's one degree of validation.
It has certain cryptographic primitives that are used certain levels of cryptography encryption
and other methods that basically provide clarity and those guarantees.
But fundamentally, it's this level of consensus that multiple independent computing systems
came to the same conclusion, verified that conclusion and created a sense of finality,
created a final state that is globally considered to be the state of a transaction.
And that is how it's achieved, right?
So it's achieved by users looking at these mathematical contract systems and saying,
you know, if I have money in a bank, there's one single person who controls that money,
that's the bank, they could choose to give me my money or choose not to give me my money.
And that's great.
But maybe there's a percentage of what I own that I want to put into another system where
there's thousands of independent computing systems that are promising me, you know, with
the help of cryptographic primitives, that I will be able to always have access to this.
Whatever this is, whatever this token is, I will at least, or at the very least, I will
always have unfettered, complete control and access to it.
So that's one example.
Another example is, hey, we have a hybrid smart contract for something like crop insurance.
I as the user evaluate where this smart contract runs.
Oh, wow, the smart contract runs on Ethereum, great.
Thousands of nodes, lots of computational security, hash power, so on and so on.
Then I look at, oh, well, what triggers the contract?
Oh, there's this Oracle network.
Okay, it's composed of 25 nodes or 15 nodes, gets data from five different weather stations.
You know, I'm comfortable with that.
I have a certain level of comfort with that hybrid smart contract and its ability to provide
me consensus about the transaction, once the contract knows what's happened, and I'm comfortable
with the consensus around the event that controls the contract, right?
Because once again, that event is what determines what happens with the contract.
And if the contract is super well written, it doesn't matter if the event isn't reliable,
right?
So now I've made this determination, I've gotten all this clear transparent information
about this system that combines the contract code with a decentralized Oracle network,
and I've made my decision to participate in this decentralized insurance kind of crop
insurance policy.
I've sent the Bitcoin or the stablecoin or whatever I have on my Android phone, and
then time goes by and let's say it doesn't rain, lo and behold, the smart contract returns
the relevant amount from the policy back to me, I continue my life as a farmer.
And by the way, the fact that that happened contributes reputation and contributes proof
back to both the contract as something that can prove to other people that it has settled
and the Oracle network as something that can prove that it has properly assessed reality
or properly triggered a contract.
And this is where there's one of many network effects where the more that smart contracts
and Oracle networks are used, they themselves generate this immutable on chain data that
proves their value and reliability and improving more and more of that in more and more kind
of use cases and more and more variants of the same contract, they arrive at a greater
body of proof that they like I am the decentralized crop, the decentralized insurance contract
for crop insurance used by a million users.
And my failure rate is not existent or really low.
And here's my Oracle network.
And by the way, it's also settled a million of these.
And so it's not the logo, right?
It's not, hey, what nice, what a nice logo you have on top of a building above a train
terminal or something.
It's much more, hey, there's a million people, there's a million separate contracts that
got settled correctly.
I have all the proof that I could ever need about that.
And it's not something that's very easy to gain, right?
Because real value was at stake, real value was moved around.
And so I think once again, the transparency aspect comes in where you're able to prove
that the cryptographically enforced contracts are better.
That said, you can still integrate the traditional banks as long as you create a data feed on
the amount of marble that's included.
So if that's valuable to you in terms of reputation, you can still integrate the amount of marble
and the size of the logo.
You can still keep the banks around.
I think we will.
I think what'll happen with the banks and all the insurance companies, by the way, is
not that they'll just die or something.
I think it'll be just like the internet.
There'll be some of them that adopt this and some of them that don't.
And some of them that do it faster, some of them that do it slower.
And that's an economic decision that they'll make.
I think their whole question is, is this a foregone conclusion?
I mean, I think my answer, my answer is yes, this is definitely going to be happening.
I think they still have a question of, is this going to change my industry?
But I'm seeing a definite shift in people's understanding.
And I think that shift is going to accelerate rapidly as one or two of their competitors
throw their hat in the smart contract ring and say, well, I have smart contracts.
I guarantee my outcomes to you.
What do they do for you?
It's risky.
Just use mine.
And the second some of them start losing business because of that, they're going to
move very quickly because that's what all of their compensation structures and their
all their goal planning structures are based around.
They're based around what is losing us business or getting us business.
Yeah.
It's fascinating.
Organizationally, though, to think about banks, they're very old school and their ability
to move quickly is questionable to me.
I just look at basic online banking, like how good banks are creating a frictionless
online experience and I think they're not very good.
And so that speaks to the kind of people who are in leadership positions at banks, the
kind of people they hire, the kind of culture there is.
So I do wonder if banks will from inside revolutionize themselves to include smart contracts or
whether totally new competitors will have to emerge that basically create new kinds
of banks, whether what is the company square?
I think it comes up out of nowhere, really, with Cash App and they have Bitcoin on Cash
App, whether they will start incorporating smart contracts and they will revolutionize
the whole banking industry or whether Bank of America will revolutionize themselves
from within.
I'm skeptical on Bank of America, but you never know.
It's in general, I'm fascinated by how big organizations, whether it's Google and Microsoft
or Bank of America, pivot hard in a world that's quickly changing.
I think that takes bold leadership and a lot of firing and a lot of pain and a lot of meetings
where the one asshole brings up from first principles idea that, you know what, the ways
we've been doing stuff in the past require, you know, we need to throw that out and do
stuff totally differently.
I know a lot of those assholes in a lot of these different industries.
First of all, I think they're getting listened to more and second of all, I think all of
these places, as I look at it more and more, I think they have a fundamental line of business
that they try to protect and then everybody's compensation and everybody's metrics and
goals is focused around that line of business.
So the second that things begin to impact that, then everybody will be in a senior meeting
and that asshole will be quite listened to because he will have the only thoughtful explanation
as to why this is happening, how things will evolve from there.
I actually don't know because that hasn't been the case yet.
But my thinking is that there will be people who don't want to cannibalize certain parts
of their business or don't want to change certain parts of their business.
And then there will be people who say, look, I think this is how the world's going to work.
We're going to make a very, very heavy kind of set of commitments to put resources towards
this.
I already see that with a few banks working on various blockchain based systems.
But granted, they've been working on those for years.
So I think all of this comes down to these kind of quarterly earnings calls where somebody
asks them, hey, I saw that bank over there wants the blockchain bond or a smart contract
derivative platform.
And I also saw that they made $10 billion in revenues or $10 billion in volume or whatever
it is from that.
What's your plan on the earnings call?
And I promise you, by the next earnings call, there's a plan.
And then the question on the next one is, well, when's the plan going to happen?
And then by the next earnings call, it's a plan is happening.
And that's what these people are sensitive to.
That's what these organizations are structured around.
It's not completely economically disconnected.
They have this core business.
They want to protect it.
I understand that idea.
But I think the problem with that is sometimes it requires this myopic focus.
And that's what all the innovation stuff is about.
Every time somebody at a corporate entity is about innovation, they're trying to sidestep
this.
But once again, the incentives to maintain whatever the core business is so strong that
the innovation people, even though they are there, I think they get a phone call and go
like, what are we doing for this?
And the ones that actually did good work and got ready to do something for this have done
their employer and their organization a very positive service.
Whereas the ones that aren't ready, I mean, they'll make up something and maybe they're
really smart and they'll get it together.
I don't know.
Can we talk about tokens a little bit?
Generally speaking, there's been a meteoric rise of a bunch of different tokens.
We could just talk about Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples.
Bitcoin, I think, crossed $60,000 in value.
What are your thoughts in general on this rise?
What's the future of Bitcoin?
What's the future of Ethereum?
There's the total value locked metric that I think generalizes the different kind of
value of these tokens.
What does the future value and impact of cryptocurrency look like if we look through the lens of
these tokens?
I think valuing all these tokens and determining that isn't something I'm particularly great
at.
I haven't spent a lot of time on that.
I've spent the vast majority of my time on building these systems and architecting them
and getting them to fruition and getting them to a place where they operate properly on
both the technical and the crypto economic and in every other sense.
I think with Bitcoin, there is a certain conception of non-governmental fiat money that Bitcoin
is really the first creator of.
There's this very powerful idea called fiat money.
It's basically more or less a kind of 40-year experiment.
I think on August 15th of this year is maybe, I think, given the 40th anniversary, a government
can say, hey, I have a currency and it's worth something and here it is.
In terms of the way that governments have stopped that in the past is if anyone tries
to make another fiat currency in their country, they immediately shut it down.
They immediately say, hey, this is really bad, you've done something really bad, it's
time for you to stop, don't do it anymore.
And it stops.
That's been the history of non-governmental fiat currency.
Bitcoin is really, due to its decentralized nature, the first and possibly in some cases
in many people's minds, the still the only true non-governmental fiat currency.
Now, how powerful is non-governmental fiat currency?
I have no idea.
This is why it's really as powerful as the ideas that people ascribe to it are.
So let's say people start saying, right now, people are saying, hey, it's internet money.
It's the money of the internet.
Okay, great.
What's that worth?
I don't know.
It's probably worth a lot.
I have no idea what it's worth.
The idea as a concept to underpin the fiat money, the let there be aspect of fiat and
of Bitcoin, you basically look at it and you say, yeah, internet money, okay, that could
be worth whatever, 60,000, 600,000.
Great question, right?
There are other versions of the world where people say, there are countries that don't
have a good fiat currency and I see a lot of people using Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin isn't internet money, it's countries without a good currency money.
So all the countries without a good currency now use Bitcoin and let there be Bitcoin as
this, as this conception of Bitcoin.
What's the value of that?
I don't know.
That's a great question, probably huge amount of value.
Then there's a further conception of Bitcoin as some digital gold, there's a scarcity dynamic,
there's all these other kinds of dynamics.
What is a portable version of digital gold with some kind of built-in scarcity worth,
kind of artificially created scarcity?
What's that worth?
I don't know.
That's a great question.
I haven't done the analysis on that as the point.
It might be worth a lot.
What is it all worth if all three of these things flow into the same fiat, kind of let
there be Bitcoin as these three things, conception of Bitcoin?
I don't know what that's worth.
I also don't know what that's worth, but could be worth a huge amount.
So I personally don't think it's super important what I think it's worth or what many other
people think it's worth.
I don't think that's really that important.
I think what's probably important is understanding what the societal conception of Bitcoin is
and how does that societal conception evolve over time?
And that, interestingly enough, doesn't just depend on you or me or the people who made
Bitcoin or anything else, it actually depends on current events.
So for example, if people suddenly say, I'm more and more worried about fiat currency,
I'm more and more worried that governmental fiat, even if it's the most reliable version
of that, is not as good as I thought it was.
Maybe I should go on the PayPal app and maybe I should get some Bitcoin just in case.
What's the world where Bitcoin is a certain percentage of everyone's ownership as a hedge
against governmental fiat money not being so good?
Nothing done the analysis, but another example, here's this conception, that's the conception.
So when I look at Bitcoin, what I see is a lot of these fascinating conceptions of what
the fiat let there be value of Bitcoin is.
By the way, all of them could be true.
Maybe some of them are true.
Maybe some of them aren't true.
And the fascinating thing is that I've seen this conception change.
So when I started in the Bitcoin space, the conception was micropayments.
The cost of Bitcoin is low, we'll have micropayments, micropayments are wonderful for machine to
machine transactions, micropayments are wonderful in the emerging market.
And that's fine.
And that was one conception of Bitcoin as let there be Bitcoin as micropayments platform.
But then the value rose and things changed, there was enough expansion in certain ways.
And now the conception has evolved into this other conception.
But at the end of the day, I think governments have a very clear set of steps for directing
the public's conception of their fiat, right?
They say our fiat is worth this for these, these, these reasons.
Bitcoin doesn't have that.
Bitcoin doesn't have an official Bitcoin spokesperson that goes out and says, the non-governmental
money called Bitcoin, the non-governmental fiat money called Bitcoin has value on the
basis of this, this, this and this.
Here's our fiscal budget, here's our future plans.
Our money will continue to be safe and secure and reliable.
And so what that whole creates is a whole that we all fill, right?
We all basically come to some vague kind of group understanding that Bitcoin is worth
this because it is tied to, let's say, all non-governmental fiat money comes into question
and everybody doubts it, possibly due to inflation.
And everybody says, you know, this is nice, but I'd like to keep 10, 20% of my, of my
wealth in non-governmental fiat, just in case, you know, what, what are those numbers?
I mean, if that happens, you know, I'm guessing you can add a few zeros.
I like how you say, I haven't done the analysis as if I'm sure a lot of people have done quote,
quote, analysis, but it's not, it's still speculation.
Nobody can predict the future, especially when so much of it has to do with a large
number of people holding an idea in their mind as to the importance of a particular
technology like Bitcoin.
There's a lot of excitement by its possibilities, but the number of zeros you add is a, is an
open question and nobody can do a perfect analysis, except whoever created this simulation.
Let me ask you this question.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
There's quite a few people who suggest that person is you.
So is it you?
No.
Who do you think it could be?
I don't know who it is.
I think if I had to guess, it's probably a group of people, some of which might not even
be around anymore.
Obviously, I'm very grateful to, if this is a singular or a group of people for kicking
off this entire industry and making this amazing change in the world, that I have the privilege
and luxury of being part of and in some small way in the work that I do.
I think also this kind of focus on who is Satoshi or who isn't Satoshi shouldn't, in
my opinion, matter so much because regardless of who it is, that in my opinion should have
no substantial significant effect or bearing on the functioning or the value or the use
or the security of the Bitcoin system.
So I think whoever it is, they're probably better off not making that public.
And I think beyond that, whoever it turned out to be shouldn't matter because it has
nothing to do with how the system is made useful or secure or anything else.
And so I think that's the point of view that I have.
Now if you were Satoshi Nakamoto, would you tell me?
Because you said they shouldn't, whoever Satoshi is, you should keep that private.
So would you tell it to me or no?
We're in some kind of weird thought experiment here.
If I was this guy, let me think about this, which I'm not by the way, I am not this person.
But if you were, would you say it?
I think probably not.
I think that they would cause a lot of distraction and a lot of weird stuff.
And so realistically, I don't think it would help anybody or even the person who discloses
it.
But just to be clear, I am not.
And whoever it is, I think they haven't said anything because they don't want the attention
and they don't want the distraction and they don't want all the problems from this.
And that makes sense to me conceptually.
It's fascinating to think if they're still out there and part of the Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency
community.
And it is inspiring to think that if they're out there that they're not revealing their
identity because it would be a distraction.
That's kind of inspiring that people are like that.
It's like George Washington relinquishing powers inspiring because it's ultimately about the
progress of the community and that's some kind of ego driven attention scheme.
Again, very inspiring.
Humans that they're best are inspiring.
What do you think about the certainty that people in the Bitcoin Maximus community have
about this particular piece of technology, Bitcoin?
Is there something interesting that you think that you might want to say about this community
or is it just is what it is?
I think at the end of the day results speak for themselves and Bitcoin has had an amazing
impact on our industry and has had an amazing impact on the world.
And I think the result is still that Bitcoin is very widely adopted and driving the adoption
of our industry in many ways.
So I think it's very difficult for people to say that Bitcoin Maximus don't have something
that they can latch onto and say, hey, there's something very real here.
I think there's been decisions made by the Bitcoin community and the people who made
the Bitcoin protocol to focus it on Bitcoin and to focus it on the kind of storing of
the ledger of Bitcoin and the information about Bitcoin and the transaction of Bitcoin
and to focus on securing that.
And I understand why that decision was made to a certain degree, right?
It was about focus.
It was about getting something worthwhile, right?
Without adding additional features and additional risk.
And that decision is a decision that was made and has kind of the benefits of focus and
the benefits of a certain amount of security and a certain amount of guarantees around
Bitcoin and what that is and the value of that.
And then it has certain limitations as a consequence of doing less or having the system hold data
that isn't related to Bitcoin or not having the system hold contractual outcomes or smart
contract code.
So I think it's just kind of a decision, right?
And I understand why they're excited and I'm very excited.
I started in this industry going to Bitcoin meetups and I met a lot of fantastic people,
libertarian people that wanted to see the world work differently and shared a lot of
my beliefs and a lot of my points of view.
And so anyone who's been in the industry as long as I have has had to come from the Bitcoin
ecosystem by virtue of kind of starting out that early.
So I have an unbelievable amount of respect and admiration and gratitude for Bitcoin and
that it exists and everything that it's done and that it birthed this industry.
There's absolutely no doubt about that.
At the same time, whatever design decisions people make are the design decisions they
make.
And so if you've made a design decision that this ledger and this thing will be about Bitcoin,
it won't be about colored coins, it won't be about op return at 80 bytes, it won't be
about these other kind of nuances that you don't want this to be about, then that's fine.
And that's a logical decision that's called focus and focus has a lot of value and a lot
of great technology products have focused on something and done that.
And then there's a lot of smart people around Bitcoin building kind of additional systems
that anchor their security within Bitcoin.
And I think that's an interesting approach that could bear fruit.
I think it'll eventually require an interaction with a Bitcoin protocol in more advanced ways.
And then there will be another question of, what is the design decision for Bitcoin?
Is it that Bitcoin will be just about the Bitcoin ledger?
Or does Bitcoin want to evolve into an anchor for all these other systems and maybe create
additional data, kind of more data on the Bitcoin blockchain related to that?
So I'm excited to see how that evolves, but until then kind of results speak for themselves
and the results that Bitcoin has achieved for our industry and for itself as kind of
the dominant cryptocurrency and the conception of our industry that people interact with
first is obviously very important and something that I think really everybody in our industry
is grateful for, right?
Because without Bitcoin, where would our industry be?
And that's obviously something that we can't forget.
What are your thoughts about Ethereum in the chain link distributed oracle network world?
Is it competition?
Is it collaboration?
Is it complementary technology?
What do you think about Ethereum?
How much do you think about Ethereum?
What role does it have?
Yeah, I think about a lot.
I think we're completely complementary.
So there's no competitive dynamics in my opinion.
We are completely collaborative and complementary with Ethereum and all other blockchains and
all other layer twos that operate a contract, right?
So we do not seek to operate a smart contract.
We seek to augment and enable smart contracts to go further in what they're able to do.
In fact, oracle networks have some value, but they don't have nearly as much value in
what they do if there isn't a mission critical system like a smart contract that needs their
data, right?
So we've made our own explicit design decisions and created our own focus around guaranteeing
that smart contracts can go further.
We've already done that, right?
Decentralized finance, the rate at which we put data is to a degree, the rate at which
certain decentralized financial markets grow.
And as we put more data, we see more financial products go live, gaming, we provide VRF.
So we have this kind of focus and it's a very useful and valuable kind of valuable for our
industry focus.
At the end of the day, I think that smart contract platforms like Ethereum made a different
set of design decisions from Bitcoin and others and they focused on creating the smart contract
capability and they kind of wanted that functionality to exist.
And I think since then, there's been a number of people that try to improve on that or try
to make variants of that.
From our point of view, we want to support smart contracts in all of their variations
and in all of their use cases.
So one of the things that I personally like about Chainlink is their ability or Chainlink's
ability, the Chainlink network's ability to be useful to many different chains and across
many different use cases.
I'm personally, you know, a fan of Ethereum, Ethereum has done a huge amount for our industry
as well.
Ethereum took us from a world where it literally took months to make a new smart contract by
being forced to code it into a protocol.
You had to go to the protocol developers and you had to say, hey, I need a DEX or I need
some kind of smart contract, put it in the protocol itself, put it in the actual blockchain
mining and kind of block generation, transaction generation protocol.
That would take months or sometimes even over a year.
That was a horrible experience and obviously very few people wanted to participate in that
and so very few people made smart contracts, which I was not a fan of, right?
And then Ethereum came along and really did a lot of innovative things and introduced
this approach to scriptable smart contracts where you could script all of these different
conditions.
And I found that fascinating before Ethereum.
I found that fascinating once Ethereum arrived.
I found it fascinating after Ethereum launched and I still find it fascinating.
And I'm also very grateful to Vitalik and the Ethereum community and all the core developers
there for taking our industry a step further.
So I think they absolutely deserve a huge amount of credit for taking our industry from
it takes months to make a really small smart contract to it takes weeks to make a relatively
secure, relatively advanced piece of on-chain code that anybody can script and people can
do audits on and that's an unbelievable leap forward for our industry and I'm genuinely
grateful to them for that.
I think the next step in line with our body of work is how does that scriptable on-chain
code become more advanced in its interaction with all of the systems and events in the
real world, which is in my opinion, the final missing piece of the puzzle, right?
So my body of work, the body of work that I'm involved in would not be where it is right
now without Bitcoin by any measure.
It wouldn't even be where it is now without Ethereum and the growth in smart contract
development that they've created.
And now what I think is going to happen next is there will be a lot of different smart
contract platforms, a lot of different layer twos.
Some of them will be private for enterprise, some of them will be public.
There will be some public winners in certain geographies for maybe regulation reasons,
maybe other reasons.
There will be other public winners, you know, the larger internet and there will be a number
of different people building smart contracts in different languages.
We are excited and, you know, I am excited and the chain link community is excited.
And basically there's a lot of, I mean, for lack of a better word, excitement in seeing
our industry graduate to providing more use cases, more usable hybrid smart contracts,
right?
Because once again, it's absolutely amazing that Bitcoin created non-governmental fiat
money.
It's an unbelievable innovation and invented decentralized infrastructure and birth our
industry.
It's an unbelievably great achievement, an amazing achievement that we now have scriptable
smart contracts through something like Ethereum.
Once again, monumental achievement in my opinion.
Once again, we still need to look to the future.
We need to look to how do we take the decentralized infrastructure concepts that Bitcoin initially
put forward, that Ethereum then improved upon and created into these scriptable smart
contract formats and how do we expand that into the world of real world outcomes to
change the global financial industry, the global trade industry, the global data marketplace
industry, you know, the, and many other global industries.
You mentioned results speak for themselves and how design decisions have consequences.
You've, the chain link community have come up with a lot of brilliant designs.
So how do you think through the design choices that you're facing where you can't predict
the future, but you're trying to create a better future?
Is there something low level introspective advice that you can give or describe as to
how you think through those decisions or high level, how you think about those decisions?
Sure.
Absolutely.
I think that's a great question and I think that actually gets to the core of what the
chain link network is supposed to achieve.
We are supposed to achieve a maximally flexible system.
So once again, this is the big difference between chain link and Oracle networks in
general and block chains in my opinion.
Block chains do not seek to be maximally flexible, right?
They say, here's my block size.
Here's the transaction types you can, you can put in those blocks.
Here's the contract language I have.
Here's kind of my blockchain system, right?
Here's the fee structure for those blocks.
They're going to keep getting, you know, kind of composed transactions are going to get
put into blocks, blocks will get connected and it'll continue, right?
And that's a very focused type of system and that's great.
And that makes sense because it's focused on creating security for that category of
on chain activity, which is once again, a critical, critical part of building a highly
transparent system and something that chain link enables and, you know, doesn't compete
with and just enables to do more.
Oracle networks conversely have to interact with all the world's data and provide all
the services that block chains don't provide, right?
So there's kind of a spectrum on one end of the spectrum, you have block chains that
are highly secure, highly reliable, highly tamper proof, highly transparent, but are
not very feature rich.
For example, they cannot talk to an API.
Many of them can't generate randomness.
They cannot do some kind of privacy preserving computation.
So they're very secure and there are these kind of data structures and smart contract
platforms to hold on chain code that can define conditions, receive value, pay value
back out under conditions and create transparency around all that, which makes perfect sense.
And then there's oracles and oracle networks.
That is all the world's data, right?
We're talking about taking all the world's data and making it consumable for all the
world's use cases that have trust issues.
So the amount of variability there is absolutely massive, right?
It's like the decentralized oracle network and the conditions that that decentralized
oracle network needs to meet is going to vary very widely from an insurance contract to
a lending contract to an ad network contract to the data sales contract that we discussed
to any number of other smart contracts.
So really the ability of a decentralized oracle network to flexibly address all of those requirements
is what's necessary.
So flexibility is the goal, whereas with on chain like Bitcoin, flexibility is the enemy
in the sense that you want security, you want the focus there.
And in that kind of world, design decisions have huge consequences.
And then if you look at the distributed oracle network side, you want to remove the restrictions
of design choices.
You want to provide maximal flexibility then.
So it's a completely separate kind of design framework.
It's a slightly different problem because we're not trying to define transaction types
fitting into blocks on a certain timeline of those blocks being generated.
We're trying to say, hey, there's this world of services or this world of data that's not
very deterministic, but it's unbelievably useful to these smart contracts over here.
And actually they need it to even exist.
And we really want them to exist because once they exist, it's going to completely redefine
what our whole industry is known for.
And defined NFTs are not even the tip of the iceberg, they're like the snow coming off
the top of the iceberg.
And so our goal is to create a framework and an infrastructure and a software that allows
people to compose decentralized oracle networks.
So initially you can compose a decentralized oracle network of seven nodes that goes to
three data sources to trigger your contract worth a million dollars.
That's where you could start.
And then let's say your smart contract, your DeFi smart contract goes to a billion dollars.
Well, then you need to make some changes.
You need to go from seven nodes to 15 or maybe 31 nodes.
And you need to go from three data sources to five or seven.
And you maybe need to create some kind of what we call circuit breakers and some other
checks and you need to make sure that the decentralized oracle network comes to consensus
around those checks because now the decentralized oracle network isn't controlling a million
dollars, it's controlling a billion dollars.
And we have decentralized oracle networks that control well over a billion dollars,
multiple billions of dollars.
And we see them growing and getting more advanced data sources and more advanced features.
And then if somebody else comes and says, well, you know, I don't really want to make
a DeFi product.
I want to make crop insurance.
And I have a completely different set of conditions.
I want this method of consensus and I want data to be aggregated in this way, but not
the way that you do for decentralized financial products.
I mean, what are we supposed to tell them?
We're supposed to tell them, no, you know, our decentralized oracle network can't let
you do that.
And you can go and wait another five years until somebody builds it for you.
That's not what we want to do.
What we want to do is be able to say, absolutely, here's an example of how somebody else made
a decentralized oracle network for weather insurance.
Here's a template.
Change that template, evolve it to meet your needs.
And then someone else comes and says, hey, I have some other use case in gaming.
I want to make NFTs related to real world sports events or I want to do whatever I want
to do with some kind of sports related data.
Wonderful.
Here's the framework.
Here are your risk dynamics.
Here's a collection of node operators.
Here's a set of pre-integrated data sources.
Here's a reputation system to assess the quality of your ensemble of nodes.
Here's a way to scale that up as the value in your contract scales.
Use all the tools that you need to build this contract.
And what we actually see now as there are multiple types of computations and data sources
that are provided by different decentralized oracle networks, of which there are now hundreds,
we now see that a single hybrid smart contract might use multiple decentralized oracle networks.
So there might be a hybrid smart contract that uses a price data, decentralized oracle
network, a proof of reserve, oracle network, a randomness oracle network.
And I think we're going to continue to see this dynamic that more and more advanced contracts
compose various decentralized oracle networks into more advanced use cases.
And this is the dynamic that we're focused on enabling.
And I think it's actually a very virtuous cycle for everybody because the more of these
hybrid smart contracts we enable on Ethereum and other blockchains, the more our industry
provides real world outcomes to the larger world, which is at the end of the day what
I think everybody in our industry wants.
Everybody in our industry wants hybrid smart contracts to become the way that global finance
works, global trade works, global insurance products work, because they will inherently
need both a blockchain on which the contract itself lives and an oracle network that powers
all of the other interactions.
As a developer, how would you recommend somebody listening to this, but also me, to get started
with smart contracts and to get started with hybrid smart contracts?
Well, for hybrid smart contracts, I'm going to have to do some kind of shameless promotion.
Please let me twist your arm.
I think you can go to our YouTube.
We have a number of developer tutorials.
Chainlink YouTube?
Yeah, Chainlink.
I think if you just search Chainlink on YouTube, you should find it.
Beyond that, we recently had a hackathon where we had a huge amount of very advanced hybrid
smart contracts getting built.
To elaborate on that, you had a hackathon.
Is that something that people can follow along like a video where there's web page traces
of what happened, or is there future actual hackathons that people could literally participate
in?
There's plenty of more hackathons coming up.
We want to enable as many developers in web three and web two to build hybrid smart contracts
as a way to redefine our industry and make all of these smart contracts come to life.
There are definitely going to be more hackathons, so people should go and pre-register, register
on a list to get involved in that.
That's a great resource where we have a lot of speakers and a lot of educational tools.
They happen over a course of weeks, not days, so there's a long time for people to work
on these things at the speed that they find comfortable.
Two questions.
One, is there a kind of hello world entry point for hybrid smart contracts?
And two, on the hackathon side, what kind of stuff do you see people building at first?
Just kind of getting their feet wet in terms of the kind of applications that could be
enabled?
I mean, there's unbelievable things that we see people building.
I think how to get your feet wet, I think the hello world is probably DeFi because it's
pretty straightforward and there's a large amount of data sources that we already have
putting data on chain on testnet, which is the test environment in which people would
build.
So I think DeFi is probably, to a certain degree, the most exciting for certain people
and pretty expansive in terms of the tutorials and the amount of contracts to see how people
have already built it.
I think beyond that, we see people building amazing things at these hackathons.
In the previous hackathon, we saw somebody build a smart contract that allows someone
to rent out their Tesla.
So it allows the Tesla API to give someone else access and rent out someone's Tesla on
the basis of a smart contract kind of coordinating payment, which was kind of amazing.
The more recent hackathon, we saw something called Debridge, which is a cross chain solution
that loses Oracle networks to confirm data on different chains.
So I think the things that people build will just become expansive and varied in ways that
I can't even imagine.
But I think this recent hackathon saw a huge, huge list of different kind of winners in
different categories.
And there's so many different categories.
We even have a GovTech category and a whole bunch of things.
If people want to see what's possible, they can go look at the winners.
I think that's probably a good idea.
Yeah, that'll be on the side of the hackathon.
There's a blog related to that, and we're going to have more of these.
And once again, our explicit goal is to take our industry into this world of hybrid smart
contracts, which just benefits everybody.
It makes more on chain activity.
It helps provide real world value to the average person from all of this infrastructure period.
And at the end of the day, I think that it just redefines what our industry is about
through use cases, right?
Because if you only learn through our industry from the point of view of a single use case,
like the NFT use case or some other use case, that's what our industry is about.
And the more of these use cases that people can make available to the average person or
to the fintech world or to the insurance world or wherever, the faster our industry will
not just be about bitcoins or tokens, it will be about changing global finance, changing
global insurance, changing global trade.
And that's the change in the world that I and a lot of other people in this industry,
I think, got into this for.
Now, it's funny.
You've mentioned about, you've had a lot of kind words to say about Bitcoin and Ethereum
as important technology that paved the way for the future, and you somehow did not mention
one of the most profound pieces of technology, which is Dogecoin.
What are your thoughts about this particular revolutionary technology and what are your
thoughts about Dogecoin going to the moon, to Mars, and outside of the solar system?
I think Dogecoin is a very interesting kind of, probably closer to a social experiment
than anything else.
And everything a social experiment.
Yeah.
I guess that's fair to a degree.
I think it's fascinating how that's evolved.
I think the people that made it, made it with certain goals in mind, and then it's kind
of taken on a life of its own.
I don't fully understand exactly why it's taken on a life of its own at this point.
I once again, I don't spend too much time thinking about different tokens and how they're
evolving.
I'm much more focused on the launching and the technology around trust and all those
kinds of ideas.
But I think one of the fascinating things about Dogecoin is how technology that leverages
social dynamics, that technology's ability to utilize fun and memes to spread.
I think it's really interesting.
I don't think it should be discounted as a, I think I tweeted today something about the
fundamental force field of fun.
That fun has an effect on the space time.
So general relativity describes how mass and energy can curve space time.
And I was just giving an example that when life is fun, it seems short.
When life is not fun, it seems very long.
So fun has a very similar effect on space time, like in curve space time.
In that same sense, there is a power to the meme.
And I think Dogecoin illustrates that.
I think Elon is an example of somebody that uses Dogecoin, I don't know his philosophy
in particular in this aspect, but he does use it effectively to excite the world in
a fun way about the possibilities of future technologies like cryptocurrency.
I think the Bitcoin world is very serious right now, and we've spoken about Bitcoin
maximalists.
There is very little space for fun and joking in the Bitcoin world, but there's still a
little bit of fun and humor left in the Dogecoin world.
In that sense, I think it's exceptionally powerful to inspire, to excite, to be able
to talk about stuff without the seriousness of financial impact that now certain cryptocurrencies
have like Bitcoin.
So I keep an eye on that.
I've previously mentioned that Dogecoin, I think, is a fascinating piece of technology
because I do think cryptocurrencies much bigger than the technology that you focus on.
There is also a social element.
That you also spoke to that I think not quite yet understood and is fascinating to watch,
especially as it co-volves with the different tools on the internet, different social networks,
social network mechanisms on the internet.
So I'm a huge supporter of Dogecoin because I'm a huge supporter of fun.
I'm fascinated to see how it will work out.
You think I'll go to the moon?
Do you think it'll be the first cryptocurrency to land on the moon?
I couldn't say.
I haven't done the analysis, as I've said before.
I haven't done the analysis, well, yeah.
No matter what, I do hope we will get humans back on the moon and hopefully get humans
on Mars soon, Dogecoin, Bitcoin or not.
Let me ask you about books and movies.
What books and movies in your life long ago, when you were a baby surrogate or today had
an impact on you, maybe you would recommend to others, and maybe what ideas you took away
from those books, movies, coloring books, children's books, blogs, whatever.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
So, I think one of the things that had a very big impact on me were Plato's dialogues,
and particularly Protagoras and Gorgias as some of the two initial ones.
I think what Plato's dialogues do very well is they give people a clear picture of what
dialogue looks like and what the assessment of information probably should look like and
how the dissection and analysis of an idea is very important and how it can actually
be taken in either direction, but at the end of the day, that the process of eliminating
this fuzzy thinking and arriving at whether it's an external dialogue or an internal dialogue
about an accurate picture of reality is actually very important.
And so, I think I'm very lucky to have read the dialogues when I was in my early teenage
years and it had a very large impact on me because it kind of showed me that nobody knows
what they're talking about, I would play out dialogues in my mind and I would engage in
certain dialogues with different people and what the Platonic dialogue showed me was kind
of how to tell when someone has no clue.
And a lot of people are very good at saying they have a clue, saying like, here is how
the world works, here's what you should do with your life, here's what you should do
with your time, here's what you should do with your money, here's what you should do
with your attention, here's what you should do with all these things.
And I think the ability to evaluate information generally is something that is surprisingly
under taught.
I don't actually understand why there isn't a course in like high schools or universities
that's just like, here is how you evaluate information, here's how you engage in external
dialogue and internal dialogue to arrive at an accurate picture of reality, rather than
the picture of reality that other people want you to have for their benefit most often.
And at the end of the day, I think that put me down a path to really try and understand.
Beyond that, I think biographies have had a very large impact on me, you know, Plutarchs,
Greek and Roman lives.
After I read Plato, I started reading a bunch of stuff, Greek stuff, I was just like these
Greek guys, they really know how it is, you know, they did this 2000 years ago and they
still got it right.
There's something here, it's kind of this like theory of time around the value of intellectual
ideas, right?
If an intellectual idea has survived the test of time, it's much more valuable than the
intellectual idea that I just came up with 10 minutes ago, haven't told anybody and hasn't
gone up against, you know, the, all of the kind of rebuttals.
So
what's your favorite, what would you say would be a most impactful biography that you've
come across?
I don't think it was those Greek or Roman biographies because they were very far away.
I think that probably one of the most impactful ones that I can remember recently is around
Vanderbilt.
And so Vanderbilt was this guy who basically, without that much of an education, he would
invent or work with people to make these steamboats and then he had a lot of acumen around creating
certain monopolies regardless of, you know, what was right or wasn't right.
And then fascinating enough, it all hinged on like a Supreme Court case that decided
if monopolies were acceptable in the form of state created monopolies or not.
And if they were, you know, if it was deemed that state created monopolies were acceptable,
he would have had a huge problem, this guy, but it was deemed that state created monopolies
through these licenses for steamboat routes was not acceptable.
And that did two interesting things that unseated some kind of old time landed gentry in the
Americas in like the 1830s and 40s.
And it basically made him right and he saw it before other people.
So I think Vanderbilt was a very interesting personality, first of all, of all the biographies
that I read is somebody who really took the situation in hand and kind of took action
to achieve an outcome, which I think was an amazing result.
The fascinating thing, by the way, is amazing way of looking at things.
The fascinating thing, by the way, is that the ferries now in New York Harbor are all
run as a public good.
So the fascinating thing is that the guy, he focused on an industry and he worked on
something that was so important that it ended up becoming a public good.
And I think that that's an interesting conception of how to look at this industry.
I think there's a lot of economics dynamics around this industry.
But I think I might have said this somewhere else before, but really the success of someone
in this industry is whether they're able to make a Linux or HTTP or an HTTPS-like system
that lives on for a very long time and is essentially a kind of public good.
So success of an idea, even if that idea is originally sort of a capitalist idea that's
grounded in financial benefit, success of it is if it becomes a public good.
It is so universal.
It is so fundamental to the quality of life that it's a public good that is deemed to
be so valuable that it should be a public good.
Yeah.
I think so.
I think that's a pretty good definition of success, that you work on a body of work
and that body of work isn't just some commercial enterprise, it's a body of work that whatever
commercial aspects or economic incentive aspects it might have, it eventually is so important
that it becomes critical to how society functions.
I'm personally quite lucky and grateful to be, in my opinion, working on something like
that with an amazing team and an amazing community that seems to really very much care about
this hybrid smart contract, transparent world that a lot of people in our industry, realistically,
I think this is why a lot of them signed up.
This is why I came into our industry.
It wasn't because Bitcoin, it was because Bitcoin was a picture of how the world could
work in so many other ways.
And that picture of how the world could work in so many other ways attracted me a very
long time ago.
And I think that all of this stuff will eventually become a public good.
I think it will become so critical to how societies function internally and internationally
that just like their systems, like the Federal Reserve, like global payment systems, like
all these types of things, I think eventually all of this technology will be baked into
these societally critical systems.
And if I and our community and the people I work with and the body of work that we're
working on can make some kind of contribution to that shift towards fair, economically
fair, transparent society, from my point of view, it's a very worthwhile body of work.
In terms of the show, you also mentioned the show.
One of the shows that I really seem to like more and more for some reason is Star Trek.
Not the old Star Trek.
I don't really get the old Star Trek.
The special effects aren't good enough.
Star Trek, like the next generation and Voyager and Deep Space Nine and all those.
I think whenever I happen to watch a Star Trek show again, I have a very simple conception
in my mind that I really didn't have whenever I saw it way back when.
It's that this is what the world looks like if technology takes us towards a utopia.
So I think there's this fascinating thing where technology can take us towards a utopia
or towards a dystopia.
And in my mind, those kind of three Star Trek shows are a picture of what human civilization
looks like if everybody's technological ambitions successfully take us towards a utopia.
Because in the Star Trek universe, you're not seeking money or you're not seeking safety
or you're not seeking you're not really seeking anything for yourself.
Everybody within Maslow's hierarchy of needs has gotten so many things for themselves that
their goal is learning and discovering and or helping.
And I think there is this conception of human life once the baser needs are satisfied.
And at the at the end of the day, I think that's what technology generally can elevate
all of human civilization to right.
It can elevate us to Star Trek world where if people want to invent, they can do that
all day and nothing else if people want to explore the stars, they can explore the stars
and they don't have to worry about economics, care city or any number of these other conceptions.
So I don't know what the most impactful on me shows have been.
But for some reason, recently, Star Trek in this in the newer variant, not the most
new new Star Trek shows, those shows are a little strange, the kind of middle Star Trek
universe where where everybody is doing something with like a very important purpose.
And nobody's thinking about like, where's my paycheck or where's my, you know, where's
my whatever, they're all kind of like we have to discover the formula to this to save the
planet over there.
And literally every episode you're discovering a formula to save a planet, right, of some
kind or a universe or ecosystem or whatever.
And it's and you're looking at, you're like, you know, this, this, this is, this is like,
this is a pretty good place to end up.
This is where we might want to end up.
So it gives you hope.
I mean, it's funny that we don't, we don't often think about the, I think it's very useful
to think about positive visions of the future when we're trying to design technology.
There's a lot of sort of in public discourse, a lot of people are thinking about kind of
how everything goes wrong.
It's important to think about that sometimes, but in moderation, I think, because you, there's
not enough in my little corner of artificial intelligence world, people are very kind of
fear monger centered.
There's a lot of discussions about how everything goes wrong, important to do, but it's also
really important to talk about how things can go right.
Because we ultimately want to guide the design of the systems we create to make things right.
And I think with hope and optimism, not naiveness, but optimism, you can actually create a better
world.
Like you have to think about a positive, a better world as you create, because then you
can actually create it.
Yeah, I'm one of the people who thinks that having an optimistic view of the world is
better for design and creativity than having a pessimistic one.
It's hard to design when you're in fear.
Do you have advice for young people speaking of being excited about and hopeful about the
future world?
Do you have advice for young people today in computer science world and software engineering
world and crypto world, but maybe in any world whatsoever for life?
How to pick a career or how to live life in general?
I think the thing that young people should do is not anyone specific thing for any one
specific young person.
I think what they should do is what they won't be able to do in the later stages of their
life.
And the way, in my opinion, from a framework point of view, to think about that is that
the amount of obligations and the amount of time that a person has seems to just diminish
over time.
So the amount of free time they have.
So you start your job, you get a bunch of responsibilities, something with your partner
spouse, more responsibilities, kids, probably even more responsibilities.
And soon enough, the time that you have to educate yourself, to travel, to experience
the world, however, create whatever creative endeavor you're interested in, slowly but
surely disappears.
I think this is something that young people don't fully realize.
They assume that the world as it is now and the amount of free time that they have to
travel, to educate themselves, to make new friends, to do all these things will somehow
maybe diminish by 10 percent.
It won't diminish by 10 percent, it will diminish by 90 percent.
And the 10 percent that you have, you'll be resting to get back to work and get things
done.
So yeah, what I think young people should do, and this is why it's very different for
each of them, right?
I can't tell young people, hey, you should study philosophy, travel and start your own
enterprise to achieve something worthwhile in the world, right?
That might be something that's good for me with my values and my kind of worldview.
But for other people, might be something else.
I think the way that they should conceptualize it is imagine if over the next 10, 12 years,
the amount of choice that you had about what you could do was cut down by 90 percent.
What would you, and this is copying from this kind of Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework.
In that framework, it's like, what would I regret not doing at 80?
And that's kind of meant to create this long-term view and make these decisions now that'll
get you to a long-term future that you can look back on and be proud of your life, right?
What I think young people should do is they should say to themselves, look, if I never
get the chance to travel for as long as I live, assuming that after 25, after 27, after
29, that's the case, how will I feel about that?
If I never get to start a company after 25, after I get married, after I have kids, how
will I feel about that?
And whatever they feel the worst about is what they should do.
Whatever they feel like when they say to themselves, if I don't travel now, I will never travel.
And they feel horrible about that.
They just have an overwhelming fear and disgust at themselves in that type of state at 25,
27, 29, that's what they should do.
And they shouldn't listen to anybody else.
Let me put it to you this way.
If you're really smart, you're going to make it anyway.
There's a lot of people putting a lot of pressure on you because they're afraid whether you're
going to make it.
If you're really smart, you're going to make it anyway.
If you're not really smart, you're screwed anyway.
Either way, just relax with it and use your time well to do the things you would most
regret not doing.
That's really fascinating.
I wouldn't say relax.
I would say very much cherish the free time, the discretionary time that you have from
the age of 18 to maybe 25.
Because at 25, everyone's going to start looking at each other and asking, what have my friends
have achieved?
I haven't achieved.
And then by the time you get to 30, you're going to look at each other again and go,
well, my friends have a family or a company or a PhD or whatever, what do I have?
And the pressure will just increase.
And it'll increase so much that even if you want to go and do the fun thing, it will not
be fun because the pressure of comparing yourself to your friends at 25 or your peers at 30
will be so great that it will no longer be normal for you to be in a hostel at 30, kind
of like living it up.
This is why I also can't tell you specifically what it is.
For me, it was getting an education in philosophy that was rigorous and in depth.
It was traveling and it was starting an enterprise that I thought that was worthwhile, that I
directed, that I could make into something great.
That's what it was for me.
For other people, it might be something with a band, it might be something with painting,
it might be an education.
You by the way, also should not assume that your ability to get an education will improve.
All of those responsibilities will take away your ability to get an education.
So if you value having an education, if you value being a deeply educated, well-rounded
person with a wide array of knowledge on a wide array of topics, capitalism will force
you to specialize.
That's what it's good at.
It's going to take you, it's going to fashion you into a very specific tool for a very,
most people into a very specific set of tasks.
If you want to have an education in something, get it now.
If you want to travel somewhere, travel there now.
If you want to do some kind of creative endeavor that you doubt whether you'll have time for
in the future, do it now.
You won't have time for it in the future.
You won't have time to read philosophy books all day, unfortunately.
You won't have time to fly to Italy and kind of hang out with people.
If you're serious about your life, you're going to get more responsibilities, you're
going to get more stuff to do.
And so my advice to you is do not piss away this rare, unique discretionary time.
And if your friends are, get new friends, get smarter friends, get people who are using
the limited time they have better.
That's my advice.
So it's just a quickly comment, it's brilliant, you know, to reframe high school and undergraduate
college education, sometimes people want to quickly get it over with, but one thing I
remember thinking, and it's very true about high school, is one of the only times in your
life you'll get a chance to truly get a broad education.
You don't often think of it that way, but it's a chance to really enjoy learning things
that are outside of the specialty that you'll eventually end up with, and that's how college
education is.
On a more fun side, I played music, I did martial arts, and we offline mentioned played
video games, I find it fascinating and brilliant what you said, which is the world will not
give you a chance to truly enjoy many of these things and truly get value from many of those
things once you get older.
I find it exceptionally difficult to enjoy video games now.
There's so much stuff to do, there's so much responsibility.
I, at the time, when I played Elder Scrolls and Baldur's Gate and Diablo II, at the time
I thought maybe that was a waste of time, but now looking back, I realized, because
I always thought, you know, let me get the career first and then I'll have a chance to
play video games.
That's the way I was thinking, you know, it was a waste of time because I should really
progress on the career and then I'll have time to play video games.
No, the reality is that was really fulfilling.
Those are some of the happiest travel experiences of my life is me traveling to those virtual
worlds and spending time in them, and it was really fulfilling, and they stayed with me
for the rest of my life, and I get to experience echoes of that when I play video games these
days for an hour here, an hour there, like one hour a month or something like that.
But even those experiences, as silly as they are, that seem like a waste of time at the
time, enjoying them fully, unapologetically, and in a framework exactly as you said, would
I regret being the kind of person who's never played those video games?
And I can, for myself, honestly say that, yes, look, when I'm on my deathbed, I'm glad
I built Baldur's Gate 2 and all those Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and all the Elder Scroll
games, and yeah, the things that don't necessarily fit into this kind of storyline of what a
career is supposed to be, travel, and all those experiences that you mentioned.
I think I just, like I said, one final quick thing on this.
I think this extends to really hard things as well.
It extends to the things you want to do.
But one of the best pieces advice one of my mentors gave me early on in my career around
this time is that it will actually become harder to start a company as you get older.
Once again, because you have more responsibilities, you're responsible to your partner for some
kind of income to create a life together.
Once you have kids, you're responsible for an even greater income to create a life for
kids.
And startups do not generate income, right?
They take many, many years before anything happens.
People are getting evicted.
People are eating ramen noodles.
That is a thing.
That happens.
That will happen.
So I'm not saying that you should do the fun things or the enjoyable things.
I'm saying the things that you would regret not doing, that you can uniquely do in the
time span from 18 to 25, which one of which is if you plan to have a family and start a
family when you're 25, you should start a company now.
You should not wait until a bunch of people depend on you for income to eat to start a
company.
The amount of pressure that will be on you at that point will be monumental.
You should start a company when nobody depends on you and you can sleep on the floor eating
ramen noodles and still have a great time and show up with a lot of enthusiasm and be
excited.
So I just mean whatever you want to really devote yourself to and really do, don't put
it off.
Don't go to consulting or banking or any other industry and say, I'm going to do this for
three years and I'll get experience.
The only way you get experience is by doing something.
You go, you do it, you fail, you do it again and again and again and again and again.
And then you have experience and then you can do it right.
Because the only way experience happens, there is no other way short of mentorship.
If you're lucky to get mentorship, 99% of people don't get mentorship.
And even though we're talking about young people, I feel like you're speaking to me
as somebody who spent the last two weeks sleeping on the floor because there's no mattress and
somebody who is single and somebody who's thinking about doing a startup.
I felt like you're speaking to me as a fellow young person.
Let me ask you about this whole life of ours to zoom out on the big philosophical question,
the ridiculous question.
What do you think is the meaning of it all?
Do you think about this kind of stuff as you're creating all the technology, as you're thinking
about this future, you ever zoom out and think like, why?
Why are you surrogate striving?
Why are we the human species striving for the stars?
So I think it comes down to whether people want to live in society.
So if people decide to be part of society, they have a certain set of conditions that
they decide to take part in.
So I think what this comes down to is a lot of really involved conversations.
But if we assume people have free will and choice, we just kind of make that blanket assumption,
then the question starts to become, well, what choices do we make and how do we live
with those choices?
And I think probably the most fundamental choice is whether we exist in a society or
we choose to leave society.
And there are people that do this.
There are people that go live in the woods.
There are people that immigrate to other societies and they make a choice.
And as they enter those other societies or they choose to leave society and go live in
the woods, they adopt a certain set of values.
They adopt values that the society prescribes, they compromise their own values, they define
their own values, and they create a set of values for themselves.
I think at the end of the day, if you're going to choose to live in society, in addition
to all the minimums of not throwing garbage on the floor and doing nice things for people
that need help and doing any number of things to just be a normal human being within society,
you have to ask yourself, what am I doing as part of society?
You can always say, hey, I'm going to leave society, I'm going to live in the woods.
I did that.
I went and I lived in the woods and I gave it a shot, realized a ton of stuff, huge amount
of clarity from that.
But when you decide to live in society, you take on, first of all, certain minimal agreements.
You mold your values a little bit to that society.
That's another choice that people inherently make.
And then there's a question of, well, what am I doing here?
What am I doing in society?
So when people say the meaning of life, I don't know what the meaning of life is.
That's the meaning of life in society.
Right, what's the meaning of life for the choice that you've made within society, right?
Because that's maybe the first fundamental choice you made.
You made a choice and you continue to make a choice to be part of society and a specific
society, right?
So you've made this choice, you're part of a society and now you kind of have a life
and you have people around you.
And then the question is, in my opinion, the question is, what is the body of work that
you want to make, right?
I think personally that life is kind of so short and the ability to get enough resources
for yourself in at least the developed markets where we're lucky to be in is so relatively
abundant that we, you and me, have the luxury, by your pursuit of a PhD, you've had this
luxury, I've had this luxury through the work that I've been doing to pursue something that
makes society better.
So this is kind of the question, I would say.
The question is, am I going to live in society yes or no, yes, okay.
Most people choose yes.
I understand why to a degree, I understand why some people choose no.
And then what is the, and I'm going to be in society, if you choose to be in society,
you're just choosing to abide by the rules, you're choosing to just do the minimum, right?
That's what being part of society means.
People that choose to be part of society but don't want to do this, it's very confusing,
they should just leave, they should just go, look, I don't like this deal, I'm going to
go somewhere else.
I'm going to live in Tibet, I'm going to live in the woods, I'm going to live wherever
where the rules are to my liking, right?
You've chosen to be in society.
Next question, kind of final question is, what is the body of work that I'm going to
be involved in?
Because in looking at that Jeff Bezos kind of regret minimization framework thing, I
think that's what a lot of it really comes down to, is you kind of, the framework is
at eight years old, you look back over your life, what would you regret not doing?
What would you regret not pursuing?
I think there are a number of things on a personal level each person has, but I think,
at least for me and probably for many of the other people I know, there's a question of,
what is the body of work that I was involved in?
What did I do?
What happened, right?
What was I involved in?
And in my opinion, you should have a good answer to that.
And you mentioned the body of work in relation to whether it helped make a better world.
And the fundamental question there is, what does better mean?
So it's our striving to understand what is better.
What kind of world would we love to exist after we're gone?
And I think that's another thing, almost unanswerable question, but it's one we can strive towards,
is what is a better world?
Right.
I think that's once again a very personal question.
I'm not sure if there's an objective moral truth that's going to suddenly give us all
an answer.
I think it's actually quite fascinating to me when people feel they have this objective
moral truth, they're so sure in their opinions, this is what we do.
We should go hurt them or help them or kill them or rescue them or whatever.
There's all these very situational specific kind of like, this is the right thing to do.
The objective moral truth told me that this is it.
But maybe there's a definitive truth that we can arrive towards a consensus of what
that is within the little local pocket of society that you're in.
Yeah.
That's the point.
That's what happens.
People just then mislabel it and they go like objective moral truth.
This is not our idea.
This is coming up from on high here.
This is the objective moral truth that I think exists in some metaphysical form somewhere.
And then you build a building with marble and it's big and usually what happens.
And then you convince yourself that that building represents a structure.
The people who build those buildings probably understand that there is no metaphysical object.
They're just like, we're all just coming to consensus.
I'm going to build the biggest building and you're like me and that's what we're going
to do.
They just look at it that way probably.
I think what ends up happening with all these values is, yeah, people should determine
that for themselves.
I agree that there's a second order question here of what is the best body of work to work
on.
Personally, I think that's probably a mix of what could you realistically achieve?
Is that going to have an impact on society that you feel good about?
So these are probably the two aspects of this question.
And is this going to have a good impact on society that you feel good about?
Obviously very subjective.
Some people save animals.
Some people save forests.
We and I are creating this system of economic fairness and transparency.
I feel that I'm in a good position to enable that.
I feel that I have a good chance of succeeding at that.
And I think that the impact will be quite meaningful for a large number of people.
And so I'm completely happy to look back once I'm 80 and see a body of work that achieved
that and be very proud of that because I think that's what I'll be doing when I'm looking
back.
Well, I agree with you.
The scale of impact as a smart, hybrid smart contract, this whole idea that you're working
on has the potential to transform the world for the better at a scale that I can't even
imagine.
So speaking of which means even more that you would waste so many hours of that exciting
life with me.
Thank you so much for talking today, Sergey.
This is a really fascinating conversation, a really fascinating space, and I can't wait
to learn more.
So thank you so much for talking today.
Thank you for having me.
It's an absolute pleasure.