12: Vitalik Buterin - The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine
| The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine | |
| |
| Information | |
|---|---|
| Guest | Vitalik Buterin |
| Length | 01:29:05 |
| Release Date | 21 November 2019 |
| YouTube Date | 11 December 2019 |
| Apple Podcasts | Listen |
| Links | |
| YouTube | Watch |
| Portal Blog | Read |
| All Episodes | |
In this episode, Vitalik Buterin sits down with Eric to discuss ethereum, the wider world of crypto and heterodox economics.
Taking note of the new development of blockchain in 2010, Eric wrote an essay called “Go Virtual Young Man”. A few years later, a Thiel Fellow named Vitalik created a virtual machine with an idiosyncratic smart contract system and a currency. Ironically, Eric had recently become a Managing Director at Thiel Capital. Perennially circling each other intellectually, the two now sit down in person to discuss economic paradigm shifts, crypto and the future of online sovereignty and social coordination.
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Transcript[edit]
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein:
[intro music] Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm sitting here today with Vitalik Buterin, the, uh, leader and, uh, founder of the Ethereum world of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. Welcome to The Portal.
00:00:22
Vitalik Buterin:
Thank you. It's good to be here, Eric.
00:00:24
Eric Weinstein:
Uh, it's t- terrific to have you. Now, in general, when I see you interviewed, immediately everybody goes straight to cryptocurrencies and Ethereum.
00:00:32
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:00:32
Eric Weinstein:
But one of the things that I've found fascinating about your story is is that in order to be a good steward of, uh, this new and emerging economics-
00:00:42
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:00:42
Eric Weinstein:
... you've actually, uh, applied yourself a great deal to standard and regular economic theory. And I was curious, um, if I understand correctly, you dropped out, uh, of college after a year.
00:00:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:00:55
Eric Weinstein:
You're self-taught in economics.
00:00:57
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:00:57
Eric Weinstein:
But you've taken a real interest in understanding how markets and economic theory work. Is that a fair description?
00:01:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, I think so. And economics has been of, an interest, uh, for me, uh, definitely for a long time. I mean, when I, uh, discovered Bitcoin, uh, back in, uh, 2011 and I was still in high school, it was this kind of interesting confluence of ideas that I was, uh, kind of already pretty attracted to. So of open source culture, that was something that a, and a good friend from high school, uh, Christopher Ola, had, uh, already kind of indoctrinated me with really well. Um, the, uh, the math- ma- mathematical and cryptographic aspects, also of libertarianism and Austrian economics was kind of the zeitgeist of, uh, the Bitcoin space at the day, and those were kind of ideas that I definitely, uh, found, uh, philosophically quite atr- uh, a- attractive at that time. And, and I w- I was definitely curious, and I, uh, read a bunch of books, uh, yeah, and read the Austrian con- uh, economics canon, 'cause that's what the Bitcoin people were kind of talking about all day. I, uh, read some, uh, kind of behavioral economics literature, Ariely, Kahneman, and, uh, Chiellini and all of those people just because I knew that I had to read other stuff [laughs] for balance. Um, and, and, uh, and also economics itself is a, an in- pretty mathematical kind of subject. Well, kind of, right? It's, it's on the borderline because it's, uh, kind of both mathematical, you know, you got your curves and your derivatives and your intersections, but also humanities, right? It's, like, really at this intersection of, like, both figuring out how to apply these models to kind of specific cases, and also trying to figure out, well, which models are really correct in the first place. And like, the first question you can answer with math, but the second question, uh, you really can't, and you need other kinds of thinking as well.
00:02:58
Eric Weinstein:
Well, this, this is-
00:03:00
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:03:00
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, an area of, of my own interest because the way I see it-
00:03:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:03:04
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, economics is odd in a way that very few people, I think, have appreciated, in that if we take w- what could be argued to be our two greatest ideas in scientific, uh, scientific man, let's say.
00:03:16
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:03:16
Eric Weinstein:
One would be sort of the geometric dynamics of, um, physics, and economics has been constructed to be an as if physics, if you will.
00:03:26
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:03:27
Eric Weinstein:
And on the other hand, it inherits from the theory of selection. You could say that markets are the continuation of systems of selective pressures by other means.
00:03:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:03:36
Eric Weinstein:
And so what happens when our two greatest ideas touch each other and they do it in a place which has very bizarre properties by my way of thinking? That is, that economists are, on the one hand, very rigorous thinkers, and are also very susceptible to what we might call political economy-
00:03:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:03:56
Eric Weinstein:
... and distorted thinking. Does that ring true to, to you?
00:03:59
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, definitely. And there's definitely this, uh, kind of combination of, uh, like for on the one hand you have these, uh, mathematical formulas and on the other hand these assumptions. And often, like, the assumptions can be pretty, uh, uh, pretty well-hidden, and they're kind of difficult to see at first glance, right? And like, it really can be subtle, right? So, like, one of the arguments that, uh, e- economists tend to put forward is basically, like, mutually beneficial transactions are be- are beneficial, and so, like, we should not interfere with them, right? Like, if I have, uh, a, um, Klein bottle and I, I want to sell you the Klein bottle, you're willing to pay $5, then I clearly value it at less than $5, you value it at more than $5, therefore the transaction's on net good. And like, I ... Therefore, I should give you the bottle and you should give me the money, and that's what we would do. But at the, the reasons why that ten- sometimes breaks down, like, are in many ways more subtle, right? Like, first you have monopoly issues. Like, if I'm the only person selling Klein bottles, then I might want to sell them at a, uh, kind of higher price than you'd be willing to accept, 'cause I want to extract more value. And, uh, sometimes the things that matter most to society aren't things that we can transfer between people from o- one person to another, like Klein bottles, but, like, public goods. And, like, the biggest public good of all is, uh, i- is the idea, right? And an idea, well, if I have an idea and I give you the idea, I still have the idea. So it's something that once you release it, it's out there, and there isn't this kind of property that-
00:05:48
Eric Weinstein:
So sh-
00:05:48
Vitalik Buterin:
You know
00:05:49
Eric Weinstein:
... should we just pause just briefly to talk about what a public good is for the audience?
00:05:53
Vitalik Buterin:
Sure. Yeah.
00:05:53
Eric Weinstein:
Um, so a public good is technically defined within economics, many people have an, an intuitive idea-
00:05:59
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:06:00
Eric Weinstein:
... as something which is, as you're stating, has this property of inexhaustibility.
00:06:05
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Uh, yeah.
00:06:07
Eric Weinstein:
And then the, the other attribute would be excludability, which is-
00:06:11
Vitalik Buterin:
Well, non-excludability for public goods.
00:06:12
Eric Weinstein:
Sorry, not non-excludability.
00:06:14
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:06:14
Eric Weinstein:
Sorry, the, the-
00:06:15
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:06:15
Eric Weinstein:
... the attribute of excludability-
00:06:17
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:06:17
Eric Weinstein:
... and, um, is used to define a public good. So if something is Inexhaustible and inexcludable, then it has this weird property that even hard line economists-
00:06:31
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:06:31
Eric Weinstein:
... would agree that the market may fail to price, in fact will fail to price the value to society of that object. So there is an admission-
00:06:40
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:06:40
Eric Weinstein:
... within economics that there are zones of failure.
00:06:43
Vitalik Buterin:
Right. Well, I guess, uh, the kind of the big kind of rethinking that needs to happen is that like there's long been this kind of zeitgeist that private goods, like things that I have and if I give it to you I don't have it and you have it, are the norm, and public goods are a rare exception. But like really public goods are pretty darn important, right? Like, if we didn't have public goods then we'd be, uh, trading sticks and b- and, uh, bear pelts and we'd basically still be cavemen. Like, they're basically the thing.
00:07:14
Eric Weinstein:
Well, like an army would be a public good.
00:07:16
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, yeah. An army... Well, armies are interesting 'cause they're kind of to us, like in a medium scale context they're a public good, and in a large scale context they're a public bad. 'Cause if everyone's armies were forced to be cut down by a factor of 10, like we'd all be better off. So economics is like really subtle that way, especially once you have kind of two layers of scale at play. Yeah.
00:07:38
Eric Weinstein:
Sure. Now, one thing that I worry a lot about-
00:07:42
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:07:42
Eric Weinstein:
... that almost nobody [laughs] seems to join me in-
00:07:44
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:07:45
Eric Weinstein:
... is that in our mutual world, I don't know what to call it, um, of people who are experimenting with what I would say the mainstream would consider far out ideas like-
00:07:58
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:07:58
Eric Weinstein:
... radical life extension-
00:07:59
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:07:59
Eric Weinstein:
... cryptocurrencies as a re- you know, potentially being rivalrous with, uh-
00:08:05
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:05
Eric Weinstein:
... sovereign currencies.
00:08:07
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm.
00:08:07
Eric Weinstein:
But in our world we talk a lot about the abundance economy-
00:08:11
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:11
Eric Weinstein:
... and a world of abundance.
00:08:13
Vitalik Buterin:
Right.
00:08:13
Eric Weinstein:
And I'm terrified of a world of abundance because, um, one of the properties that software has had-
00:08:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:20
Eric Weinstein:
... is that it has replaced physical goods-
00:08:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:23
Eric Weinstein:
... and services which have these attributes, they're not public-
00:08:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:27
Eric Weinstein:
... um, with small files. And when a small file is not encrypted-
00:08:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:33
Eric Weinstein:
... it has the attributes of a public good, and therefore value and price can, can chasm.
00:08:40
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Yep.
00:08:41
Eric Weinstein:
Um, that's terrifying-
00:08:42
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:43
Eric Weinstein:
... because then this weird thing of markets which allows us respite-
00:08:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:47
Eric Weinstein:
... from dictatorship and somebody directing our activities-
00:08:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:08:51
Eric Weinstein:
... and allows us to self-direct goes away-
00:08:53
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:08:54
Eric Weinstein:
... because things can't be priced accurately.
00:08:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:08:56
Eric Weinstein:
Are you... Do you have any... Does that have any purchase on your thinking?
00:09:00
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. So, and I think, like, you've definitely kind of struck at a very important point. So I think kind of my own framing of the point is, uh, slightly different.
00:09:10
Eric Weinstein:
Please.
00:09:10
Vitalik Buterin:
So I, I think, like, first of all, like, start off by think- by realizing that kind of private property and things is not something that fell out of the sky, it's a social technology, right? It's that we have these kind of norms that basically say, "Oh, uh, you c- we will create this kind of mapping from objects to people, and if an object is mapped to you then you're allowed to do basically whatever the hell you want with it, and other people cannot do anything with it without your permission." And if that concept did not exist, then physical objects would be public goods, right? Because, like, if there's a Klein bottle over here, the Klein bottle would be there, but like really anyone could take it. And if you produce Pl- uh, Klein bottles, then like you're not producing something for yourself, you're producing something for pretty much the, the first person who comes along and grabs it. And so property rights, right, are this kind of social technology that helps make, uh, private good economies tractable. And we could consider making social technologies to make pub- public good economies tractable, right? Like, the existence of public goods by itself is, uh... I mean, it's not good or bad. Like, arguably it's even good because it means that people can cooperate with each other on such large scales. The bad thing is that we don't really have good tools for handling it, and specifically don't have good tools for handling it that manage to simultaneously avoid both not giving good results and, like, basically being centralized and dictatorial. And so this is where my interest in, uh, radical exchange comes in. So this was this, uh, movement that was started by Glen Weyl a couple of years ago when he wrote this, uh, Radical Markets book, and he advanced some of his proposals, like Harberger taxes and, uh, quadratic voting were the ones that are kind of the most popular. And the... And of the core, uh, kind of idea behind the idea is basically is, like, let's create structures of kind of norms and incentives that try to have the best properties that we can get out of markets, but do, do so without, like, basically economically breaking in the way that we know kind of existing property right systems do once you enter a world where kind of everything that you build just inherently affects millions of people.
00:11:40
Eric Weinstein:
Well, this is, this is an interesting perspective. You of course are famous for implementing this Ethereum protocol.
00:11:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:11:47
Eric Weinstein:
But before we ever get to computer protocols, there are sort of legal and structural protocols that we impose upon ourselves in the form of government-
00:11:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:11:56
Eric Weinstein:
... and markets, uh, that are subordinate to, to government. And there's a weird way in which you may start, um, a process by which you write down rules, uh, for how a society should function.
00:12:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:12:12
Eric Weinstein:
But once those rules are written down, you may discover all sorts of unintended properties-
00:12:18
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:12:18
Eric Weinstein:
... of that rule set, and there's-
00:12:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:12:20
Eric Weinstein:
... a real question: Can we actually unhook ourselves- From the killer app that is capitalism or American democracy, and, uh, if we start to realize that that app is running out of control
00:12:36
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm. I guess, um, you know, for kind of myself as a, you know, social technologist, and I definitely, uh, don't think that we should be kind of overturning entire countries with the new mechanisms overnight. I think, uh, you know-
00:12:51
Eric Weinstein:
Oh, and I wasn't insinuating that
00:12:52
Vitalik Buterin:
... Oh, definitely. I think, uh, like, that's, like, figuring out how to kind of solve, like, grand problems of humanity is a long-term goal. But I mean, short-term goals are there is def- there's little things that we can make better, right? So I ... And this is actually part of why I find, uh, cryptocurrency and, and blockchains interesting because they are in a lot of ways this ideal ground for ex- economic experimentation of different types, right? So like, to give one concrete example in, in, uh, w- so one of the ideas that Gwen Weil and myself have, uh, come up with and are pushing forward is something called quadratic funding. And the way that quadratic funding works is roughly this, right? So you have a central kind of pool of funding, and you could imagine this coming from a government, you could imagine this coming from wealthy donors, you could imagine it just kind of being put together by some, like, cryp- uh, crypto economic protocol. It could come from anywhere. And then you allow people to, like, basically set up projects. And you let people say, "I have a project. Here is something that I'm doing, and if you like this, then you can donate to me." And you let people donate to projects. And then the core of the mechanism is basically that if there is a project that multiple people donate to, so there's some project, you donate to it, and, uh, someone else donates to it as well, then your donation doesn't just bene- benefit you, it also benefits the other person. And the other person's donation doesn't just benefit them, it also benefits you. And so to kind of counteract that, uh, kind of market failure, the mechanism basically says, "Well, we're gonna multiply y- the effect of your donation by two and multiply the effect of the other person's donation by two." And so now both of your incentives are kind of aligned with the whole. And you extend this mechanism so it instead of supporting two people, it supports an arbitrary number of people, and you kind of calculate these subsidies across all possible pairs of people. And what you get is this formula that basically says you let people donate to different projects. You look at how many people donated and how much money you've donated, and based on this from the central pool of funding, you give this extra subsidy. And so it basically is like a market for public goods, right? And in the, uh, E- Ethereum ecosystem, there is something called, like, Gitcoin Grants where we've basically started, like, trying to use this mechanism to fund public goods inside the Ethereum ecosystem, right? So this could be implementations of the Ethereum protocol. It could be scaling solutions. It could be wallets. It could be educational resources. And we've had a kind of test round recently with about, kind of, $200,000 in this central matching pool, and it recently finished. I mean, you can go to, like, gitcoin.co/grants to see the results. And, you know, we got contributions from hundreds of people, and the results it gave were actually pretty reasonable. So-
00:15:53
Eric Weinstein:
It's a test?
00:15:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, yeah. And, and so, like, I think Ethereum could have, uh, a lot of value as in just being a test net bed for, and decentralized governance and a decentralized, uh, public good funding infrastructure of this kind and-
00:16:09
Eric Weinstein:
Well, I think that, that that's fascinating. I guess one of the ways in which I would understand that is, um, you know, when my wife, who's an economist, and I talk about this stuff, we often talk about a market democracy has these two voting systems. One is $1 1 vote, and the other is-
00:16:25
Vitalik Buterin:
I think it is one person, one vote
00:16:25
Eric Weinstein:
... theoretically anyway, even if that's honored only in the breach.
00:16:28
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And, like, uh, liberal democracy does this horrible thing of, like, treating these as opposite poles where something is either one or the other, and they're, and they're often fighting each other, when really everything's a spectrum.
00:16:40
Eric Weinstein:
Well, and I like that a lot. I mean, a- another thing that we've been discussing recently, um-
00:16:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:16:45
Eric Weinstein:
... and this again is sort of joint with, with Pia Malaney, is thinking about the Chicago approximation-
00:16:52
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:16:52
Eric Weinstein:
... where you've got some reality that's incredibly nonlinear and complicated.
00:16:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:16:56
Eric Weinstein:
And then weirdly, uh, in a, one of these famous instances where the map is not the territory, you take this incredibly simplified world where agents have this-
00:17:07
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:17:07
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, properties you can't even believe you would ascribe to a human being-
00:17:10
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:17:10
Eric Weinstein:
... where you call it homo economicus and you-
00:17:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:17:12
Eric Weinstein:
... it's perfectly rational, and it, it has all of these characteristics like an automaton that only makes rational decisions. And then you impose that, like, through law and economics programs, and suddenly you've distorted your society by taking the map as the territory so seriously that you don't realize that you're destroying something and distorting it.
00:17:36
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
00:17:38
Eric Weinstein:
The-
00:17:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Um, no, that's d- no, definitely the, uh ... Like, it's a soc- like, it's one approximation. And I mean, we're never going to have approximations that are perfect because the world is just, like, so-
00:17:52
Eric Weinstein:
I'm glad to hear that
00:17:53
Vitalik Buterin:
... yeah, and the world is just so complicated and so, uh, even rapidly changing in the 21st century. Like, approx- you know, all approximations are bullshit, but, like, you have to find a couple of good ones that work reasonably well and make progress for us.
00:18:07
Eric Weinstein:
Well, and I think that one of the things that's unfairly done to cryptocurrencies is that we expect them to solve all of the problems that already cropped up-
00:18:15
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes. [laughs]
00:18:16
Eric Weinstein:
... in our forms of governance and our forms of, of currency and exchange and court systems.
00:18:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:18:21
Eric Weinstein:
And that what we should be asking of them is to be improvements or to augment-
00:18:26
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:18:27
Eric Weinstein:
... already existing systems. Now- One of the odd things about governance, um, is we could view you as in some sense starting a rival virtual country-
00:18:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:18:40
Eric Weinstein:
... um, that has a legal system because, uh, the Ethereum, I don't know what to call it, network pro- platform protocol, um-
00:18:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Yeah
00:18:48
Eric Weinstein:
... it-
00:18:49
Vitalik Buterin:
It controls coins and it has the right to reassign those coins
00:18:51
Eric Weinstein:
... and not only that, but it d- has a, a stand-in for the legal system in the form of what are called smart contracts.
00:18:58
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:18:59
Eric Weinstein:
Um, normally a c- a, we have this concept in governance, I guess it goes back to Weber, that a government is supposed to be a monopoly on violence, which is an odd definition, that you recover the concept of government from monopolizing violence, and then you, you sort of unearth and, and unpack all of the features of government from that one-
00:19:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:19:23
Eric Weinstein:
... generating function. In some sense, a cryptocurrency-
00:19:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:19:27
Eric Weinstein:
... and smart contracts derive from math rather than violence.
00:19:32
Vitalik Buterin:
Well, they derive from math and social consensus, right? So-
00:19:36
Eric Weinstein:
Well, I love the fact that you... I was gonna get to that, but bring it up
00:19:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, no, 'cause this is important, right? Because, like, for example, you know, you have the Bitcoin blockchain, and then you have the Litecoin blockchain, which operates under, like, almost exactly the set of, the same set of rules as the Bitcoin blockchain, and yet the Bitcoin blockchain has $100 million market cap and the Litecoin blockchain has a $3 billion market cap or something like that and much less usage. So, like, blockchains are definitely not just math and technology. Math and technology are the substrate in maybe in the same way that the military is, like, the substrate of keeping a country together. But that, yeah-
00:20:13
Eric Weinstein:
Well, the extended military, including police forces and whatnot
00:20:15
Vitalik Buterin:
... e- exactly. But, like, they're the substrate, but they're not the country, right? The country is the community.
00:20:21
Eric Weinstein:
Well, and this goes to what I would love to get into y- with, uh, love to get into with you, which is the way in which different utopian dreams collide-
00:20:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:20:33
Eric Weinstein:
... in the space of cryptocurrencies. So for example, there are some dreams that may sound more like what, um, I assume you may be active in the effective altruism community. Is that a possibility?
00:20:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Yeah
00:20:46
Eric Weinstein:
... um, which tries to figure out how to do the most good, uh, to do good efficiently-
00:20:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:20:51
Eric Weinstein:
... rather than sanctimoniously.
00:20:52
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:20:53
Eric Weinstein:
Um, there are other people who have this idea of, I, I, I just want a, a retreat from other human beings, and I wanna be left alone. I don't wanna be taxed. I don't wanna be told what to do.
00:21:03
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm.
00:21:03
Eric Weinstein:
Very strong libertarian perspective. Sometimes those people are the same people.
00:21:08
Vitalik Buterin:
There's two kinds of libertarians. There's no... Well, there's many ways to split libertarians into two kinds. But one-
00:21:13
Eric Weinstein:
Right
00:21:13
Vitalik Buterin:
... like, there's the leave me alone type, and then there's the kind of conquer the world type, right? The kind that kind of relishes, like, seeing, uh, fiat currencies be destroyed and replaced by, uh, Bitcoin, and it's, uh, kind of, you know, creating a, uh, thousand, uh, y- uh, year kind of reign of sound money that, uh... And I, and I mean, I generally have this, uh, kind of instinct that, like, when someone says that, like, we should impose a lot of short-term disruption and harm on the entire world for the sake of some nebulous long-term gain, that's something to be skeptical of. But so I'm definitely-
00:21:50
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah, underline the word skeptical.
00:21:52
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:21:53
Eric Weinstein:
You, you're using it in a extreme form of understatement.
00:21:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, yeah. And like, again, so I'm, and I'm definitely not in, in the camp that kind of actively relishes, like, fiat currencies being destroyed. But, I mean, there's... And I, I definitely n- and don't think that all Bitcoiners do. Like, there's some that do see it as kind of a, something that's supposed to coexist and something that's supposed to provide a check and balance against a government's monopoly on issuing money without kind of replacing it entirely. So, you know, there are, there's definitely kind of different visions within individual communities. There's, uh, different visions between different communities. And then it, there's, it's not just visions about what cryptocurrency should do to the world, it's also visions about, like, what, how cryptocurrencies should work internally and what they should do to each other. So, like, in that, in that sense, I guess, uh, like, cryptocurrencies are interesting, and, and blockchains, not just because of, like, what they can do to the world, but also just as this kind of microcosm of the world all, all into themselves, right? Like, we talk about countries, like, virtual countries, but, you know, there, there's many virtual countries now. There's over 1,400 on CoinMarketCap, and they have some analog of, uh, geo-
00:23:11
Eric Weinstein:
You do-
00:23:11
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:23:11
Eric Weinstein:
... you do think of them as virtual countries?
00:23:14
Vitalik Buterin:
It's, I mean, all models are bullshit, but some are useful. Mm.
00:23:19
Eric Weinstein:
Well, to the extent-
00:23:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:23:20
Eric Weinstein:
... that a country is a sensible-
00:23:21
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:23:21
Eric Weinstein:
... thing to-
00:23:22
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:23:22
Eric Weinstein:
... display. Yeah, yeah.
00:23:24
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:23:25
Eric Weinstein:
Um-
00:23:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:23:28
Eric Weinstein:
... so in that world where we're dealing with, um, often very radical individualism-
00:23:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:23:36
Eric Weinstein:
... um, and, uh, a very strong sense that there is something wrong with the coercive aspect of a government-
00:23:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:23:46
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, do you worry that something that you have given birth to, um, may start to behave in very different ways than you would ever want?
00:24:00
Vitalik Buterin:
Definitely. I mean, probably the closest, um, that we've f- seen to things like this happening already would be the, uh, the initial coin offering, uh, boom in, uh, 2017 and 2018. And, like, basically what happened there was that people saw that cryptocurrencies are something that could potentially hit a very high value, and so people started saying, "Oh, like, I'm g- I'm raising money. Like, anyone come and, like, give me $50 million, and I'm gonna build a cryptocurrency, and I'm gonna make it great, and I'll turn your $50 million into 50 billion gu- guaranteed." And- This, like... And like it's complicated, right? Because I mean, on the one hand, like the possibility of, kind of raising money and using it to fund a cryptocurrency development, like it's, it, it did a lot of good, right? Be- and like in general, like the open source, uh, community it's, and it kind of acutely suffers from this kind of public goods challenge that we talked about because, you know, open source software is a very public good. And like we saw some very public kind of splats involving open source software being under-maintained, like the Cloudflare kind of issues a couple years back when it turned out that s- a, an open SSL library was like really, really under-maintained despite billions of dollars of value depending on it. And with cryptocurrency, suddenly you can make things that are completely open source that through coins do have a funding mechanism. And like, you know, this has mass- like massively accelerated the development of many kinds of cryptographies, zero-knowledge proofs and peer-to-peer networking, a lot of other things. But at this... On the other hand, like it's also given rise to this kind of speculation, and in many cases the, uh, the projects turn out to be outright fraudulent, right?
00:25:51
Eric Weinstein:
But, uh, um, there's a really delicious and weird situation. I haven't asked you about it yet-
00:25:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:25:56
Eric Weinstein:
... but-
00:25:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:25:57
Eric Weinstein:
... your, I presume that your net worth-
00:25:59
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:26:00
Eric Weinstein:
... crashed a great deal. W- it got run up and then came, came back down.
00:26:05
Vitalik Buterin:
It, it did. Yeah.
00:26:06
Eric Weinstein:
And were you happy in any way about that?
00:26:10
Vitalik Buterin:
Relieved.
00:26:11
Eric Weinstein:
Relieved?
00:26:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. So when, uh, the, at, right at the top of the big bubble, like in December 2017, um, when y- uh, Bitcoin was hitting 20,000, Eth was hitting, uh, 1,400, I, I made this tweet and... Well, a series of tweets, uh, and that kind of became k- somewhat famous within this space where I basically said, "The cryptocurrency space has reached half a trillion dollars. Does, does it deserve it?" Like, do the things that it's actually, uh, accomplished like hold a candle to the, uh, promises that-
00:26:46
Eric Weinstein:
Right
00:26:46
Vitalik Buterin:
... the market is ascribing to it? And I mean, the subtext of my answer is not yet, and I was, uh, proven very right, uh, fairly quickly. And, and-
00:26:57
Eric Weinstein:
But you didn't short it, did you?
00:26:59
Vitalik Buterin:
So f- f- the... I, and I did con- get, an, uh, get the Ethereum foundation to sell about, uh, 70,000 Eth like basically at the top, and that's doubled our runway now. So like the... And it was one good decision that had a l- and that had a lot of impact, but, you know, did not short.
00:27:19
Eric Weinstein:
I should say that-
00:27:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:27:20
Eric Weinstein:
... I was, um, weirdly somewhat relieved as well. I view th- that-
00:27:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:27:27
Eric Weinstein:
... the innovation of decentralized, um, transactions and the Bit-
00:27:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:27:35
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, you know, it's hard for me to say because I actually am convinced that the blockchain should be an intermediate state and should-
00:27:42
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:27:42
Eric Weinstein:
... not be the permanent-
00:27:43
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:27:43
Eric Weinstein:
... version of decentralized computing.
00:27:46
Vitalik Buterin:
I agree.
00:27:46
Eric Weinstein:
Okay. Um, but I thought that that was such an amazing innovation that you could have a locally enforced m- uh, mechanism without a centralized authority but with a global ledger un-
00:28:01
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:28:01
Eric Weinstein:
... which, which I th- I see of it as a, as a point of, um, intellectual failure that-
00:28:08
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:28:08
Eric Weinstein:
... th- in some sense you're mirroring-
00:28:10
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:28:10
Eric Weinstein:
... the transactions of the physical world. So for example, um, for those, uh, listening at home who don't have a visual here, Vitalik, uh, has several glass bottles next to him.
00:28:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm.
00:28:23
Eric Weinstein:
Were he to give one to me, which he shouldn't do right now, but, um, the idea would be that it would no longer be in his space and it would be in mine.
00:28:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:28:34
Eric Weinstein:
And that property of atoms, uh-
00:28:37
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:28:38
Eric Weinstein:
... has been somewhat mirrored-
00:28:40
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:28:40
Eric Weinstein:
... in Bitcoin and blockchain-
00:28:42
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:28:42
Eric Weinstein:
... and Ethereum transactions.
00:28:44
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm. And this is like the concept of like money as a thing, right? The, kind of the scarcity of the 21 million limit. If I give you five coins, I have five less and you have five more.
00:28:56
Eric Weinstein:
Right. And so the idea-
00:28:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:28:57
Eric Weinstein:
... is that it's a... What you're doing is you're porting conservation laws-
00:29:01
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:29:01
Eric Weinstein:
... into, from the physical layer into the logical layer.
00:29:05
Vitalik Buterin:
Right. And yeah, and I, this, and to some extent kind of re- reflects the kind of very deeply kind of Austrian economic libertarian origins of the, uh, the space way ba- uh, back in the end of 2009 to, you know, 2013 days. And I mean, creating like digital gold was pretty much the f- like, uh, and a digital payment system was the first use case. But I mean, I definitely think that like we can and should be thinking about point systems that work in ways other than money. Mm.
00:29:36
Eric Weinstein:
Well, I a- agree with that, and I also think that it isn't digital gold because, um, as the saying goes, you know, gold or money has no stench.
00:29:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:29:45
Eric Weinstein:
And that the blockchain is this bizarre difference with the physical world-
00:29:50
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:29:50
Eric Weinstein:
... in that it is a distributed ledger that, um, may be somewhat anonymous-
00:29:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:29:56
Eric Weinstein:
... but still gives the history. Like if-
00:29:59
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:29:59
Eric Weinstein:
... I hand you a dollar and, and you don't have access to, um, any particular-
00:30:06
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:30:06
Eric Weinstein:
... um, means of analyzing whose DNA is on that dollar, you have no idea where it's been.
00:30:11
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:30:12
Eric Weinstein:
And these, that is not, that is violated by the current blockchain type implementations.
00:30:18
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes.
00:30:19
Eric Weinstein:
So it isn't a complete port of the physical world into-
00:30:22
Vitalik Buterin:
Indeed
00:30:22
Eric Weinstein:
... the digital, but it is-
00:30:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:30:23
Eric Weinstein:
... a, an astounding one. And I guess I get very frustrated with the economics questions, like, well, what's good f- what's it good for? Where's the killer app? I mean, we have-
00:30:34
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:30:35
Eric Weinstein:
... all of whatever's left of human civilization to figure out-
00:30:38
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:30:38
Eric Weinstein:
... what this thing is meant to do.
00:30:41
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:30:41
Eric Weinstein:
And I'm not very worried that we're not going to figure it out. I mean, we're gonna figure it out sooner or later because a conservation law in digital space is just too valuable. Is that wrong? Are you worried at all about the search for... Like, I, I just hate this question. You know, where's the, where's the killer app? And I'm thinking-
00:31:00
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:31:00
Eric Weinstein:
... chill out, man. It, it... This is an astounding intellectual achievement. W- is that wrong?
00:31:07
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And I think there's definitely a, a, a kind of a long time to go. And I think, you know, the apps will come. You know, there's... You know, the ones that are coming right now are basically kind of financial, but I think... I mean, that's kind of true, uh, just in part because the finan- the existing financial system is just, like, so ready and waiting there to be disrupted. But in, like, in the long term, like, there's, there, there, there's-
00:31:34
Eric Weinstein:
Is disrupted a polite term for destroyed?
00:31:37
Vitalik Buterin:
[laughs] You choose.
00:31:39
Eric Weinstein:
[laughs]
00:31:41
Vitalik Buterin:
Um-
00:31:41
Eric Weinstein:
Well, but, you know, I mean, there is something interesting here. You're 25 years old.
00:31:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:31:45
Eric Weinstein:
Every bit of your adult life is post-2008.
00:31:50
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:31:52
Eric Weinstein:
And to be 25 years old and in charge of a f- financial ecosystem to the extent that anyone is in charge of Ethereum, and I, I don't want to claim that you are sitting there r- running it and making all these decisions, that's an astounding thing, that, that this has fallen to somebody who, whose adult life is post the crash.
00:32:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:32:22
Eric Weinstein:
Do you think about that at all? That you don't have the same associations the rest of us do with markets when they were claimed to be working well.
00:32:30
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:32:30
Eric Weinstein:
Like, during the, during the era of the Great Moderation supposedly-
00:32:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Right
00:32:33
Eric Weinstein:
... when volatility was banished-
00:32:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. So-
00:32:35
Eric Weinstein:
... you were what, 13, 12?
00:32:38
Vitalik Buterin:
Right. So one thing that I kind of only realized recently that I found interesting is that there... Like, there aren't kind of two tribes here. There's three tribes, right? And what I mean by this is that there's the tribe that says markets are, are, are, are great, and there's the tribe that says markets are bad, and, like, we should move to more things that look like political mechanisms. But then if you look at kind of the, the a zeitgeist that's kind of fairly popular in the cryptocurrency space, I mean, definitely even still now to a big extent, it's that markets are great, but the thing that existed and exists, like, isn't markets. And so I guess, like, there's people who are pro-market and who see kind of the existing financial system as being that, and there's people who are pro-market who see the existing financial system as being, like, yet another one of the perversions of that that needs to be overcome.
00:33:38
Eric Weinstein:
Well, it's odd because-
00:33:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:33:39
Eric Weinstein:
... I would love to fix-
00:33:41
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:33:41
Eric Weinstein:
... our democracy, I'd love to fix our markets, but I'm... I have to say, I believe that I have grown up in a, in an approximately 50-year bubble.
00:33:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:33:52
Eric Weinstein:
Um, which the Silent Generation and then the Boomers presided over.
00:33:57
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:33:58
Eric Weinstein:
And my own read is that because of their inability to figure out sufficient innovation-
00:34:05
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:34:05
Eric Weinstein:
... to take over from the previously innovative system, that the world of human expertise has been almost completely contaminated by special pleading and political economy, so that many of us who don't have a particularly Austrian or libertarian bent-
00:34:25
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:34:26
Eric Weinstein:
... are just sick to death-
00:34:28
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:34:28
Eric Weinstein:
... of being lied to by people claimed to be Nobel laureates in economics.
00:34:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:34:34
Eric Weinstein:
Do you... Is it-
00:34:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. No, it's-
00:34:36
Eric Weinstein:
Does it have any emotional connection to you?
00:34:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:34:40
Eric Weinstein:
Like, I, I feel like I'm lied to about almost, almost... You know, the doctors are lying, the lawyers are lying-
00:34:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Totally
00:34:47
Eric Weinstein:
... the accountants are lying, the extraction companies are lying. And it's not because of a million different reasons. It's because growth ran out, and our whole society is predicated on a need for economic growth.
00:35:02
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. No, there's definitely end of things that are, uh... that have changed and a s- and a system that's just not keeping up and doesn't, and doesn't understand that there is such a thing as keeping up. And it's like... Hmm. So, like, one, like... Even Glenn talks about this, right? Like, he talks about kind of the mar- markets as social technology mentality versus the, like, basically end of history mentality. And, uh, I guess, like, the way that I kind... And I definitely saw this, uh, kind of zeitgeist 10 years ago that said, kind of even more broadly than, like, markets versus other mechanisms, it's like things are 80% efficient and lots of work to make them 95% efficient. Whereas, like, the thing that's really going on is that things are 3% efficient, and we should work hard on making them 6% efficient. Like, if you s- kind of move away from the narrow context of, like, I'm, I have something to sell, and you have something to buy, which is pretty well optimized already, then there's lots of these kind of very big things that are happening that have just completely been missed. And, and technology a- and, and of network effects and all, uh, and just generally kind of migrating from atoms to bits are definitely all a big part of it. Hmm.
00:36:28
Eric Weinstein:
So let's talk about something that's a little bit funny, which is if you start to replace government-
00:36:34
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:36:35
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, as we were talking about, a- and you see it as a monopoly on violence-
00:36:38
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:36:38
Eric Weinstein:
... you notice that very often there, there's a very funny role played by organized crime.
00:36:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:36:46
Eric Weinstein:
Now, of course, when we think about organized crime, we tend to get- emotionally excited by it for whatever reason. We, we, we, we make lots of movies about it.
00:36:53
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:36:54
Eric Weinstein:
Um, it occupies the mind as something terrifying and alluring.
00:36:58
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:36:58
Eric Weinstein:
And there's sort of two weird aspects to organized crime. One of which is violence as a contract enforcement mechanism. In other words, you're, you're gambling, so you don't have access to the regular court system. Now you have a gambling debt.
00:37:17
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:37:17
Eric Weinstein:
And so just the way our government would put you in jail if you, um, you know, started doing things, you couldn't fulfill all of your obligations and you were doing harm to lots of people and you couldn't be stopped.
00:37:32
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:37:33
Eric Weinstein:
Um, organized crime has to do something. It can't maintain jails.
00:37:38
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:37:38
Eric Weinstein:
So it can put the hurt on somebody for means of contract enforcement.
00:37:43
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:37:44
Eric Weinstein:
So it's, it's not looking to do violent things, it's looking to run illegal businesses for which there's demand.
00:37:49
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:37:49
Eric Weinstein:
And then it has a problem of enforcement.
00:37:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:37:52
Eric Weinstein:
Then there's another part of it which is violence is the product.
00:37:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:37:56
Eric Weinstein:
So for example, uh, extortion, it'd be a shame if anything were to happen to this lovely business that you're running, uh, is a veiled threat. Pay us or we're gonna do harm to your business or, you know, uh, contract killings and the like.
00:38:10
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:38:11
Eric Weinstein:
Are you worried that effectively by introducing parallel structures both in the form of currency-
00:38:18
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:38:19
Eric Weinstein:
... and in the form of contracts, smart contracts that are the sine qua non, I guess, of, of-
00:38:25
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:38:25
Eric Weinstein:
... of the difference between bit- Bitcoin and Ethereum-
00:38:28
Vitalik Buterin:
Right
00:38:28
Eric Weinstein:
... that the killer app that is most likely to happen while the technology is still clunky and cumbersome and difficult is in the parallel space that either you are going to replace organized crime as a place to do contractual business outside of the normal scope, which could be a, a benefit because organized crime still exists and is a bad thing because it uses violence, and you would use math in, in place of it.
00:38:59
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:38:59
Eric Weinstein:
Or that it could actually be used to facilitate violence, um, by, you know, using, uh, let's say prediction markets or something else to induce people-
00:39:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:39:12
Eric Weinstein:
... to commit crimes, um, where the committer, uh, the committer of violence has unusual information about where the violence will be committed and therefore can profit from it.
00:39:26
Vitalik Buterin:
It's definitely a, a, a worry that have I and, like, lots of people in the crypto space have had since the beginning. Though I do feel like at least so far we've been surpri- like, it feels like less of it has happened than we had expected.
00:39:38
Eric Weinstein:
That's the thing.
00:39:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:39:40
Eric Weinstein:
Now, what do you... W- what accounts for the idea that something that can be dreamt-
00:39:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:39:46
Eric Weinstein:
... has mostly not occurred?
00:39:49
Vitalik Buterin:
This... I definitely have a, uh, co-
00:39:51
Eric Weinstein:
Is, is... Maybe it's a great thing about humans that we didn't realize that we're not nearly the horrible people we thought we were.
00:39:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And I definitely have a couple of theories about this. So one of those theories is that, like, basically a lot, like, a lot of things that people do, and especially a lot of things that people do in the infosphere because, like, public goods are kind of chronically underfunded and all that, rely really heavily on goodwill. And so, you know, you have goodwill that if, uh, someone, if you pay someone to write some, uh, piece of s- piece of software for your website, it's not gonna include some bug-
00:40:29
Eric Weinstein:
Malicious code
00:40:29
Vitalik Buterin:
... yeah, some bug that'll steal people's money or tell the FBI where you are, that you... If you, um, create a system for, like, enforcing agreements that they'll actually get enforced, then even j- like, on Interne- Internet forums, they depend on kind of a lot of volunteer labor for just things like moderation. And if you create a group that just goes, like, fundamentally against, like, the vast majority of people's values, then it's just gonna be hard to find volunteer effort for that sort of thing. And, like, this... So, like, that's probably the big, the big reason I think why, like, so far we don't really see a kind of, you know, complicated, like, de- decentralized structures being created to facilitate, like, bla- black markets for killing people and so forth because-
00:41:21
Eric Weinstein:
Well, let's start off with something-
00:41:22
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:41:22
Eric Weinstein:
... more mundane like a numbers racket.
00:41:24
Vitalik Buterin:
Right.
00:41:25
Eric Weinstein:
So a numbers racket would probably be a much simpler application.
00:41:30
Vitalik Buterin:
So what do you mean by numbers racket here?
00:41:32
Eric Weinstein:
Well, it's something that takes the place of a lottery-
00:41:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
00:41:35
Eric Weinstein:
... where some, let's say, some naturally occurring-
00:41:38
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:41:38
Eric Weinstein:
... number that would be printed in a newspaper, and presumably nobody has the influence over-
00:41:44
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:41:44
Eric Weinstein:
... what number gets printed-
00:41:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Right. Yeah
00:41:46
Eric Weinstein:
... constitutes the lotto draw.
00:41:48
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And lotteries have existed on blockchain since the beginning.
00:41:51
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah.
00:41:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Like, uh, even... There's definitely been this kind of sub-community of people that created these kind of provably fair Ponzi contracts where, you know, you have a smart contract and you can throw money in, and as soon... like, if you're the Nth person to throw money in, as soo- as soon as two N people throw money in, you get, like, 1.9 d- uh, back or something like that. And, like, this is just a fun game that people have made and, like, participated in even fully knowing what the economics of the thing are. So yeah. And thing, things like that have definitely happened, though I don't, like... Though in... You know, gambling is the sort of thing that, like, there isn't, like, there isn't this kind of nine- like, 99%-plus consensus that it's really horrible and evil, right? Because, like, on the one hand, like, lots of people wanna ban it, but on the other hand, people do it. And it's something that, like, people See negative consequences of, but at the same time it's some- uh, like, it is something that people participate in and enjoy. Whereas the kind of extremely bad stuff, like, that's... There's definitely this kind of, uh, this kind of barrier between kind of things that are edgy versus things that are just so far over the edge. And for th- things that are kind of so, so far over the edge, like, it is... L- like, even with smart contracts and even with all of those things, it's still hard to coordinate those structures.
00:43:20
Eric Weinstein:
Mm-hmm.
00:43:20
Vitalik Buterin:
And I think, like, the blockchain, like, the blockchain's inability to directly read facts about the real world could even be a saving grace here. Because, like, because a blockchain can't directly read, like, whether or not something in the real world happens, it basically means that if you want to have some application, whether a prediction market or something else, that does, like-
00:43:44
Eric Weinstein:
So can we say a little bit more about the pro- the intellectual problem that you're, you're touching?
00:43:49
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Sure.
00:43:49
Eric Weinstein:
So, so the idea is that there may be something that's very perceptible to us-
00:43:53
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:43:54
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, about the real world.
00:43:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:43:57
Eric Weinstein:
But we might naively think, well, the computer should be able to tell whether that happened-
00:44:02
Vitalik Buterin:
Right
00:44:03
Eric Weinstein:
... or it didn't happen, and that that's a surprisingly difficult thing to code up reliably so that the interface between the world of, of bits and bytes and the world of, uh, otherwise physical reality-
00:44:19
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:44:20
Eric Weinstein:
... um, which often w- we don't realize we're thinking about subjectively.
00:44:24
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:44:24
Eric Weinstein:
Um, that it's hard to maintain that interface so that the way in which the f- things that have happened in the real world can be definitely agreed upon without-
00:44:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes
00:44:36
Eric Weinstein:
... any kind of adjudication inside of the digital world.
00:44:38
Vitalik Buterin:
Right. Yeah. So the-
00:44:39
Eric Weinstein:
I don't know, I don't know how to say that well
00:44:41
Vitalik Buterin:
... well, uh, blockchains are a kind of fundamentally programmatic medium. All they see is, like, data that gets fed into them and what they can compute as a result of that data. And so if you want to create a smart contract that says if someone figures out how to... what the f- prime factors of a big number are, pay them a reward, you can do that because prime num- prime factors are something that you can multiply together and verify. But if you wants to have a smart contract that says if there's a hurricane in, in Sri Lanka, then pay 500 bucks, then, like, you can't do that on the blockchain itself 'cause, like, computer code has no idea what hurricanes are. It has no idea what Sri Lanka is. Uh, you know.
00:45:22
Eric Weinstein:
No, but it could... In that case-
00:45:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Well
00:45:23
Eric Weinstein:
... you could have a, a designation that, you know, that the national, uh-
00:45:28
Vitalik Buterin:
Correct. You can a- you can get data from third party sources. And this is the thing that a l-
00:45:32
Eric Weinstein:
Somebody else turns it into data.
00:45:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly. This is, uh, the, the thing that a lot of applications are doing. But the thing that's important to keep in mind is that as soon as you do that, like, your smart contract is no longer fully trustless.
00:45:45
Eric Weinstein:
Right.
00:45:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Right.
00:45:46
Eric Weinstein:
So there's this concept, uh, which is like a utopian concep- tr- concept of a trustless-
00:45:52
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:45:52
Eric Weinstein:
... legal system-
00:45:53
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:45:53
Eric Weinstein:
... so that you don't have the messiness of humans anywhere in the system, and you can have complete f- faith and con- and confidence in the contract that you've struck.
00:46:02
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, right. And, like, outside of, uh, pro- like, basically giving bounties for solving math problems, like, it's not something that you can 100% achieve.
00:46:12
Eric Weinstein:
So I can't necessarily ensure my vacation that if, uh, i- if I go all the way to, um, Argentina and the weather is terrible, uh, it, it pays out because we can't agree what terrible weather is.
00:46:26
Vitalik Buterin:
Right. Like, you can create structures b- made out of individual participants that can try to kind of align incentives to get people to kind of give d- to give correct results. Like, you can have complicated kind of contraptions involving people giving different answers and policing each other and rewarding people who give the same answer that other people have committed to and things like this. But, like, you can only try to approach the kind... like, the ideal of kind of correct truth. Like, you can never 100% reach it.
00:46:59
Eric Weinstein:
Now, you started Ethereum in 2014, 2015?
00:47:03
Vitalik Buterin:
Um, started, started end of 2013. I mean, it launched in 2015.
00:47:08
Eric Weinstein:
Okay. Would you say... Let's use launch date as an artificial-
00:47:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Sure
00:47:12
Eric Weinstein:
... date. Would you say you are more or less excited emotionally-
00:47:18
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:47:20
Eric Weinstein:
... than you were when it started? You've now been through s- you've, you've logged some miles here.
00:47:24
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. I've def- definitely sta- and excited. Um, I think the-
00:47:34
Eric Weinstein:
More excited
00:47:36
Vitalik Buterin:
... I think the main difference is kind of more d- like, definitely a kind of e- excited in the sense of, like, four years... Well, definite as, like, uh, uh, kind of as opposed to indefinite, right? Like, four years [laughs] yeah, four years ago was about like, "Hey, let's make this platform to kind of try really a, a bunch of really cool things. We have no idea what's gonna happen, and let's just stick it out there." And now, like, we know things about things that people are already doing. We know things about things that people wants to do, and we, and we also kn- know more about like w- what the limitations are. And so instead of just being this kind of extremely fuzzy dream of, like, "Let's stick smart contracts and algorithms and kind of trustlosify everything-"
00:48:22
Eric Weinstein:
Right
00:48:22
Vitalik Buterin:
... it's something that's kind of both more moderate but also kind of more r- like, seeming m- uh, much more like it, uh, like it actually has a big chance of kind of transforming the world kind of precisely because it's kind of moderated to some extent.
00:48:41
Eric Weinstein:
So are you more... If, if I gave you a false three choices, and by the way, smart people always hate these things, so feel free to break the model.
00:48:49
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:48:49
Eric Weinstein:
If I gave you a choice between saying are you mostly excited about the technology and the amount of innovation?
00:48:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:48:56
Eric Weinstein:
Are you mostly excited about the business opportunities for yourself?
00:49:00
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:49:00
Eric Weinstein:
Or are you mostly excited about the way in which this could transform human life? Would you be, would that, would that be an easy call or would you say I, I reject that decision tree?
00:49:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm. Some mix of the first and the third. Hmm. I don't know. I guess, like, the framing of business opportunities is definitely kind of never... Like, this is weird. I mean, despite, I mean, of even-
00:49:26
Eric Weinstein:
I get the sense that you don't love money enough.
00:49:29
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. This is true.
00:49:30
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
00:49:31
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm. I mean, it's weird because I, for a long time, I-
00:49:35
Eric Weinstein:
You have a lot of it and it's-
00:49:36
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. Well, I have a lot of it, and it's also even weirder because I, like, for a long time I subscribed to this kind of branch of economics that basically says that, like, love of money is, like, the best motivation for peo- for, for people to have. And like-
00:49:50
Eric Weinstein:
Sort of Ayn Randian?
00:49:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Um, well, in, I'd say, like, in that area.
00:49:57
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah.
00:49:57
Vitalik Buterin:
But it's-
00:49:58
Eric Weinstein:
But I don't get that-
00:49:59
Vitalik Buterin:
No.
00:49:59
Eric Weinstein:
I'll be honest. I don't, I just don't get that vibe.
00:50:01
Vitalik Buterin:
Right. I mean, uh, there's, I've definitely kind of shifted a lot over the years. I think, like, my experience even within the crypto space itself has kind of trend, and given me a lot of new information to work with. Like-
00:50:15
Eric Weinstein:
Say more
00:50:16
Vitalik Buterin:
... like, I've, the, the, basically, and, and this goes back to this kind of cryptocurrency as, as a kind of microcosm of wider society thing, right? Like, if you're, like, basically any, like, any movement regardless of, like, what it, what the movement is for or what its goals are, to be succeed it needs to be sufficiently big, and once something is sufficiently big it needs to have internal structure to coordinate and achieve its objectives.
00:50:47
Eric Weinstein:
Right.
00:50:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Which means that it suffers from governance issues, it suffers from public goods issues, it suffers from conflicts with, um, adjacent movements, it suffers from conflicts between its own values and its, and, uh, g- its own desire to succeed and so on and so forth. And, like, it needs to come up with ways to answer, like, basically almost the s- the same kinds of hard problems that the world as a whole is working on.
00:51:15
Eric Weinstein:
Well-
00:51:15
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:51:15
Eric Weinstein:
... you know, it's, it's interesting. When I look at the sort of world of people-
00:51:21
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:51:21
Eric Weinstein:
... maybe it had an epicenter in the Bay Area-
00:51:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:51:23
Eric Weinstein:
... though I think it's less true now-
00:51:25
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:51:26
Eric Weinstein:
... um, who are trying to figure out what is the future and how do we get there.
00:51:29
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:51:30
Eric Weinstein:
There's a very clear sense that people's creativity and their intelligence is correlated with their financial success.
00:51:41
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:51:41
Eric Weinstein:
But it's not very tight, and so there's, like, an embarrassment that, well-
00:51:46
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:51:46
Eric Weinstein:
... that person is super amazing and they're-
00:51:48
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:51:48
Eric Weinstein:
... not doing all that well.
00:51:50
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:51:50
Eric Weinstein:
This person somehow metabolized a tremendous amount.
00:51:54
Vitalik Buterin:
I mean, this is something that I've definitely kind of realized just from kind of my travels. So, like, I've interacted with a lot of kind of super famous people in different kinds of positions, which includes, like, some world leaders and includes some kind of leaders of, like, fields in cryptography. And it, and you realize that, like, people in these pos- pos- positions, they are impressive, but they're not, like, super amazing god-like impressive. Right?
00:52:23
Eric Weinstein:
Some of them are.
00:52:24
Vitalik Buterin:
Some of them are, but then there's also super amazing god-like impressive people that just, like, don't get to get that much recognition at all.
00:52:30
Eric Weinstein:
Well, that, that, that's sort of what I'm trying to get at.
00:52:31
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. Hmm.
00:52:32
Eric Weinstein:
Is if I think about, like, if you hang around with musicians, very often you'll have somebody who's a super famous musician. Say, "You wanna know who's really good?"
00:52:40
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:52:41
Eric Weinstein:
And they'll tell you somebody you've never heard of.
00:52:42
Vitalik Buterin:
And, yep, you'll, it, it-
00:52:43
Eric Weinstein:
And you say, "Well, that person's a musician's musician."
00:52:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly this, yes.
00:52:46
Eric Weinstein:
Right. And so, um, you know, if I, if I gave the name of, um, people who are famous for being, let's say, physicists, they're very often-
00:52:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:52:56
Eric Weinstein:
... the people on television as physicists.
00:52:58
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:52:59
Eric Weinstein:
But they would all point to some guy who doesn't give a lot of interviews and say, "Well, that's the top guy in the field."
00:53:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly. Like, basically, like, social status, like, is, uh, predicted by competence multiplied by, like, basically publicity skill, and that's half correlated with competence for obvious reasons.
00:53:19
Eric Weinstein:
Right.
00:53:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Like, those people also know the people that have the real competence.
00:53:22
Eric Weinstein:
And that's one of the things that I've always found really interesting about people who have this diehard belief that markets-
00:53:28
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:53:28
Eric Weinstein:
... produce justice.
00:53:30
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:53:30
Eric Weinstein:
Um, which is I do think that success in markets is somewhat correlated or has been-
00:53:37
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:53:37
Eric Weinstein:
... with s- things like productivity.
00:53:41
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:53:41
Eric Weinstein:
But it's also correlated sometimes with how predatory somebody can be or-
00:53:46
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
00:53:46
Eric Weinstein:
... how lucky they happen to be at a particular moment.
00:53:49
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:53:49
Eric Weinstein:
And one of the questions that I have is, um, if you're really interested in innovation, which is what I sort of pick up-
00:53:58
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm, yeah
00:53:59
Eric Weinstein:
... as one of the main things, um, how does something like Ethereum-
00:54:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
00:54:05
Eric Weinstein:
... give us a possibility to revitalize innovation after what many of us c- consider a period of relative stagnancy outside of the areas of computation and communication which everybody knows have exploded?
00:54:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
00:54:21
Eric Weinstein:
Do you think about how, if Ethereum can mediate a new renaissance, a new generative age?
00:54:31
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. So-
00:54:31
Eric Weinstein:
You sort of talked about it a little bit during our public bit-
00:54:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Definitely. And I think, uh, I mean, there's kind of Ethereum as a platform for, like, experiments in, I mean, governance and public goods funding is one thing I mentioned, and education is another thing that I kind of talk about and y- and obviously do. I mean, I have a lot of these blog posts on vitalik.ca and other forums. And, like, there, one of the big challenges that I, for example, is that, like, for, in- And if internet educational resources in general, there's basically two kinds, right? There's, like, papers and, uh, Wikipedia and, like, basically things that are technically accurate, but they're just, like, horribly not understa- understandable at all, and we should not be sh- uh, forcing people to even try reading them. And then there's pop-sci literature, which is very accessible, but it's often just actively wrong in really horrible ways. And, like, I, I personally, and even before Ethereum, like, I did Bitcoin Magazine, for example. Like, I've always, uh, tried to find this kind of middle gap, this way to explain con- take concepts that are technical and, and expand them to a broad- a, a broader audience so that they are more accessible. And, like, this to me has been important in part because, like, I view accessibility of information about the technology as a precondition for even the decentralization of the space. Like, if the thing technically runs on 50,000 computers but only 42 people know how it works, then your decentralization index isn't 50,000, it's 42. And, and so, and if-
00:56:07
Eric Weinstein:
That's a very nice point.
00:56:09
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And so trying to kind of improve e- like, even how we in the Ethereum community kind of work on innovation internally. But so those are kind of things that kind of, that happen in blockchains as kind of a, as a lab for trying out new things, kind of first for the blockchain space, and then poten- it could potentially export it to other things. And then we can also look at kind of blockchains as something that can be used to improve and kind of create better institutions. So, like, one of, uh, you know, the Ethereum Foundation's, uh, researchers, uh, Vlad Zamfir, he actually got into Ethereum because he was looking at how to improve academic publishing. And, like, he saw things like, you know, the existing peer review mechanisms and how they were just very flawed in a bunch of ways, and he thought that, like, "Hey, here's potentially a platform that we could use to, like, build something that does better." And, like, that's one of his core interests and why he is even, like, con- continuing to work on the technology.
00:57:16
Eric Weinstein:
You know, I hadn't understood how insiders viewed peer review in an academic context until a finance professor got drunk at a party-
00:57:24
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:57:24
Eric Weinstein:
... and said, uh, "You know that guy who's harassing you in your research in finance, you don't know why he's doing it." I said, "Well, wh- why do you think he's doing it?" He said, "Well, I know."
00:57:34
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:57:34
Eric Weinstein:
He says, "We've created a system where our fees are sky high to consult, and we do this by, uh, making the number of professors in our field small by controlling peer review."
00:57:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:57:47
Eric Weinstein:
"And so that effectively we are a conspiracy in restraint." And, like, this guy's just telling me straight out-
00:57:53
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:57:53
Eric Weinstein:
... that, uh, this is a gating function to keep their consulting fees high, and that this guy is gonna do everything that they tell him to do-
00:58:01
Vitalik Buterin:
Ugh
00:58:01
Eric Weinstein:
... because otherwise he can't come into the club and charge these rates.
00:58:04
Vitalik Buterin:
That, that sounds about right.
00:58:07
Eric Weinstein:
Right.
00:58:07
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:58:07
Eric Weinstein:
So that one of the a- another killer application... So you have one potential suite of applications which have to do with facilitating illegality. Some of that might regard, result in net reduction of harm because you could replace violence with math.
00:58:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes.
00:58:24
Eric Weinstein:
On the other hand, um, a place where you could have a really positive effect is political economy-
00:58:32
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:58:32
Eric Weinstein:
... where by removing, um, the human ability to act badly-
00:58:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, you do
00:58:40
Eric Weinstein:
... um, you effectively create a much fairer, more representative world.
00:58:43
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly. Yeah.
00:58:45
Eric Weinstein:
Uh, what do we do? So you, you, you have an interest in, in... The two fields that I find Wikipedia can't explain to any normal human being-
00:58:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:58:55
Eric Weinstein:
... are theoretical math and physics.
00:58:57
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
00:58:58
Eric Weinstein:
Even biology you can sorta guess what's going on because you have something concrete to think through.
00:59:03
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. But, like, even biology, like, you gotta learn math to deeply grok it, 'cause otherwise you're just memorizing ki- like, names of chemicals.
00:59:10
Eric Weinstein:
Well, but you c- I, my, here, th- I have a PhD in math.
00:59:15
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
00:59:15
Eric Weinstein:
If I try to read a math paper-
00:59:18
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:59:18
Eric Weinstein:
... one or two fields over from my own field-
00:59:22
Vitalik Buterin:
Right
00:59:23
Eric Weinstein:
... I will do less well with it than if I read a biology paper-
00:59:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
00:59:27
Eric Weinstein:
... even though I've taken no class in biology.
00:59:30
Vitalik Buterin:
That, that sounds right.
00:59:31
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah.
00:59:31
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. Like, there's a difference between the level of math that you have to know to just because it's, like, importance for you as a philosopher, and then... And, like, that's about the level of math that I think you need even to, to be good at biology, to be good at economics, to be good at a lot of things, right? It's understanding, like, principles, even things like, for example, if you have a trade-off between X and Y, and right now you're optimizing entirely for X and it's a smooth curve, then if you want a little bit of Y, then you can get your first bit of Y at almost, like, zero cost of X, right? And that's just a pro- like, it's a property of continuous functions that, like, uh, from the maximum, the derivative starts at zero. And, like, if you kind of just deeply kind of mentally grok about, like, a hu- a, a couple hundred of these facts the same-
01:00:22
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah
01:00:22
Vitalik Buterin:
... way you deeply kind of mentally grok, like, how to walk, then, like, you get a lot. But then from there there's also, like, the frontiers. And often, I mean, the frontiers are less important.
01:00:32
Eric Weinstein:
Well, so here's a weird thing I don't know how to bring up. When I try to understand crypto as a space-
01:00:37
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:00:38
Eric Weinstein:
... I'm always confronted by how incredibly Byzantine and impossible it is to understand all of the acronyms, all of the sub-pieces of history. I mean, it's an-
01:00:48
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
01:00:48
Eric Weinstein:
... incredibly fragmented-
01:00:52
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
01:00:52
Eric Weinstein:
... experience in which I spend a long [laughs] period of time just feeling moronic.
01:00:58
Vitalik Buterin:
It, y- mm-hmm.
01:01:00
Eric Weinstein:
W- isn't it odd that, like, Ethereum itself suffers from this? ... this problem? It's hard to know what's going on?
01:01:07
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. It's definitely something that, like, we want to fix. So if, I mean, if you ever have suggestions on, like, what specifically we could make more understandable, I'm always happy to hear those.
01:01:19
Eric Weinstein:
Fantastic. Now, one thing that I think is really interesting is this, uh, episode that occurred, uh, in the Ethereum space in which you were faced with a very serious question of leadership-
01:01:33
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
01:01:34
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, having to do with an emergency that you could have either allowed to follow the rules that had been previously specified in some sense-
01:01:45
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:01:45
Eric Weinstein:
... or could, where you could, uh, interject a certain amount of human intervention-
01:01:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:01:51
Eric Weinstein:
... but thereby letting people know that this was, to some extent, um, not mediated only by rules and computers. Can you, can you say a little bit about this famous incident and describe it?
01:02:02
Vitalik Buterin:
Sure. Uh, so in, uh, 2016 there was this, uh, smart contract that a group called Slock.it launched, uh, called, uh, the DAO, and DAO stands for a decentralized autonomous organization. It's a term I came up with about three years before, and it basically means that, like, you can have a smart contract, this computer program that controls, like, digital assets and it encode a set of rules for an organization. And, like, you can use this kind of smart contract basically as a replacement for things like companies. And so Slock.it decide to launch a DAO, and their DAO was intended to be basically a decentralized VC fund. So people could apply. The DAO would, um, vote on which projects were worth investing in.
01:02:49
Eric Weinstein:
So leaderless, rule-based-
01:02:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
01:02:51
Eric Weinstein:
... and virtual.
01:02:52
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly. You know, it was... It hit, hit all the cypherpunk [laughs] notes that are-
01:02:58
Eric Weinstein:
[laughs]
01:02:59
Vitalik Buterin:
... are the, in the right place.
01:03:00
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:03:01
Vitalik Buterin:
And the thing launched, and we were all expecting it, uh, like, during its kind of initial fundraising phase, which was also, like, an open public blockchain process and to maybe get $5 million. But then it got five, and it got 10, and it got 20, it got 50, and 100. And then the price of ETH went up and it got 200. And then when I was, um, sitting at a friend's, uh-
01:03:26
Eric Weinstein:
Was this at all alarming that it was so successful?
01:03:28
Vitalik Buterin:
Uh, it- after the 50 mark, I definitely kind of switched from, uh, excitement to deep apprehension. But, you know, it's a contract-
01:03:36
Eric Weinstein:
Did you let on-
01:03:36
Vitalik Buterin:
... you can't stop it
01:03:37
Eric Weinstein:
... that, that you were feeling that way?
01:03:39
Vitalik Buterin:
A bit.
01:03:40
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:03:40
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so on, uh, June 17th, 2016, when I was in, uh, Shanghai at a, uh, friend's apartment and it was about 15:30 something, um, in the afternoon, I, uh, saw a message, uh, in one of the, uh, Skype chats that I was, that I was in, and someone basically saying, "Hey, guys, look at the DAO. It seems like there's some money coming out of it." And so I, uh, checked, um, on, uh, the public block explorer on the blockchain, a- and, uh, I saw, oh, look, the, it seems like about $2 million, uh, uh, ETH has actually already been removed from the DAO, and, uh, more ETH is kind of slowly being drained over time. And so I pinged the, uh, core developers and I asked, "Hey, is this normal?" And at first I was thinking, okay, the alternative is unthinkable. There has to be a reasonable explanation for this. And-
01:04:35
Eric Weinstein:
So you were locked into some sort of denial?
01:04:37
Vitalik Buterin:
For v- uh, the beginning, yes. And, um, the developers looked at it, and over the next half hour as more and more people came online and started chattering with each other, it became clear that the unthinkable has actually happened. And I actually burned about 20 of my own ETH, like basically just DDoSing my [laughs] the, the Ethereum blockchain itself and, like, just spamming it with transactions to try to kind of slow the attacker down.
01:05:06
Eric Weinstein:
DDoSing is denial of service?
01:05:08
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, yeah.
01:05:08
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:05:08
Vitalik Buterin:
Just spam the blockchain with transactions.
01:05:10
Eric Weinstein:
But not, not all of my listeners will know the terms.
01:05:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Sure. Mm-hmm.
01:05:12
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:05:12
Vitalik Buterin:
So that, uh, the attacker's transactions could not get in as quickly, 'cause the attacker's transac- the attacker could only withdraw something like a couple hundred ETH with every transaction, so it was a slow process, like, in the hopes that the, uh, developers would find some way to plug the hole.
01:05:27
Eric Weinstein:
Now, was that an intentional inefficiency, or it was just that the sys-
01:05:30
Vitalik Buterin:
It was, it was not intentional.
01:05:31
Eric Weinstein:
So in some weird way, the inefficiency was a good thing.
01:05:34
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes. It gets even weirder. There is an even bigger inefficiency that would, uh, that would prove to be an even better thing. Um, so but then the developers, however, did not find a way to plug the hole. But the attacker voluntarily stopped after stealing about 4 million ETH from the DAO. But in any case, the, this is the second inefficiency, right?
01:05:55
Eric Weinstein:
Wait, voluntarily stopped?
01:05:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. The-
01:05:57
Eric Weinstein:
There was a request made?
01:05:58
Vitalik Buterin:
No, no, no, as in the attacker just stopped.
01:06:00
Eric Weinstein:
Oh, okay.
01:06:01
Vitalik Buterin:
And, and so here's the second and bigger inefficiency. The money that was, uh, the attacker took out, the 4 million ETH, it did not go into the attacker's wallet immediately. Instead, it went into a child smart contract, and only after 35 days could the attacker actually take that money out. And this was-
01:06:23
Eric Weinstein:
A child smart contract, you mean a-
01:06:25
Vitalik Buterin:
Separate smart contract that, that was created through a function call of the main DAO smart contract.
01:06:32
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:06:32
Vitalik Buterin:
So this was also not intended, right?
01:06:35
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:06:35
Vitalik Buterin:
It was just, like, a random quirk of this, uh, of fate that there was this big bug that was the biggest, uh, smart contract theft in history up until that point, and it put the money into this convenient box where it would just stay conveniently locked for 35 days where everyone could stare and look at it. [laughs]
01:06:54
Eric Weinstein:
A Limbo.
01:06:54
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And the, soon after this, like, there was, uh, calls happening between core developers, and the proposal to remedy the situation with a, a blockchain fork, uh, came into play, right? So basically what happened here is the, uh, uh-
01:07:11
Eric Weinstein:
Was a blockchain fork an emotional issue for this community?
01:07:14
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. So ba-
01:07:15
Eric Weinstein:
Why is that?
01:07:17
Vitalik Buterin:
So wh- wh- I guess first of all kind of-
01:07:19
Eric Weinstein:
What is it?
01:07:19
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly. So explain what, what, what would happen. Uh, so in general, a blockchain fork is a normal process, right? You have, uh, an upgrade, and the developers of the Ethereum clients implement code that basically says, "After block number f- f- four three seven zero zero zero zero, stop processing blocks according to the old rules. Start processing blocks according to the new rules, which have extra features attached." And-
01:07:44
Eric Weinstein:
Where blocks are just-
01:07:46
Vitalik Buterin:
Sent, packages of transactions
01:07:48
Eric Weinstein:
... sets of text.
01:07:48
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
01:07:48
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah, okay.
01:07:48
Vitalik Buterin:
And based ... And, um, so every, w- before this sub f- uh, kind of these code patches are formally proposed, there is this month-long period of, many-month-long period of deliberation where changes are proposed, people discuss them, people, like, talk about them, and g- generally it's agreed that these changes are good. And so people just go and download the code, and because everyone's downloaded the code, the blockchain after block four three seven zero zero zero zero follows these different and better rules.
01:08:18
Eric Weinstein:
This is a very warm and very human process.
01:08:21
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
01:08:21
Eric Weinstein:
It isn't the cold logic of a machine.
01:08:23
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly.
01:08:24
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:08:25
Vitalik Buterin:
And so the DAO fork, it was also a fork. It was also a code change implemented by the developers of the clients that is, i- i- was pushed out through a new version of the different clients that people could download, and users went ahead and voluntarily downloaded it. And it would basically change the rules of the blockchain, except instead of changing them per- permanently, it would only do o- a single one-time change. And the single one-time change basically said, "During block one one nine two zero zero zero zero, before processing any transactions, take the ether that's stuck in the, this, uh, child contract and move it into another contract that could then basically refund it all to the victims." And so this was a very kind of manual intervention, right? It basically says, like, we all agree to run code that just irregularly takes this money and just reassigns it to this other thing.
01:09:29
Eric Weinstein:
So the, the ... It's very weird because, you know, we always think in, like, a sci-fi movie that something that you think is human would rip off its mask and reveal itself to be a computer.
01:09:41
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm.
01:09:41
Eric Weinstein:
And this is the reverse.
01:09:42
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly. [laughs]
01:09:42
Eric Weinstein:
The computer face is ripped off, revealing humans behind this, this technological stack.
01:09:49
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes. And I mean, ultimately, like, people talk about kind of blockchain immutability. A- and, like, this is this idea that basically you're not supposed to do this sort of thing. And-
01:10:01
Eric Weinstein:
Well, wait, where does that supposed to come from?
01:10:03
Vitalik Buterin:
Exactly. So, like, there is, there is definitely a sense in which it exists technologically because, like, actually pulling off one of these forks is incredibly hard. And for example, if it was not the case that the money was conveniently stuck there in one n- nice little address for 35 days, it would basically not have been possible to do it, right? Because when, as soon as you announce a f- uh, this protocol change that says we're gonna take money out of here, put it in there, the attacker could just move the money from there to a different address, and basically you play this cat and mouse game, and the attacker could win. But sometimes there is this possibility where you c- you, you absolutely can just, like, do these interventions, and you can just decide to stop writing this code and start running this other code. And the only reason why this is not done more frequently is basically because there exist these norms, right? And there exist norms in the blockchain community. Uh, Vlad Zamfir, the researcher I mentioned before, kind of calls them, uh, Szabo's Law, and, like, named after Nick Szabo. And, and Nick Szabo actually dislikes the moniker Szabo's Law, but, like, it is a pretty accurate representation of kind of his beliefs, which is, and the beliefs of many in the crypto community, which is basically that, like, even though it technically is code run by humans, we should act as though it is code not run by humans. And, like, because it is digital gold, right? Gold is not run by humans. Gold is gold. And so if we want to make something that is like gold, then even though we're unfortunately stuck with this thing run by humans, we should, like, try as hard as we can to pretend it's not. And, like, this was the ideology of a lot of people in this space, and the DAO fork very much went against this ideology. And so, like, even though in my opinion, like, having norms that you can't just, like, go and edit whatever you want is valuable, but, like, when so mu- such a large fraction of the ecosystem is at stake, it's worth rethinking things. But, like, other people were kind of even more rigid in this regard. And so there was this kind of split in the community, and a portion of the community actually did not download the updates, right? A portion of the community did not download these code patches that implement the fork, and they just said, "We will continue running our own, our old chain." And the old chain has, like, since then been called Ethereum Classic, and it runs to this day.
01:12:25
Eric Weinstein:
This is a fascinating civil war-
01:12:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:12:28
Eric Weinstein:
... in f- in essence.
01:12:29
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes.
01:12:30
Eric Weinstein:
And what I get out of this is that there's this very weird thing, which is that people get very attached to ideologies.
01:12:38
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:12:38
Eric Weinstein:
And then they come to understand why the simplistic version of that ideology can't possibly work in a warm human system.
01:12:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:12:47
Eric Weinstein:
I watched this ... Have, have you ever gone to this, uh, festival called Ephemeral, which is sort of Burning Man on the water. It was supposed to-
01:12:54
Vitalik Buterin:
I've heard of it and I got invited to it, but I haven't had the chance to go yet.
01:12:58
Eric Weinstein:
So it's kind of a libertarian water world in the-
01:13:00
Vitalik Buterin:
Right
01:13:01
Eric Weinstein:
... Sacramento Delta.
01:13:02
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:13:02
Eric Weinstein:
And what was interesting is that one year, um, in order to come to the festival, you had to have a lecture, and you had to agree that you would receive the lecture because of problems that had happened the previous year.
01:13:15
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
01:13:15
Eric Weinstein:
And you realize that these libertarians were being forced to invent governance.
01:13:21
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes. [laughs]
01:13:21
Eric Weinstein:
And rather than just anarchy, you had to have some organized system.
01:13:26
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:13:26
Eric Weinstein:
And so one of my questions is, is the, is that dream of escape from the heavy hand of government, uh, effectively not something to be pursued inside of crypto space for the most part because we've realized that it is going to require governance and that we can't figure out a way to turn this into-
01:13:48
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:13:48
Eric Weinstein:
... a completely cold and, uh, methodical process?
01:13:52
Vitalik Buterin:
It depends which version of the dream you subscribe to. Like, the, if the version of the dream you subscribe to is, uh, the dream that says that we can finally use algorithms to, like, basically completely eliminate humans' ability to interfere in things, then, like, if, if your goal is to see that enforced 100%, then, like, no, you're not going to get that. If your dream is that you dislike how governments have ha- like, existing governments and monopolies of violence have hegemony over this, uh, social function of, uh, coordination and enforcing structures of rules and you want there to exist an alternative, then, like, that's something that we can talk about, right? So, like, if the, if the dream is to augment, yes. And I mean, I'd argue that, like, blockchains have a very and of necessary role now, especially kind of given modern kind of political trends where, like, there basically is no single traditional political body that's accepted as trustworthy by the entire world, and it doesn't look like there's going to be one. But, like, if your dream is to kind of completely over, overturn things and have, like, some simplistic notion of digital property rights as the only thing that governs behavior, then that's something that, like, you can try for, but you're not gonna succeed.
01:15:19
Eric Weinstein:
Let me try something else with you-
01:15:20
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:15:20
Eric Weinstein:
... that I'm curious about.
01:15:22
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
01:15:22
Eric Weinstein:
You and I are both plugged into this weird alternate world that thinks very differently.
01:15:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:15:28
Eric Weinstein:
And I had Andrew Yang, uh, in that chair-
01:15:30
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
01:15:30
Eric Weinstein:
... and you saw that episode of the, the Portal-
01:15:32
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
01:15:32
Eric Weinstein:
... before. Um, some people call this neurodivergence. That-
01:15:37
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
01:15:37
Eric Weinstein:
... this is a non-neurotypical world.
01:15:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:15:40
Eric Weinstein:
And I would say that both you and I exhibit some-
01:15:44
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:15:45
Eric Weinstein:
... indicia of, uh-
01:15:47
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
01:15:47
Eric Weinstein:
... not thinking along standard lines.
01:15:50
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:15:50
Eric Weinstein:
The thing that occurred to me is that you brought up Slate Star Codex-
01:15:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
01:15:55
Eric Weinstein:
... which is this website that is extremely influential in our shared world.
01:16:01
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:16:02
Eric Weinstein:
And I was thinking about the difference between Slate Star Codex and CNN in terms of sense-making.
01:16:09
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
01:16:09
Eric Weinstein:
Is there any way in which the Ethereum world can create a counterweight so that the neurodivergent can wrest the stranglehold that seemingly the neurotypical institutional world-
01:16:25
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:16:25
Eric Weinstein:
... seems to have on sense-making at scale? Like, is there a way of promoting... Uh, another blog in this world would be, like, Less Wrong.
01:16:34
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:16:34
Eric Weinstein:
There are particular thinkers that I think of as being very important, influential. I think you've given to Aubrey de Grey and E- Eliezer Yudkowsky.
01:16:43
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:16:44
Eric Weinstein:
There's, like, this very different world-
01:16:46
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
01:16:46
Eric Weinstein:
... that isn't well known. Um, and in part I view podcasting as like pirate radio, which is the phrase I keep... Or son is that because you're, you're Russian.
01:16:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes. [laughs]
01:16:56
Eric Weinstein:
Um, what can we do potentially using your technology to even the playing field between corporate sense-making and this kind of home-brewed sense-making that seems to me to be of an infinitely superior level?
01:17:13
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm. I think-
01:17:14
Eric Weinstein:
Well, not infinitely, but quite superior.
01:17:17
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. So I think, like, once again, there's kind of two aspects to kind of blockchain TM that I think are, uh, equally valuable here. One is the technology itself, and then the other is the existing community around the technology. And I mean, with the tech- with the technology itself, I mean, you can try to, like, create ins- in, I mean, institutions for, like, do even things like funding, like, podcasts, for example. And like, e- even, like, things like the kind of Gitcoin Grants Quadratic Voting, for example, would be a potentially a great way to kind of fund media organizations that avoids the pitfalls of both, uh, say, like, present day media, which is funded by some combination of adver- of, like, advertising and, like, horrible clickbait incentives, and at the same time avoid the pitfalls of, like, basically cen- like, centrally controlled media and then, like, create a third alternative. So, and, like, it doesn't even have to be quadratic voting. It could be some other kind of mechanism for funding, and blockchains could be used as a base layer for that. There's also the, uh, kind of blockchain kind of community as a group of people who care about the, like, many of these kinds of ideas. And I mean, even a lot of Ethereum people are definitely kind of Slate Star Codex adjacent. And, and I feel like I've tried my best to kind of bring these worlds together and, uh, get them to talk to each other. And I mean, sometimes it is a challenge because, like, there's ways in which they're similar, and there's a lot of people who are in both, and there's also ways in which they're sometimes different. But, I mean, those diff- those differences can be a good thing.
01:19:07
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah, I guess I'm concerned that in our... We're, we're coming up on an election in the US.
01:19:12
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:19:13
Eric Weinstein:
Um, and I view Fox News and The New York Times and CNN as, like, watching professional wrestling. Uh-
01:19:21
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
01:19:21
Eric Weinstein:
... it's got- A very clear narrative structure before the facts even come in.
01:19:27
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. This is, this is actually one of the things that I've only really started noticing maybe in the last like one to two years. Like, it's... Narratives are something that like don't seem like you're there when you're fully inside of them, but once you kind of step outside and you start seeing that like, wait, these people are missing something and they're making predictions that turn out to be materially incorrect, like, yeah.
01:19:54
Eric Weinstein:
And then there's no memory.
01:19:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
01:19:55
Eric Weinstein:
Like, there's no cost and-
01:19:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you wanna... There's no accountability at all, and it's something that you just actively start think- seeking out how to move beyond.
01:20:06
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah.
01:20:07
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. I think, like, m- figuring out a b- a better funding model for media organizations in general seems-
01:20:16
Eric Weinstein:
Well, because in some ways, what I'm concerned about is that something like podcasting is almost a public good, and so the advertis-
01:20:25
Vitalik Buterin:
Well, it's totally a public good [laughs]
01:20:26
Eric Weinstein:
But advertising is the one thing that-
01:20:29
Vitalik Buterin:
Right
01:20:29
Eric Weinstein:
... keeps... I call it the business model of last resort.
01:20:32
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes.
01:20:33
Eric Weinstein:
And w- we are going with an ad-supported, uh, model because I don't wanna disguise... We were... Somebody offered to endow the podcast. Not, not my employer.
01:20:43
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:20:44
Eric Weinstein:
Um, and I decided against it because I think what I really wanna do is to try to figure out how to improve the business model.
01:20:52
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:20:52
Eric Weinstein:
We've talked about a couple different variations on, on advertising in order to make sure that controversial but very sensible and level-headed people-
01:21:03
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:21:04
Eric Weinstein:
... can weather the storm, that the big problem that I keep-
01:21:06
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah
01:21:06
Eric Weinstein:
... seeing is that advertisers pull-
01:21:09
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:21:09
Eric Weinstein:
... when there's a coordinated campaign to say, "Drop that program or else."
01:21:15
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes.
01:21:15
Eric Weinstein:
And there's a-
01:21:16
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:21:17
Eric Weinstein:
... a, a need for something like the blockchain or a smart contract to make sure that you can't silence people who are speaking decently-
01:21:26
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:21:26
Eric Weinstein:
... just because they've pissed off a very large activist community.
01:21:31
Vitalik Buterin:
Right.
01:21:31
Eric Weinstein:
So do you see any way in which the blockchain, for example, like I-
01:21:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm
01:21:35
Eric Weinstein:
... I might give up advertising if I could figure out a way to fund not only this program but allied programs.
01:21:43
Vitalik Buterin:
So [laughs] in 2011 when I was, uh, starting Bitcoin Magazine, I, uh... Well, it started off with like this one anonymous person whose name I'll never know who, well, aside from Keyby, his internet handle, uh, and who was just paying me five Bitcoin, which back then was $4 per article, to write articles for him.
01:22:04
Eric Weinstein:
Okay.
01:22:04
Vitalik Buterin:
And I mean, this was five times lower than the minimum wage, but I loved it 'cause it was the higher- highest wage I've ever had.
01:22:10
Eric Weinstein:
[laughs]
01:22:11
Vitalik Buterin:
Um, and eventually despite paying me five times less than minimum wage, uh, yeah, Keyby ran out of money. And like he s- told me, "Hey, maybe Bitcoin Weekly will have to shut down." And I came up w- uh, with this business model that actually ended up saving it for a few months, and basically saving it all the way until I got to get it poached by Bitcoin Magazine. And the business model is basically I write two articles a week, and, uh, we'll publish, uh, the first paragraph of each article, uh, kind of publicly, and we'll say, "The rest of these articles is kind of hidden for ransom, and here are some Bitcoin addresses, and if people can collectively come together and pay 2.5 BTC to these Bitcoin addresses, then we'll-"
01:22:54
Eric Weinstein:
Then they're free for everybody?
01:22:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes. [laughs] Then-
01:22:55
Eric Weinstein:
That's nice.
01:22:56
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And it actually worked well, and it actually started raking in like much more money than, uh, Keyby had paid before. So, I mean, it's... Not saying like that precise model is gonna save-
01:23:08
Eric Weinstein:
I think it's quite-
01:23:08
Vitalik Buterin:
But-
01:23:08
Eric Weinstein:
I mean, it's a, it's a clever, it's a clever exploit.
01:23:10
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like to me, more clever experiments is like what smart contracts are all about. So like let's try lots of different things, and we're gonna have come up, plan m- uh, some steps forward that are interesting.
01:23:25
Eric Weinstein:
Vitalik, I'd love to have you come back and talk to us about other things and other points, but let me just close by asking you a couple of questions about the mysterious origins-
01:23:35
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:23:36
Eric Weinstein:
... of decentralized computing, the blockchain, and all of this stuff.
01:23:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Sure.
01:23:40
Eric Weinstein:
What the hell? Why don't we know who Satoshi is at this point, where Satoshi s- seemingly-
01:23:50
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:23:50
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, came up with the first really viable version of this, this idea?
01:23:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
01:23:56
Eric Weinstein:
We can prove that... I th- you know, I guess those-
01:23:59
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:23:59
Eric Weinstein:
... those blocks have never transacted that, that are under Satoshi's control-
01:24:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:24:04
Eric Weinstein:
... one would think.
01:24:05
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah.
01:24:05
Eric Weinstein:
And that's a very mysterious origin story.
01:24:10
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. It surprises a lot of people. Like-
01:24:13
Eric Weinstein:
Does it surprise you?
01:24:16
Vitalik Buterin:
It does. I mean, it's... Like, there's definitely not many people that have managed to stay anonymous kind of through, uh, that level of prominence. Like even like Silk Road, the kind of first big kind of crypto anarchist outlaw project on top of Bitcoin, like after about two years, Ross Ulbricht got caught.
01:24:35
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah.
01:24:35
Vitalik Buterin:
And I mean, the tools for just continuing to look at things that you say until eventually you slip up and you use some word, word patterns that match like word patterns that you used under your name, and then you correlate things. Like, it's difficult to get around. And like I've-
01:24:54
Eric Weinstein:
Unabomber got away with it for a long time.
01:24:57
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
01:24:58
Eric Weinstein:
The, uh-
01:24:58
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah, but-
01:24:59
Eric Weinstein:
I don't know if you know about the Citizens' Committee to Investigate the FBI that pulled off this amazing heist in 1971.
01:25:05
Vitalik Buterin:
So, I mean, Ted wrote his stuff in the 1970s, right? And that's also 1970s. So I mean, now we have, we have the internet, and everyone's stuff is on a v- uh, is, is publicly available. We have machine learning. We have statistical tools.
01:25:20
Eric Weinstein:
Do you think it's well known who Satoshi is within a group that doesn't wanna talk?
01:25:24
Vitalik Buterin:
No. So I, and I think the- I mean, there's high uncertainty about this, but I think that it's, uh, very likely, uh, that, like, Satoshi is one person. And-
01:25:40
Eric Weinstein:
You think Satoshi is one person?
01:25:41
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and then, like, there isn't some, uh, like, very grand conspiracy, a bigger-
01:25:47
Eric Weinstein:
Do you think you know Satoshi?
01:25:49
Vitalik Buterin:
So-
01:25:49
Eric Weinstein:
I mean, d- not that you know wh- who Satoshi is, but do you think-
01:25:53
Vitalik Buterin:
Oh, do I think it's someone I know personally?
01:25:55
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah.
01:25:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Um, so if I had to pick one person, and the, uh, the-
01:26:02
Eric Weinstein:
And I'm not asking you to out that.
01:26:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Well-
01:26:04
Eric Weinstein:
But you, you can say if you want to.
01:26:05
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. You know, I'll say it. It's ac- it's not an uncommon opinion. Uh, if I h- if I had to, like, bet my life on one person, it's Hal Finney.
01:26:13
Eric Weinstein:
Yeah.
01:26:13
Vitalik Buterin:
Basically because, you know, Hal was around in the early days. He clearly understood what was going on. He clearly participated since the beginning, and he also died at the exact time, basically, that Satoshi disappeared. And so there's a lot of these kind of coincidences i- in his favor. But then he's the one person I'd bet on if I had to bet on someone, but I'd also bet against him. Like, it's well under 50%.
01:26:36
Eric Weinstein:
Got it.
01:26:36
Vitalik Buterin:
So-
01:26:37
Eric Weinstein:
It's a pretty good caper.
01:26:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. And there's, there's definitely a significant chance that it's, like, someone who's still in the, in the crypto space somewhere that I've met at some point. Um, or it could just be someone we have never met and never will.
01:26:54
Eric Weinstein:
Hmm.
01:26:55
Vitalik Buterin:
He, he's done a really good job. Like, even just kind of setting himself up as this kind of perfect relationship-
01:27:03
Eric Weinstein:
Or she or they.
01:27:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Yes. Yes. And, you know, yeah, she, she really, like, impressed a lot of people.
01:27:15
Eric Weinstein:
It's pretty tr- uh, I find it very inspiring-
01:27:18
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
01:27:19
Eric Weinstein:
... one of the great intellectual feats of our time would have, uh, anonymous authorship. Um, and the only story I know that's comparable to that is this bizarre break-in story where the, uh, the, it was a woman, I believe named Judy Feingold, who was determined to take the secret to the grave.
01:27:37
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm.
01:27:37
Eric Weinstein:
And the other people in the conspiracy-
01:27:39
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm
01:27:39
Eric Weinstein:
... um, left the conspiracy after the statute of limitations had run out, and they started talking. And then sh- her perspective was, "We all agreed we were never gonna mention who did it."
01:27:49
Vitalik Buterin:
Hmm.
01:27:49
Eric Weinstein:
There's some desire usually-
01:27:51
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
01:27:51
Eric Weinstein:
... uh, to get caught and, and an urge to purge.
01:27:55
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. Well, that does make it more likely there's one person, right? Conspiracies get exponentially harder the more people you add.
01:28:02
Eric Weinstein:
That's true.
01:28:04
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm.
01:28:05
Eric Weinstein:
Um, it's been fantastic having you here. I wanna let you know that you're welcome to come back and to talk about things that are unrelated to Ethereum and blockchain and crypto because I actually, I have to say I found very inspiring, um, your attempt to use this platform to rethink what can economics be repurposed to do. And I-
01:28:25
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm
01:28:25
Eric Weinstein:
... I think that that's, uh, an unheralded, uh, potential killer app for your, your program.
01:28:31
Vitalik Buterin:
Well, thank you. It's been, it's, it's been good to be on here.
01:28:33
Eric Weinstein:
Okay. You've been through The Portal with Vitalik Buterin. [outro music] Thanks for joining us. Please remember, uh, to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and to check out our YouTube channel and to subscribe there and click the bell for more episodes when they become available.
01:28:48
Vitalik Buterin:
Mm-hmm.
01:28:48
Eric Weinstein:
Thanks for joining us. [outro music]