welcome to the nwork state podcast I'm here today with anat yakovenko the co-founder of salana today we're talking about why the decentralized crypto phone is Central to both digital civil rights and digital property rights to understand the crypto phone you need to understand the concept of private Keys these are the keys to your crypto wallet a crypto phone is unlocked with those keys just like a normal phone is unlocked with your face ID passcode now because these private keys are kept local the cryptophone is built around protecting digital civil rights and digital property rights to a much greater extent than a typical phone it protects digital civil rights because it allows you to send provably ended encrypted messages and protects your account from centralized search and seure but the cryptone also protects digital property rights by preventing centralized services from freezing transactions or seizing funds and that's why the cryptophone is important protection of digital civil rights and digital property rights anatol is with me today to talk about Solana's efforts on their phone and how as a former Qualcomm engineer has experience in low-level hard optimization was actually very helpful in building it we talk about some of the nitty-gritty technical details in building the phone and then go all the way up to the big picture of the society we're building namely how the cryptophone is perhaps The crucial enabling technology for the sovereign individual and thereby a crucial enabler of The Sovereign Collective what we call the network State let's get started welcome to the network State podcast an toi should I say toally go ahead totally wartz thank you for having me you know we've been I think friendly for a few years now I've seen the the rise of salana from very humble beginnings I actually knew Raj all the way back in the day when he was at omada health I was a board member there and uh you have gotten to know more recently and you were formerly a Qualcomm engineer before a relatively unusual late and career migration to crypto what I thought I thought we'd talk about today is you know the salon ecosystem in general but specifically why the salon of phone a decentralized cryptophone is is Central to human Freedom uh but maybe you want to you want to just give the for I most people know what salana is at this point but we want to give the background yourself background on salana and soone just bring us up to the the present moment sure so the or my origin story you know I'm uh went to school in Illinois I was uh a nerd love computer science loved performance optimization I don't know for whatever reason I like mentally got into the the love of like looking at code and trying to make it run as fast as possible on a piece of Hardware like optimizing assembly all that stuff and I ended up working on kind of that part of qualcom like looking at like various parts of the stack and like doing optimizations and I was there from the start of the mobile Revolution basically 2003 for about I can't remember for sure but like 12 or 13 years so I went from like these 2 megabyte 2in phone flip phone devices to so 2005ish pre iPhone yeah yeah yeah way way before iPhone um and like I saw the iPhone Revolution I saw the feature phone market drop from 80% to 20% I saw the hardware improve every year by more than a factor of two Ox which is pretty cool um in uh 2017 and like I've been I was aware of crypto I think since the origin I thought Bitcoin was kind of neat but I never understood the social impact of it even in retrospect it seems so obvious 2008 financial crisis sure this sound money thing comes out it just like didn't click it seemed like oh this is kind of NE but would never scale kind of thing a lot of engineers get very skeptical about like this is going to change the world kind of right and like missed the whole social implication of it in 2017 is when I got into crypto I saw fees on bitcoin HD like 60 bucks a transaction and um I literally had like a Eureka moment that there's a Wun code passage of time as data and that was the foundation of proof of history but like that I didn't know what to Google for this is kind of funny like the reason why Salon started is because I couldn't I didn't know this was a verifiable delay function there there's a bunch of folks like Dan Bonet working in these things at Stanford and I didn't know what to Google for and I thought oh man I found something really really cool that no one has thought of and it has this unique property where I can take this data structure and I think I can apply it to build a a source of time and create time division multiple access which is how old school 2G sellers networks work like when I started before CD before CDMA it was all tdma before CDMA that's right yep yeah so I and that's like the fundamental way you scale bandwidth in a shared Channel on radio is you split everything by time and then you get you can utilize basically almost all the bandwidth available to you and once you have that you have a scalable blockchain so that was like the Eureka moment I didn't know what to Google for uh my wife basically said you better go start this and do this for real or stop talking about it that's great that she encourage you though that's really great yeah y uh and that's what I met Raj and uh he was like kind of the perfect co-founder because he was not an engineer he's raised money before he kind of understood a large part of T and Silicon Valley that was really new to me his quote is that like he was like okay I'll help you for six months and then you know off to go but five years later yeah five years later we still uh working in building the sort of low level optimization stuff that you're talking about you know you know Duff's device I'm sure you Duff's device right that type of stuff right where in theory you could just write a for Loop and you know the compiler will take care of it but in practice you might need to actually manually unroll the loop and you have to have a familiarity with the underlying you know architecture right you know it's interesting because you know a couple of just remarks on what he said one is you know feeman I think he used to say that he didn't like to read the literature before he attacked a problem he only did that afterwards if he ever did it because then he would try to take original approach from first principles which is sort of what happened with you in proof of history and now obviously there's an intersection with vdf and you can pull some ideas from that literature but you you came at it from an original way of thinking of you know essentially vdfs as an alternative to proof of work or proof of stake right y yeah I felt like I got lucky in solving a hard computer science problem you can do basically as an engineer you never want to feel like okay this is like I'm GNA solve this really hard computer science problem you're very likely to fail and what I felt was like oh man I think I got lucky and they have like a solution to something really clever to a very hard computer science problem so let's see like how far we can take it and how far we can scale it um and one way of thinking about this and you tell me if I'm off base but like the way I sort of model it is that part of how Salon scales is because you assume that nodes can have heavy compute yeah whereas uh you know Bitcoin for example assumes like a one Meg block size constraint as a hard constraint system the whole Bitcoin Civil War has fought over that and then ethereum now obviously has a totally different model with with stake and and so on which is which is different right but um would you would you agree with that yeah and that comes from this idea that they don't have a a source of global they don't actually have a global clock and they have to rely on other forms to to get their notes to coordinate and the the problem this is like tdma solves is like pretty intuitive like imagine you have two radio towers that transmit at the same time time over the same frequency you get noise so if you give each one a clock they alternate by time and they there's no longer interference and information passes through this is actually exactly the same thing that happens with blockchains you have two block producers that produce a block at the same time they'll produce a fork so now the chain doesn't know what the next state is and has to resolve it and that's effectively noise because now you've dropped the amount of information that this this thing is is handling per second yeah and actually I have actually I have a signal process background I I didn't do certainly as much as you've done at Qualcomm but you know for the for the viewers or what have you the uh you know the noise that you're talking about is if both of those stations try to compete with each other by blasting at the same time there's a beggar Thy Neighbor thing where I'm broadcasting okay no you can only hear me okay I'm going to broadcast and then they compete and then people just hear static because they're just kind of competing with each other right y uh but if instead they take turns which they can only do if they've got a very reliable clock then I can broadcast stop you broadcast stop and we cut up the Spectrum by time but what's interesting is I don't think you know maybe it's just I'm remiss or derelict in this but I don't think I'd actually heard the analogy between tdma and proof of History before and the thing is that CDMA is much more efficient than tdma because you have you know instead of um I broadcast and then you broadcast and then person C and person D or whatever uh you use orthogonal functions you know wavelets or you know hard bases or something and then everybody can broadcast at the same time but their signals are actually have zero in product with each other and then you have a much uh you know much better use of bandwidth I wonder is there is there something I I'm sure you thought about that maybe it's a really trivial question but is there some analogy for that with the with salana um there is it's it's pretty complicated so there's a way to broadcast multiple block have multiple block producers broadcasts at the same time and you're kind of dealing with a similar problem if I see if I have to guarantee that when I receive this information that is partially from A and B that I can decode it um and think in a very general way that's very similar to how these wave lefts don't interfere you can solve it with the ratio coding you can pad it with an aeration coding which is a polinomial and you receive parts of the message and then you recover it um that's like onor road map um eventually there something that we want to build but this is like one of those nonlinear hard engineering problems sure sure I think is my you know my my recollection is CDMA was not done in an adversarial environment and so probably there's some assumption that breaks down when folks are trying to broadcast because you have to you have to nail the that basis exactly for it to work right the the concepts of like having um polinomial interpolate the data and give you this like like now now you're no longer looking at like discreet CHS of data you're looking at samples of a function you know you're you're sampling a function that actually works really well in an adversarial environment because it has this natural error corruption so you can make an assumption that as long as x% of the participants are like uh honest then I will recover the sample and like in general you know the assumption that all these networks run on is that two-thirds of the network are honest and therefore that's a pretty valid assumption what you want to avoid is that if they are dishonest what you want is that the natural status of think halts but that's the result like not that it can like steal money or issue like new tokens and some like that and that's also pretty easy to achieve so I think I think we have like a a re realistic engineering plan to to build that uh it's just deploying these systems like in a global internet with random people running this and random Hardware on random connections it's like a massive pain it is yeah I know of course well that's the funny thing is even even with the hardware requirements that you guys you have fairly beefy requirements for the nodes right so even with that it's still like uh you know the Dunkirk evacuation uh no that it's like well so basically in in World War II the British uh were able to evacuate France with a it wasn't like a nice military set of ships it was just this boat and this dingy and so on and they just kind of used everything that they could get together and that's kind of how I think about a lot of decentralized computing is it's like it's like the Dunkirk evacu just get whatever boat you can to to solve the problem and so even with that Baseline that's interesting so you still have a lot of you know just a lot of folks in the consensus Network well yeah well salana is unique in that like um I think we're the only Network that has uh a single quarum where there is no sampling and it's very large it's like about 3,000 computers all participating in consensus and they're voting every 400 milliseconds so we've kind of like when you look at the trma problem that vitalic kind of La out that there's straight offs between performance uh decentralization and security like the properties um you can't really scale that without Hardware or or or you basically take the sharding approach where you start splitting the network and you're making a trade off there a bit on security but like well there's a third approach which is zero knowledge or something along those lines right like where you you are you it's that's almost like the CDMA of ourspace where you're using you have an algorithmic gain potentially I don't know if you'd agree with that zero knowledge helps you on the compute side so you can improve how much uh computation a verifier needs to like you basically lower the CPU count but well I was saying like rollups like ZK rollups like you just store less you use as a compression thing you store less information on chain or something like that that has its own trade-offs of course you can get rid of signature verification but you can't get rid of the state and The Ledger sure right and fundamentally that's that is the bottleneck like there's tricks you can apply these tricks to layer one and kind of compress a bunch of the signatures and do a bunch of other tricks but at the end of the day the bandwidth that's shared between the network in a very like radio analogy that channel that's shared between all the towers that's the limit and totally either you build two different networks on different spectrums right and then have like algorithms to to make sure that they can reliably assume that the other one didn't create a fault or you just make it bigger right you like increase the Spectrum and therefore you can increase the number of participants and that's the approach we're taking that means that we are the optimization nerds that are looking at like Duff device like okay what if we like prefetch this into memory and like do stuff like this can we handle more messages per second and therefore have more participants and the result of that I think is like been awesome like we have nearly 3,00 validators all in a single Quorum all voting every 400 milliseconds so this is a a single replicated Global computer that's synchronized every 400 milliseconds in the world so when you drop a piece of data into it it's replicated around the world which is pretty amazing yeah yeah yeah actually that's interesting way you know it's interesting way of thinking about it it's not just a CDN in the sense of data replication it's also compute replication right yeah and it's and and it's got verification that the data was replicated consistently across all those places where CDN a normal CDN like aamai or something like that doesn't have doesn't have the same thing that's just an interesting way of thinking about it I hadn't for some reason I just hadn't thought about the latency aspect in quite that way um like a CDN 2.0 um okay well so uh well actually did you have any more remarks on that I wanted to I wanted to talk about the go ahead yeah there's like kind of a fundamental difference between in in like values between what salano is working on what ethereum folks are working on and you can kind of think of it as like both care about minimization there's some amount of that the network needs to minimize the amount of trust that people place in it but a theory like Sal really cares about global synchrony that data is replicated globally as fast as possible and everyone has the exact same state like as fast as possible in atomic composition that me as a developer me as a user I can like use a references any pieces of this data immediately and like automically and those three things are what salana cares about and ethereum folks have been able to sacrifice the other two while improving trust minimization to a degree and that's I think it's reasonable I actually think I I mean I'm a multi I mean and so and so forth my mental model is that you have um just like you have different levels of security for different kinds of things you know you might have a certain level security for the the president of a country and another love security for I don't know the um I don't know the the mayor of a city or something like that right and then you have another L of security for just somebody walking down the street um who may not be as much of an assassination Target or what have you in the same way that you have uh you know Bitcoin has a certain level of security where it's like it's trying to be nation state resistant and then ethereum and and completely immutable ethereum has relative immutability in the sense of infrequently mut mutated smart contracts and they try to keep the chain fairly thin but not as thin as or as Bitcoins and then you guys are you know like it's like a third gear on a bicycle and um you each gear on a bicycle is like useful for different things and then you guys have what I call a fatter chain right which makes actually a lot of things very convenient you just have all the state there you can just program against it you don't have to have anything offchain or what have you but it does increase the weight of the chain and you need um you know heavier compute to deal with it does that sound like a fair yeah description like the difference there isn't that the security is diff is worse or better it's that security is more expensive like you have to pay for a more expensive full node to get the the full trust minimization guarantees so what I wanted to talk about today you know maybe primarily is the salon of phone you know the decentralized cryptophone is Central to Liberty and freedom in the world um to civil rights to property rights in this age of you know centralization of of things and I can give my brief thesis on it and I'd love to hear your thesis on the salonon as a specific ENT of this essentially if you you know now about 15 years into the smartphone Revolution certainly our our wallet is on our phone um you know with your Apple pay or what have you your boarding passes are on there um in many countries uh to get through like a covid checkpoint or something like that you needed to use your phone they just assumed everybody had it you call your Uber or whatever on your phone you get to your Airbnb on your phone your data is on there your Communications are on there uh a large part of your life is on there your Digital Life is on there but it can be remotely accessed like for example in China not too long ago um videos of those you know protests against uh the like you know the third year of lockdowns or videos of those were just like remotely I've heard deleted you know from like WeChat they just reached in and deleted them we've seen uh for example with Google there was a report that uh some parents were taking photos of their kids for the doctor for the pediatrician and they got flagged as cesam and and you know their life was turned upside down as a function of that okay and then there's stuff where you know of course people you know there's various hackers that can do remote wipes and and so over and so this thing that really is your sanctum sanctorum your phone there's some being some good moves in the sense of like an encryption is now out there Apple has done some very laudable stuff recently with their you know iCloud actually has private Keys it's getting all these people everyone's like oh no one will learn private Keys Apple has actually got this new thing with iCloud where you can have private keys and actually get into encryption locally but uh we're still not all the way there towards a a sovereign phone you know where you have private keys that you hold locally that encrypt cloud data and they give you not just an encryption that's asserted I mean I like the fact that WhatsApp Asser it but that's provable because you're encrypting it locally right and so um so that is kind of where I'm at why I've wanted to see a crypto phone for like 10 years and I'm so glad you're doing it but I'd love to hear your thesis on it then maybe we can kind of go from there I think like the really coolest thing about crypto is not the blockchains or the layer ones is the it's the self- custody cryptography piece yes because it's the it's like a I think when you kind of think of that combined with like the first amendment and like the fourth amendment you effectively have the base layer for a stateless society like I have I have my cryptography nobody can take it from me there's and you know an atomic weapon cannot break the encryption right and like that's a very very powerful tool and I think it's because it's secured by math it makes it I think kind of outside of Almost Human facilities like magic effectively yes and I think that was like the revolution what crypto created is that like you now have consumer grade crypto that people are able to install and download through metamask through Phantom through like chome extensions or through Ledger and that didn't exist before 2008 like I don't know if you ever worked at a big tech company prior to that signing something required they were like armed guards by the ver sign security oh really I didn't know that that part I didn't know yeah go ahead how did that work tell me about that uh yeah so the way ver sign works is there's a a certificate chain they have a a cryptographic key that is the root and then that Key signs a child key that then gets passed down to like Google and then Google has its own certificate chain down to like it's so people but it's really yeah click the lock symbol near in H site and they'll show you the state chain but the armed guards part I was aware of I knew about like DNS sack and I knew about like the people who are like the root domain you know holders and and so but but tell tell me about this well if you steal the root you can reassign certificates and then you can fake all the connections and you can pretend to be Google so what was the armed guards thing so verine basically so so like at a big tech company like if you're signing code that says hey this is like qualcomm's code or this is Google's code that's now running in your device and the device trusts that code to have certain privileges you have to sign it with a certificate and that signature process is extremely like it's a ceremony there's guards that guard the key right you got to go to like a faad cage like it's a whole thing it's a whole thing interesting so I mean you know what that does remind me of actually is the security for a crypto exchange right where you do use a faraday cage and you do like you know you just don't take any you know you you sign offline and you air gap and you cold store you just all of the different defenses in depth right um but go ahead you're goingon to say but like consumers basically didn't have access to this it was very funly pgp was like the encryption tool for signing emails and all of the stuff never really worked at scale but all of a sudden with crypto because there's some you know need for like people to have fun like either there's for speculative reasons or just because their developers are messing around with ethereum and looking at as a new programming environment or Bitcoin people started building all of these tools to make it easier and you started metamask I think was a massive step up from pgp like if you ever as a as a human like I could not figure out bgp right well and I'm an engineer that's the thing is you know I have a rule of thumb which is if it's hard for you and it's hard for me it's usually too hard yeah right like like it's hard for like basically you know our friends whatever it's usually too hard right and but but your point is actually a really good one because the entire you know pki problem right public key infrastructure there's this whole slew of actually nowadays as I'll get to very useful papers but at the time all these papers were written under the assumption in the 90s and the 2000s of assume the pki problem is solved right assume just for the viewers that everybody has a private key that they keep secure and accessible at all times and a public key that's that's available to everybody in the internet if everybody on a network had that there's all kinds of Amazing Magic that you can do with things that are you know like like secure email and messaging and all this stuff right transactions the problem is I think the part that was not appreciated is that to have something both a secure and B accessible at all times is actually very costly because you could have it secure without being accessible by just going and putting in some safe deposit box that you never you know it's dug up in the ground right or you could have it accessible without being secure by just having it you know like pinned to the top of your Twitter or like tape to the top of your computer or something like that to be both a secure and B accessible is like on your person it's like it's like literally a wallet right Y and and so you needed a strong incentive for something like that and you need to teach people that if it was not secure or not accessible they would lose money because it wasn't accessible then they couldn't find the key and if it wasn't secure someone else would take the key and so cryptocurrency incentivized the build out of public key infrastructure without it we wouldn't have had Millions hundreds of millions of people trained and incentivized to keep their private Keys private and secure right it's secure and accessible and so that's enabled this entire all this magic of you know this this like world that these these papers assumed into being now that assumption is actually manifest I'd love your thoughts on that yeah and that that's exactly what I was kinden in my realization too like once you have pki that's hum like consumer scalable pki all of these ideas like become possible you can like you L well does it's not even going to matter which later one people are using when you have 8 billion people that can sign with cryptography that's right it's like it's it's like you know in the early days when people started using the term crypto of course you could do software before the internet I mean there were personal computers so there you can do disconnect computers but software and enget are almost synonymous today they're not of course of course but because so much software runs internet and so much software depends on internet and so much software assumes the internet and the same way like so much cryptography will assume cryptocurrency because if you're going to assume that a private key is there locally I mean this is a thing where Apple introducing this thing for iCloud or Whatsapp doing ant encryption or you know Google has like DNS verification for you to confirm you have your domain right Amazon of course has its ec2 Keys all of the majors understand that you need like some sort of you know key challenge or some sort of digital verification and all that will eventually in my view and probably yours eventually go to some sort of you know crypto-based thing right because it's just the platform that has the most adoption we've got 300 million crypto users now in five years 10 years we may have a billion or more right go ahead and it's much easier once the like all the tools that we built for crypto make that communication challenge response process much much easier easier and much faster like it you not no longer need to be like a PhD and cryptography and cryptographic secure protocols you can actually use a bunch of JavaScript to go punch it out and all of a sudden you've got something that works that's right people like we're still not at a stage where you can make that secure like like a entrylevel engineer can build a secure system but we're at a stage where you can build these systems and they're somewhat straightforward to audit and you can get to that like okay this is a secure protocol we're doing the key exchange over salana or whatever and now we've set up the communication Channel everyone can go and talk in a secure environment that's right and actually you know one thing you touch on which is user interfaces like really nice and clean user interfaces people take them for granted because they're simple to use they think they were simple to develop yep and it's actually quite the opposite go ahead yep and the Simplicity comes from like uh consumer scale when you can make an assumption that the internet connection is always there it always works and when you when you get to a point when developers can make the Assumption okay everyone's going to have a wallet and when they talk to my website there's a wallet you actually blow away a massive part of like normal developer user account management like I don't know if you ever had to build a SAS or whatever yes it's a yeah like managing accounts managing their credit cards doing all of the stuff is like a team of 20 or 30 in any decent leg size like SAS company and and and you basically I mean you can rely you can try to use Facebook login Google login and so and so forth and you can actually get quite far with that but eventually you're almost always going to need your own account system because it is the central node in everything you're doing right like you have types of users and all that type of stuff and you have admin users or whatever but now we have the portable log and we actually have this article called the billion user table which I'll flash up but basically you know the Advent if ens and SNS and so on like now you can have a portable name between sites which is the portable social profile that people wanted um it is is locked to a blockchain but you can Import and Export your profile data in and out of sites which is kind of what you're talking about right like a third model for accounts right not username password not log in with Google or Facebook but login with your private key effectively go ahead exactly so once once you assume that consumers of P it's just all like not only can you build like just normal applications much faster because you're not managing accounts but you can now also build Financial applications which has really been impossible before yes and like you can build a bank right like two two devs can build a bank in three weeks and you know the thing is one thing I find and you're probably aware of this as well is folks who are first or second gen immigrants are just so much more conscious of how big a deal that is right because we've all experienced some problem with the banking system either in our home countries or you know with family abroad or something like that and the more you're kind of you know more the developed World rich country whatever you know Legacy infrastructure works for you the less you see the need for crypto because you don't you just don't see the problem you're like you know my Starbucks thing kind of works why do I need this thing or whatever but if you're setting money overseas you know marazza Hussein had a good post on this where you know he's in he's got like family totally innocent family they happen to be in a country which is just very hard to send money to and boom he's just able to do it right and so that kind of thing like now boom you can just instantly set up the equivalent of a bank account send or receive money it is actually like it's S A that's the thing is people think oh where's the use cases well it's a THX it's 100,000x easier to set up a bank account in terms of time and to send money across borders and to do accounting on chain and and and all these different things whatever I I know I'm preaching to the choir but go ahead so so to get to kind of like the mobile phone why a mobile phone well like me as an engineer I welcome this is while I was there this is basically I think before even Bitcoin was a thing we're already working on this idea of a trusted display and a trusted Computing environment on your phone and that means that it's it's by trusted what this means is that it's an environment that the operating system that runs all these user applications canot cannot touch it's like thing it's like exactly sgx exactly but s sgx did have a problem with it right if I was like a while back or go ahead these these systems are hard to build and it takes a lot of iteration and like the sgx design was more ambitious than like something like trust Zone and arm sure um but you basically the way kind of from a very high level the way it works is it segments memory is it there's some chunks of physical addresses that are accessible to the trust Zone and nothing else in the operating system can read it and you need to also make the display trusted environment and that's a very kind of unintuitive thing but like let's say it had like a a widget for you to enter your seed phrase on the phone and an application from a malicious developer replicated yeah mimic the exact same screen it asks you to reenter it ners would get fished and accidentally enter it and now your seat phrase is is gone so you need a a very a way to override the display and make sure the operating system cannot mimic that and like create that environment very similar to the htps lock symbol exactly right so once you have those pieces you can then effectively treat this device very similar to a hardware wallet like a ledger I would say that like most people should not use this for Cold Storage like storing their life savings on it but even if even if the if we like prove that supply chain and everything else and audits was as secure as a ledger you still need to get into this like idea that I have like my cold wallet which is my savings account and that has air gap security and this is my hot wallet that I use dayto day and I use it for talking to applications and that if I lose my wallet it's not catastrophic right right right right no I think I think it's very important I mean the um the thing about it though is it is much while you should still have cold storage this is this is putting up a much higher bar uh a warm wallet is at least not remote shut off very trivially right it be hacked but it's like it's still far more secure than the status quo um and you know there's something else you said by the way which uh is I think really important I didn't want to skip over when you said restoring the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment right I actually wrote an article on this called uh Bitcoin is civilization that's actually the domestic policy version and then also um uh you know the uh you know an article for foreign policy on the international policy version but to your point Free Speech how are you going to do it well you need actually encrypted speech and how have protection from search and seizure the TSA is like patting everybody down searching everybody without War well encryption restores your ability to walk around without search and seizure especially in those countries that don't have even those uh traditions of civil liberties you know unfortunately in many plac around the world so we're basically wherever there's a phone we're parachuting in civil liberties as well right now the only thing I would maybe added on what you said is I do believe that what that does is it gives people the ability to opt out of you know like bad States you know failed States surveillance States I think the next step is going to be them opting in to good jurisdictions and I I think we're both you know in a sense Pro civilization because the that that's actually the third bit in in my book The I was like uh the least popular word in the world is recentralization you know because the people who are currently running centralized systems are like why aren't those okay for you and the people who are pro decentralization are like why would you want to recentralize that's where we're escaping from but the way I kind of think about it is you know decentralization is like hitting the fire alarm you know everybody runs out the building and in different directions but then they want to like regroup at the like you know the the Union Point right and maybe not in exactly the same way but you know you you need to have those Sovereign individuals they they unbundle from the system that's failing them they use the Civil Rights the property rights that the crypto phone delivers to do that right and it's really both it is I mean it's like you know Punk 6529 you know on T right so she has this really great which actually expresses that so clearly which is most civil rights don't exist in practice without property rights they are basically the same like you want to buy a sign to protest you need some money right you know almost all kinds of things if you can shut off somebody's banking you can basically like throttle them and they don't have you know the cost of speech if you raise it too high they don't actually have freedom of speech right so the so so the the left libertarian the right libertarian have something very strong in common here you know right and um so so putting that together basically uh that sovereign an individual who has those civil rights and property rights that are restored in my view protected by the cryptone can then bundle with other people to have a sovereign Collective where now they can actually they because they have property rights they can do Collective Goods together because they have civil rights they can speak freely together and they can come up with a polity that suits them go ahead let me know your thoughts on that these are like the freely Associated communes that like mik bakun and dreamed up like there's no there's no oppressive State everyone Associates at their own will they bring whatever they can and everyone kind of works together and connects it yeah well so so but so it's funny there's there's a utopian version but there's actually the actual version and the actual version is like uh mid 1800s America so it's called the the communistic societies of the United States a book by the guy Charles Nordhoff and he goes through and for example like the Onida commune in in Upstate New York was actually a group of people because there's all this land right so people could just go to wherever a piece of land and if they liked it they stayed and if they didn't like it they' apply to another community and they'd move there and some of these things failed but some of them really worked and like anida today is actually the name of like a glasswar manufacturer as you might be aware but back in the day it was like a it was like an opt-in Society where there's enough geography and actually the kibit in Israel were also kind of like this and some of them now today have become like big companies like Nim is like an agricultural thing so reason I say that is people there is the utopian idealistic version that doesn't actually get anywhere but there actually have been successful experiments in opt-in living of which arguably the United States is one of the best where you know it's only 4% of the world most of the people who came here came here voluntarily of course you know sense of slaves notwithstanding Native American Etc that's important but like let's say 90% 85% of the population came voluntarily and it did build something great it is an optin Society of course there's lots of other dimensions to it but that that is some it's the only reason I just say that is otherwise people will think oh biology just so unrealistic and utopian but you're right there's a there is the bonan aspect but there's also the American aspect there's the there's a realistic aspect go ahead um and so like why I phone I think is the engineering aspect of the phone for pki is just really really obvious yes this this device already has the hardware to support it like where Apple and Google Store your biometric scans it's in the secure element like when you do Apple pay that's a trusted display nobody else can fake it and like all this stuff already exists so we've taken basically stock Android build uh and like worked with like an oem and five Engineers like made the changes to enable cryptographic signing in this device this is I'm honestly I'm so happy you're doing this actually you know the thing I hadn't connected until just now is I was like you know phone's pretty ambitious but then you guys have shipped it and it seems to work and then I I realized your Qualcomm background is probably helpful in this in in terms of you know it's like knowing what to turn and who to talk to and so and so forth is that correct like yeah okay yeah I think understanding the scope of the problem like we were able to minimize it to like we need the smallest change inside this the trust Zone to support this it's not going to take a team of 100 people take five and you can work with any oam to enable it wow like that's go ahead what you're saying I'm I'm really psyched about this and that means that like this technology like we we have a really good relationship with like the Google folks and like it runs all the Google services there's no like objections on their side like good oh you can't do this or something like that it's just is really really small there's not a like I would imagine that like the number of Twitter users that have enabled the nft search is probably under 50 100,000 like that have that have and like when you look at Twitter it's like 300 million people to them like okay crypto's a buzzword we can enable this feature and do a whole bunch of work to support self- custody or whatever and then only 100,000 people op to it it's a failure well so here's the thing actually I think that that is going to be pretty important for them in the future and here's why 100% right so so like lots of things are like this where like for example crypto kitties you know it was like this small experiment nft thing in 2017 it was like a little bubble and then nfts became a huge thing and then they crash but they crashed back down to a much higher level than they were before one thing for example um you know there's an app salon app uh I think it's called glow right which you're probably familiar with right and you can just take a photo of something in nft now people think oh that's so stupid what are you doing the answer is it's not just okay yeah you can sell it maybe or whatever they're thinking about n speculative art I'm thinking of it as a crypto instrument it's a crypto camera that at least that person at that time can assert on chain that this thing was photographed by this device and maybe you include a device signature with it and there's things you could do maybe even in like a hardware fingerprint or something why is that so important because AI is comp at least mitigate them right and so that code that Twitter has for you know code pass for handling nft is it may be something where you have a check mark not just on the person but on the image that it came from a crypto camera and you can actually show it's uh it's uh it's supply chain like its digital supply chain it came back from this block at this time and that doesn't mean by the way to be clear that doesn't mean it's necessarily 100% real it just means at least you can have some some things you know about it you know some of the metadata some of the China cussy it had to have been faked by this guy at this time you know on this chain and that narrows it down a bit because with that person had the motive to fake it you know so hey I'd love your thoughts on something like that so I uh yeah AB absolutely 100% agree with you I think like in the post product Market fit crypto world like every company is going to have to have some interface to crypto and like but the the hard problem for them right now is that like the number of active users with pki is actually pretty small you have a bunch of people that hold Bitcoin a bunch of people that may have traded on exchanges and just buy and hold it but like when you look at the number of active trans acting users in nfts and all these other stats when you combine them like open C's Global total number of users that have used openc is around five million number listen I have an argu I have an argument on this historically no I understand I understand and I'm not I'm not one thing that I've uh thought about and this observation isn't original to me I think Dixon has made it other folks have made it but you know social media arose where it had lots and lots of users but then for a long time people said How's this thing going to make money right and for example Instagram had tons and tons of use tons of use cases and when it was acquired in 2012 you know John Stewart because it had no Revenue at the time by the way it was actually a huge huge uh coin flip by by Zuck if Facebook was not you know they only had like four billion in cash they're a few weeks away from IPO Facebook itself it was questionable as to where they're going to make money on mobile they spent a billion dollars acquiring Instagram he didn't consult the board now today it's a$1 billion doll company everybody think thinks was such a genius move obvious move at the time antitrust it was very non- obvious move then right point is Instagram had zero Revenue but had lots of use and crypto has in some ways the opposite emergence mode from social media where it generates tons and tons of money and it's a use cases that are second as opposed to social media which was use case's first Revenue second right so that's kind of one angle on your argument uh maybe you have some thoughts on that and then that's actually like you you almost led me to the opportunity for us okay great how can we how can like a tiny startup with like five Engineers messing around with Android take on like like Google and apple because like the thing that we're really delivering here is the pp for users but also an AAP store like an application store yes for developers that does not have the fee model that the Google and Apple stores have and does not have the restrictions on treating pki as a feature on the device for token gating for nfts for minting these nfts you know and like submitting them to a chain and selling them like that's basically prohibited in both Google and apple like and that's that's kind of like the feature set and the opportunity for us is that while crypto has a small user base it's probably the spendest user base on the internet sure like I would say it's with it's like the 0.1% of people that like generate the most like volumes the most trading the most like Financial activity on the internet right now the crypto users so if we can get this device to 25 50,000 of those users that's actually better distribution channel for devs than the big app stores are today anyone that's building in crypto would rather get their application to 50,000 active web3 people that have used openc or or magic Eden on a day-to-day basis and try to like find some way to sneak in a feature in the app in the Apple App Store behind the scenes there a couple questions on that a um assume you you did uh have multi- wallets on there so it doesn't just hold Saul it holds eth and BTC and so on right so so like uh VZ right now we just why the reason we shipped is that sure UT cut teaches but but it's on the road map T absolutely and like there it's open source and we have like external contributors working and adding e support there's actually an evm equivalent runtime called neon on salana which requires e support so like even if we were just like trying to box it out like it would eventually happen because all the stuff is interoperable I'm glad you're taking that approach because I think once a salon of phone holds both eth and BTC and maybe it's not a maybe it's not a exactly a blocking requirement or something like that I think it's like worth checking out even now and that's a software upgrade so you could get it now I try to but um the thing is that basically uh this is I I'll I'll make a couple points these are obvious points to you maybe not points that Phil know the ecosystem web development was actually held back through most of the 2000s by Internet Explorer absolutely right that whole time period has been erased from memory right everyone thinks oh I remember you remember it I remember it right it took literally like an engineer of Google to like accidentally deprecate Internet Explorer 6 and post a link like hey update your shitty shitty browser and like oh it wasn't a PM that made that decision or a director it was like there was like a fire in Google management holy who P who pushed this feature yes well it was it's something where like that whole story is worth telling and the reason I just say is because web development as we currently know it was held back by Microsoft because they beat net so just for those who don't remember this you know because they're too young or whatever in the 90s Bill Gates saw the internet thing coming to his credit okay and Netscape had just had their huge IPO I think 1995 and Netscape Navigator was coming and he decided okay we're going to ship a browser we're going to bundle it with the operating system and we're going to asfixiate Netscape and and basically that's what they did and that was actually part of the basis for the antitrust trial in the late 90s early 2000s was they were bundling their browser with the OS and it was but it was worth it for them in a sense because um they took all the revenue out of the space Netscape did sell to AOL it was like but but basically what happened was once Microsoft had killed Netscape as a a competitor inter Explorer had like 90 something percent share and they basically just like kind of stopped development after that right because they didn't want the web to become a big thing they wanted everybody to run on Microsoft Windows now at that time in the early 2000s there were two alternatives to Windows which were a apple and Mac OS um which is based on BST and B Linux and Linux was a server set technology that had an Ethics around of Open Source and what not which we forget today because Linux is now so commercial but the time is a big thing and apple was still a shadow of what it is say it was pre it was even pre IOD yeah pre iPod pre- iPod let alone iPhone or iPad or the monster it is right so Microsoft was very dominant in the early 2000s and it was basically choke pointing the entire web and Google just bed its time because it didn't want to get killed like Netscape and uh you know just did Search Search Search Search Search all the way through 2004 Focus on that completely over six years and by the way people rode off the internet after the dotom crash right for years this wasn't it wasn't it was like so out of the news that it wasn't even something that people attacked right it was just thought of as obviously you know a failure whatever they're all focused on Iraq they're all focused on terrorism that was the 2000s right even in 2009 somebody wrote this article about like the power centers in the US and they didn't list Silicon Valley among it okay they had like you know the Pentagon and they had Wall Street and all this stuff did not list Silicon Valley because it was still gadgets it was like you know maybe you have your iMac and there's Microsoft Windows and that Facebook was still in the 20 2009 still like for college students all that stuff was just not even there point being that it was only in 2004 with gmail which actually pioneered Ajax in 2005 Google Maps and it took Google's Engineers which were the best in the world to figure out this back door in Explorer left his back door right for xmlhttp request and then you know Firefox started gaining some Traction in the mid 2000s then Chrome came out I think it was only like what 08 or 09 if I'm right was that right okay Y and HTML 5 was like the late 2000s and htl 5 was this exciting thing oh you can do the web but that was like 10 years from the Doom crash in 2000 to actually being able to do web apps kind of sort of in 2010 and now the iPhone app store only came out in ' 08 all of this stuff was like extremely recent and so the reason I bring all that up is I think that you know the Internet only came back by public acclamation as an important thing in February of 2013 and that's when the techlash began but it's basically about 12 years between the Doom crash and 2013 before Tech was taken seriously again the reason I say this is uh a big part in my view of what's being holding back people are like oh where are the applications for crypto and so and so my first answer to that is well there are applications we've got digital gold we've got crowdfunding we've got wire transfers we've got setting up bank accounts we've got a lot of stuff it's like the what have the Romans ever done for us there's all these things right the second is well block space has been a constraint for a long time and so the apps that being developed are those that minimize use of block space like Bitcoin is just hold for a long time right where ethereum is buying to the crowd fund and then still hold for a long time it's minimal on chain and only now with what you guys are doing and what other chains are doing is block space much less of a constraint right so that's the second thing and the third thing is what you're doing with the salop phone because apple as you know was just like ridiculous for many years in terms of filtering apps and you couldn't do crypto stuff on the phone and they they've gotten a little better on that now but it's like a it's like one step forward two steps back sometimes and now you've got a phone which is totally unlocked and so you can do all the crypto stuff on there so so those three things I I think or why like salana has like this really interesting mobile app culture now those things have all like come together now finally go ahead yeah that's my take on it I maybe you do Sy cratic um there's like a tidbit of history there that I think at least in my memory this is kind kind of how I remember it the web sucked until the iPhone released and apple decided to actually Fork khtml into webkit which is the open- source uh like web browser that was built for KDE which is part of the a dust suit for Linux and this is like the people like at the time I was like a huge Linux I ran Linux and like the year of Linux and desktop was always going to be next year yeah yeah it's actually arguably come it's actually come because Android is a new desktop and that's mobile Linux right but but but it came in a different brand go ahead and and like the Apple Engineers working on webkit and make and that thing being open source is when Google then forked webkit and made and made Crow and and that was like Google and apple both working together to kind of like build a browser that was equivalent to Internet Explorer and then like could kind of Drive the web to like next Generation like these Dynamic application environment was like I think what saved the web and there's kind of a deep irony there that now like both Google and apple run these like app stores that are anti- web arguably that would have in some ways like neuter the web and prevent these like Rich applications running in like a browser only environment so we're like back full circle we're back full circle and actually mic I mean I give a lot of credit in immense credit to suia for turning around Microsoft and so on but we may literally be in this weird history of repeats thing with Microsoft about to like choke points yeah the entire Tech ecosystem through an API running on its servers do we want that again I mean come on right you know like with with all the props I hope they make tons of money I just don't want them to have the same control that they did right and but but yeah your point is very good because basically it took Google and apple and Firefox right all I mean you know like a really good startup because Firefox had Blake Ross who's like a super genius you know like browser developer like this you remember him right he actually I don't know what he's doing now but he's like an early engineer of Facebook also and he like coded Firefox when he's like a teenager so Blake Ross at Firefox and uh and Google and apple all three of them took years before finally I 6's market share came below 50% I don't remember what year that was but it was like I feel was the late 2000s that's my guess we'll go we'll kind of look it up I might be wrong but I feel like that right yeah I think you're right right so so basically and then and only then could all the stuff that Paul Graham was talking about with web apps and YC combinator only then late 2000s early 2010s could that stuff finally become feasible right and and even like Netflix for example streaming Netflix house of cards I think was only 20 2012 2013 right they were doing mail order DVD the web just didn't work for long the reason I just say all this is people people have retconed that because it works today they think it instantly worked and this is where I think like pki is going and I don't know if it's going to take like salana like SMS showing that there's now developer traction and devs are shipping apps and making real revenues to get like the Google and apple to change like my my my kind of bet is that like in the in the best case we succeed we get 1 to 2% like market share of like Global users using SMS and these are the web3 users and all of a sudden developers that are shipping applications to this user base are generating more Revenue than they do in the other app stores and that's going to be the inflection point that forces the big companies to be like okay we got to like change your business model which is going to be really painful because the the careers built around that business model right right and and support pki I I it's it's funny I think well you you've done a very good job at Salon you have a you have an Instagram deal you have a YouTube deal right um just you know Twitter's got nft support and so on um so you've done a good job of interfacing with the big tech companies um with the open-minded people there who at least are putting a toe in the water right Reddit also has nfts now um Discord is uh you know they had some push back last year but they're I think gradually adding some crypto stuff and so on um and and I'm also starting to see apps like like Luma for example that have um you know ethereum and salana support um or like spatial.ai has some like crypto support so you're starting to see it not as like necessarily the the be all and end all of the app but as a feature in the app which you can log in with metamask or uh you know um Phantom or Google right so that's like just starting to happen but it's happening kind of out of public sight in some way it's only like the hardcore we are seeing it go ahead and these are the the small stages of adoption and I think these are kind of the the early like you know it's like really painful to Zana startup it's really painful to Zana an ecosystem yeah like a whole like new programming Paradigm is is also really really hard oh oh and rust and rust by the way yeah I like rust but rust also adds a degree of uh a degree of difficulty to some extent right great great language but um the you know it's funny though one thing is one of my thesis I love your thoughts on this is after mid 2017 I realized that we weren't going to have another trillion doll American tech company the reason is the backlash against Uber you know backlash against Uber but ethereum was going vertical at that time I realized okay we're going to have the American Tech ecosystem we'll have the Chinese ecosystem and then we'll have the global ecosystem system where the only other thing that can get to global scale will be those things that have crypto backends and actually that is you know the you know in a sense the competitors to Google and Facebook and so on are actually already in play ins sight they are Bitcoin and ethereum and salana and you know the basically the things that are built around those chains as opposed to companies it's like communities and currencies as opposed to companies I'd love your thoughts on that I think that the maybe I'm like too much of like Anarchist I think it's going to look more of like smaller companies that are very hyper optimized for their user base that I think it's going to be very hard to build a global brand that scales up maybe protocols can do it but protocols only I think that's right but but it's going to be like local companies that are like hey I'm using etherium and people have some trust to to that brand or I'm using salana or I'm using like this prod call for matching drivers to to passengers and these small companies all around the world can all coordinate around this one protocol and use that to bootstrap their like initial user base initial like set of drivers and stuff and like CU like I think what what chains provide are like basically marketplaces and that's a very uh small thing but very powerful thing because the web runs into a Marketplace it's the ad exchange Marketplace everything runs in a market place somewhere like when you're buying stuff somebody has to match you with a seller and like having these de like decentralized transparent marketplaces with branded protocols I think could help bootstrap these like small communities that are like now running effectively like uber but now Uber that's built on top of a protocol that protocol may not actually be as extractive as a trillion dollar big Tech cor you know you mentioned something which makes me think of the fat protocol cus from like a few years ago the thing is the fat protocol thesis I think is in the long term may be partially true we may see some app chains but I think in the short term it is not true because what'll happen is you'll put the minimum necessary State on chain right I think this is the part you know Moxy Marin spike is a great engineer you know did signal and so on he had this post a while back like about a year ago or so where he's like it feels like all the web3 stuff is just trying to put it's it's trying to have the minimum amount of decentralization I'm like you're absolutely right because block space is the key technical constraint of the whole thing just like bandwidth was the key technical constraint of the 2000s right so like in the 2000s the whole name of the game was minimizing bandwidth that's why Netflix did Miller DVD right that's why Google did search for a long time uh because it was just keyword in 10 links out right that's why Amazon had a card basically a catalog interface and you know AWS came only much later and it's because they were minim minimizing you know like bandwidth use because early internet most people didn't have T1 connections even Facebook you probably know the story you know why Facebook started at Harvard I don't because like people that tried to do social networks before like six degrees and so on um and that didn't have photos because people didn't have enough digital cameras didn't have high enough band I mean think about that time right like digital cameras couldn't be taken for granted right Y and most people didn't even have that many digital camera photos and you had to have a special camera that would like go with some like printer cable like thing to your computer said like one one digital camera photo and at Harvard you had just like you talked about like the 50,000 crypto users as like the starting base for something Harvard had that group of like in in 2004 2003 these relatively Elite users that had T1 connections they're well off enough to have digital cameras they were young and early adopters and that was the hot house environment where like this could take off sooner and then going to colleges it was not simply a strategic thing it was like an active necessity I mean even in 2009 like something like only 5% of India was online right so like five years before then you couldn't have had Facebook in India right and so um I think in the same way the strategy you have where you get 50,000 100,000 Salon of mobile users is the same emergent strategy for you know starting in Harvard or starting in San Francisco but rather than starting in a geography you're starting with a global Community getting that like small user base is is uh very counterintuitive like go to market I think for like phone companies and I worked on the Amazon Fire the Facebook phone like a whole like the windows Metro phone at qual we were like okay this big company is going to build a smartphone and we throw a bunch of Engineers at it and I would be one of those like working on some component very similar to like that being lucky being at Harvard to Ser Facebook if if we can get if we can be that lucky and get the phone to the the crypto users that the the number one like I would say Spenders on NE not and the daily active pki users uh and if we get enough of them that's going to be I think a very competitive Marketplace for developers K devs build applications that are like so high value to users that somebody will decide okay I'm buying an SMS enabled phone that because of this application and if we see that like we see actually somebody doing that that means that we actually have product Market fit for the this idea of that like pki and the interaction between pki and a public blockchain whatever that data structure that's it's interacting with is now so valuable that users are willing to like make a purchasing decision I think that that's going to be like the big unlock and that's the big unknown because I think while we're there a bit on like nfts and like crypto trading and stuff like that I would say my in my mind the only kind of non like more consumer as use case that we've seen over the last year was steppen which is like crypto like Marketplace based fitness app and that had like a breakout but like not a sustainable one but like we need we need to see more attempts at this like this is a consumer application it's got It's using crypto rails and pki for like user identity and crypto rails for finance and like whatever else but it has like real value to consumers in the like the real economy outside of crypto itself and and I think I think part of that is now enabled by block space being cheap enough that it's a transaction um and and that's relatively new that's like about a year old or so right technologically you know one other thing by the way to your point is uh there's this post at you know the network State called the billion user table by by John Stokes and he um it's it's kind of good long form version of an argument that uh that I've discussed on Twitter we've discussed with him but it's basically that uh in the long term I'm pretty sure that people will log in with their crypto account as opposed to you know Facebook Google etc for the simple reason that when you log in with um your salon name or your ethereum name you have a balance Tada right that alone you know if you if you just had 10,000 users who logged in with Facebook and all you've got is their profile photo and their name or you have 10,000 users that logged in that have non-zero balances and then more than that they have the whole Vector of nfts whatever it else they've decided to share with the site right because they've logged in with that particular name you just like you know that's just a much more economically valuable user right and uh you know one way of thinking about it you know you mentioned on 50,000 100,000 well do you know for example do you know how many people the Cayman Islands has like as a as a country it's only like 68,000 people that's believable so yeah that's kind of interesting right eston is only a million people like there's a lot of countries one thing I think you know it's a theme of the network State book and you know the Pod just like there's startups that punch way way way above their weight you know like WhatsApp had 13 people not 55 people and Instagram had like 13 people you know to get to hundreds of millions of users and you guys had five people to go and do the salop phone when it taking a huge group of people um there's small countries that punch way up of their weight and they just do way more with a few tens of thousands people I mean the C islands is like a globally important thing right um Estonia is like pretty pretty important given only like a million people so I think actually it's not just I I know you know this and I know you're saying this but like it's not just a numerical base it's kind of their commitment and influence I do think that the kinds of applications that would run on the salop phone um you know one graph that has always stuck with me have you seen the graph of Facebook's user base and the smartphone install base if you if you compare both of them I believe that smartphones actually grew faster than Facebook even though you had to pay money for smartphones like as useful as Facebook was and how big it's got it right smartphones were so ridiculously valuable to people right and so an interesting question will be um when would your crypto phone get so valuable that people would pay for it you know what is like the killer app right and it'll you know it might be I can I can think of negative models right I can think of negative cul things where there's you know threatened or actual seizure or search of of things right I want to think of positive things uh you know obviously the crypto economy right and tasks and other kinds of things maybe you can earn more within that environment right maybe it's just like a crypto first environment you know like forecaster do you what that is it's it's like in a sense it's like an ethereum social network right um no though he was it's not it wasn't necessarily created for this purpose is like now becoming a Bitcoin social network where it's got like lightning integration and ordinals ordinals are coming in Bitcoin is actually now much more interesting again from a Dev sample with Noster and ordinal right and then there'll be a salon Network maybe among these crypto phones that seems like an obvious thing to do just like other salana users integrating with other salana users right so I so that may be just something where to participate in the salana crypto economy that's maybe why you you you get that phone right so maybe you don't actually lean out of it you just grow the salana country right let me maybe maybe disagree maybe you agree with that I I I mostly agree with that I think I think we we will see like these kind of like pki interactions like start happening with applications that are like start they'll basically like the complexity of like dealing what chain you're dealing with where the data structures are how the users log in these are starting to get more and more kind of melting away with libraries and developer tooling and like the pki aspect of it like for my users perspective like if they have this phone this the what the phone does is it Pro secures a seed phrase but then the wallets themselves can connect to ethereum can connect to salana can connect to bitcoin and whatever and it's all based in the same seed phrase and that's where your root identity is generating from kind of going back to that verisign world that secure element inside the device are is are the armed guards for the certificate and then you end up with like infinite yeah better than arm guards cuz encryption yeah that can be on any network and um the tooling and like the being able to kind of like move value and like move maybe like key points of like identity between them that stuff is going to get better and and simpler across like you know as just time progresses like on on all the major networks we're kind of seeing some of that like you see like major wallets like Phantom start supporting multiple chains but do it in a way that everything is Der red from a single identity route and you have accounts that can be shared between chains and like nfts that are associated with one but you can then send proofs like for SM for like applications that are kind of becoming more agnostic like I own this nft it may be on salana but it's a dgod and dgod are doing stuff on ethereum and stuff like that so I I'm I'm really glad that you're thinking cross chain and multi-chain eventually uh even obviously you have to ship and so on but that actually think you know like things like neon EPM compatibility I think that's really good and positive some you know I have uh so I have a couple other things I wanted to talk to you about with the the phone may one is just on like the logistics of building it right cyanin a long time ago they tried to Fork Android and they got I mean they they were pretty good technically strong technically but um they just uh they didn't have like the business model for it at the time and then a bunch of Chinese manufacturers successfully forked Android and like xiaomi being you know one of them uh and then one of the things Google did is it sort of pushed more and more stuff into Google services to kind of discourage that so Android was initially very open and everyone like freewrite on Google and Google's like wait a second I didn't I didn't really want you to do that and so more and more stuff became like Google services where they they didn't Clos Android Source but they closed the state of the application and pushed it server side um and the third was Facebook using Android for Oculus Quest and of course you know Facebook's a big competitor of Google but they they found that that operating system was a mobile that they could for can do something with um so you know I don't know I mean like the uh it's interesting because iOS in a in a sense is also built on BSD but they have not made it anywhere near not even not anywhere near they have not made it publicly forkable at all how did you know how did you guys think about that in terms of those other three that I mentioned like Cyanogen and the Chinese manufacturers and uh and Facebook are all competing with Google but you you took a more Cooperative approach am I correct about that and this is for practical reasons I used both my my Saga device and my iPhone but even before I had the Saga I was already using Google Maps and Gmail and and chrome so like you like those are really pretty decent services and I kind of know that they're taking my data but that that's just like competitively I think it's really really hard to build products that are as good but it's getting closer you start seeing like things like Hive mapper Builds an open data set for mapping uh and that's definitely going to end up being competitive to Google Maps eventually I use signal like more often than I use iMessage like my iMessage is filled up with Spam from Rand Oh Yeah from randos uh my signal I actually used to talk to like my friends and family on a day-to-day B basis um so like that that stuff was already naturally happening at some point we'll get to parody to where you have encryption first like privacy preserving applications that have the exact same properties as the Google applications and then it won't really matter if the Google's stuff is there anymore and for now my guess is that like the GMS licensing an oem licensing is set up in a way due to uh the Google mobile services I don't know if it's set up because Google B trying to trying to do this so yeah so so skiff is actually um I'm not sure if they have Salon sport they have support but they may add Salone support at some point skiff is worth looking at if you haven't seen it which is like doing uh Google Docs and Gmail with crypto login right and maybe they could add Salon login and uh they're doing basically provable in and encryption and so on right so uh something like that is a good example of what you're talking about where you basically have dropin for each thing and one of the reasons that people might want this is you know Google is starting to do things where um you know it's it's this was this was just a demo but it was posted on Twitter you may have seen this where a landlord was being autocom completed as being offensive to somebody um and you know just like I don't know there's stuff like that where you just might not agree with what Google is doing serers side they're they're now just sort of showing it's almost like you know big brother can see you kind of thing right have you ever heard of Tau sorting do you know what that is Charles Tau okay so all the way back in 2013 um it's actually part of a bunch of tweets I had nuked a bunch of tweets a long time ago but tweeted something like um the long-term consequence of the smartphone will be to enable tbow sorting and there's this economist named Charles Tau if you Google tie b u t right there's something called the Tau model okay this is a purely theoretical model in like the 1950s and he had seven assumptions in the tbba model it was something like uh everybody has perfect information and they can um you know we now say remote work they can work from anywhere uh and they have mobility and services in one location don't spill over to the other so for example if a group in location a is funding services that only those people who paid for the service can have access to it and Group B can't and so on so it like limits a free rider problem and so it's over they had a bunch of assumptions which are all very unrealistic in the world in 1950s what's happening is internet is making all of those happen and uh the salop phone or the cryptophone more generally is making them happen even further still you know so it's that's something you know just like you know you um the verifiable delay function was something that you sort of built something and you weren't aware that it kind of intersected with some piece of literature if you haven't seen that so we're taking a look at the tbba model um and seeing how the crypto phone really satisfies a bunch of those assumptions go ahead do you think that yeah like because the the phone has been built kind of like by these big tech companies you think it's going to become so uh like the consumer differentiator between any device is going to get so small that like it's a commodity product and then crypto can be that differentiator that like has a viral flip like do you I I think so right because I mean smartphones they don't get that much better each year you know like uh it is true that your iOS iOS will get slower people don't know if that's a real thing or Not Right But but assuming I mean there's uh there's you know I'm talking about right like if you don't if you don't upgrade your iOS um or you don't upgrade your phone they get malicious it's just the davs are building an the NextGen device and they're using all the hardware of the NextGen device for their like testing and then when you port it when you install that code on a old gen device you're like hey why is it sluggish right right exactly so so it's it's like you know there's that saying like uh whatever in the in the 90s people said whatever Intel creates Microsoft destroys like meaning Microsoft mic eat all the ram eat all the CPU whatever right uh but actually you know what's interesting about it is uh you know you're a low-level guy uh do you know this app a long time ago called word lens came out in the early 2000 early 2010s late 2000 okay this a Brazilian guy um you know a friendly acquaintance of mine who coded this and was basically able to do realtime uh OCR and translation of words so you could hold it up and sign in Spanish would in an augmented reality way translate into English okay and this was in like the early 2010s with very limited cameras I think it was even pre- deep learning okay and uh it was just incredibly impressive low-level engineering where he just coded everything in Objective C at a very low level and it kind of showed I mean he was he was like one guy basically and he was ahead of like all of Google's ml people or whatever right I eventually got acquired by Google well-deserved acquisition and uh and that kind of showed what could happen if you took your kind of skills or his kind of skills and actually did push the metal you know which hasn't been done right and the reason I think about that is in the event you know people are talking about some conflict over Taiwan or what have you and hopefully that does not happen right but in the event that there is some sort of sustained supply chain disruption we might be stuck with the current model of phones for a long time you know or at least years right basically 10x improvements can software across any application you can think of like you can like the way things are built right now with react and all of these like very fast to Market Stacks uh it's not optimized for performance it's really optimized for Speed of getting to Market and that makes sense when you have like a a very rich environment like richer resources but if we needed to push the envelope on like performance uh there's just like you know 10 to 100x of optimizations people can start doing in software I'm I'm very confident of that and then you can you can see that in gaming comp like especially the switch or Playstation those have a very long life cycle and it's the same chip for like 10 years you know on the PS2 or whatever and you saw the quality of games get better and better as Engineers really figured out the nooks and crannies of the hardware and then the libraries and then the skulls scaled out but that takes a very large con concentrated effort of continuously working on the same thing it is actually amazing when you go back and play some of the old NES games or something like that how constrained those Engineers were in their debugging and shipping and yet how good many of those games are I you know people have talked about you know obviously starting new companies new communities new uh new currencies for a while uh and I've got this whole book on starting new countries right and I'd love to hear your thoughts obviously you know crypto provides a lot of the material for that it provides currency it provides identity it actually provides something underes me which is community of a bunch of people around the world um you know what what does uh toly Land look like right to toia you know um what what what is if you can start a new country uh you start a new currency so if you start a new country what is what does that look like what would you do with that the state is the is the oppressive part so I would start sure a non country like free association anyone can participate it if they want to and whatever they bring in bring into it is is like is up to them right like and I think that's a very natural state of living because uh the absent when in like communities like I mean that was like the the state of living in prehistoric times like everyone lived in some community and like everyone kind of you had ideas of private property but you also had this shared thing that you are working on um and you kind of see that naturally happening with the internet op Source communities people build licenses and stuff like that to create some rules of enforcement but they're not but I don't have to use the GPL no one's forcing me to be a GPL only person I can then go code Apache licensing or whatever and you kind of free associate with communities based on whatever common social rules and standards they've created and that to me is like a very natural state and this is what like toally land would be like we all have our pki if we want to coordinate on ideas uh it'd be open source ideas we would like if we want to pull funds together to go do a certain thing we could use a doubt you know and like you know set up a a group and dialect where we like have these like smart messages that tell everyone hey go side this transaction and like tell the and like activate the Dow to go like pay for like you know Market marketing campaign for this open source product or whatever that we built whatever whatever it is the thing that that we worked on together and that's like a very kind of like transparent free flow of like uh Association environment um KLA things scale I I believe that can actually scale to a very large number of people because this is the natural state of people but can it be like competitive to a nation state is like I think a question like there's one set of anarchist like back in the French Revolution that their whole theory was that like we just ignore the state and we do this like small commun association thing and eventually if enough people do it the state just goes away because we just we just ignore it like and then like disappears and that's a very kind of utopian not practical thing point of view but it it feels like very very attractive to to believe that that's possible if you can get enough people from the state to believe it doesn't exist then it doesn't exist like the Soviet Union doesn't exist right so there's an aspect of that which sounds utopian but there's also an aspect of that which is it's it's actually getting I mean that's thing I think a lot of people don't get about crypto crypto is a software install but it's also a like uh a mental install it's a wetware install right because um it's not just the bites on a hard drive or a phone that matter but it's the concepts in people's heads that value those bites and and treat them in a certain way right and um so you know there's there's the dumb version of it which is oh let's all just you know close our eyes and pretend the government doesn't exist but there's the smart version of it which is governments have been convinced to not exist right East Germany does not exist you know like the Soviet Union does not exist these oppressive governments were basically convinced in a sense to not exist now of course the countercounter argument is they were convinced in part at gunpoint you know there was the USA and so on and I'm not a utopian about that um certainly that was a very important component of the whole thing but ultimately at least a big part of that Revolution was a peaceful one internally where people did change their minds right so at least part of it I'm not saying all of it but at least part of it is the thing you're talking about where you you build essentially a parallel Society it shows a better way than the Legacy Society people decide to opt out enough and then they kind of withdraw support for the old thing and maybe the old thing doesn't have the legitimacy to even enforce on the new one right maybe that's I think reality that like this kind of already exists and in Western like liberal and democracies it mostly exists too like people naturally like have so far like we have more or less the freedom to kind of limit the actions of the state and like slowly but surely we kind of like do that and for the most part like you know in our kids school people get together and pull as money together and like go build something right for the school and there's no like the state is not involved there right and like yeah it's a network we we pull Network we work people work on open source software together randomly right like random people they put in work they get releases out they coordinate and the state is more or less not involved there outside of like the like you know uh small copyright things right like finish what you're saying then I'll cryto as like you know tooling land right like is is like that happening at a faster pace and accelerating at a bigger scale and like once this layer of services that's effectively provided through these like networks starts eating away at other services like some are commercial right it like now open source software is competing with Microsoft built operating systems right are not as interesting anymore as Linux so there's like places where the stuff is clearly want as this some happens I think the the other parts will naturally recede and in kind of how you described and eventually may only exist a name only and that is like I think what crypto and like this idea of an open database with pki would can like coordinate not just on ideas anymore but now on like Financial assets I think that's the really really exciting part some people watching up to this this segment will think oh my God these guys are so impractical blah blah but put to put some flesh on the bones that this and just to give it a little more practical or not not to give more practical but the angle from which it's May perceived is more practical the concept of the network State the network is the digital part the state is like the physical part that's one way of cutting it and I think people aren't really thinking through the extent to which the network can actually act as quote enforcer but non-violent enforcer of good behavior so for example with crypto the network can enforce property rights and identity and do birth and marriage and death certificates and it can um you know have Registries of who owns what and then how does it enforce well uh we already know that wealth can be represented on chain what's a little you know maybe less obvious is uh for example how did you get into your um office today right did you use a key card right okay it's key card get into the office for many people they have um like a Tesla style fob to get into their car right um many pieces of C you know obviously you need like some sort of uh um you know cryptography to get into your phone whether it's face ID or you know passcode or something like that uh and many pieces of equipment so so buildings and piece of Capital Equipment will basically all be gated by your phone or a fob or a card or some consolidation of all those that looks like a phone right so that means that all Financial assets because all stocks bonds all that type of stuff all property digital property and all capital goods right all the way in electronics and stuff which is maybe if you add all that up right because all real estate can be gated by a lock on the door right All Electronics all vehicles every crane every ship every plane every car right all capital goods and all um property can be put on chain and guarded by that and in theory maybe you could say oh I'm going to go in hot wire or Tesla well maybe but that's pretty hard to do right I'm going to hotwire and get into this you know 30 story building I'm going to climb up the elevator because I don't have the crypto key maybe but it's pretty hard to do right as a practical barrier um if you have ens or SNS based authentication to those systems you can protect buildings and cars and phones and electronics as well as all the onchain property that's probably like 90% or more of the value of property in the world it's not going to protect the clothes on your back it's not going to protect the literal you know uh glass of water that you're holding right but modulo those things things that are too di Minimus in value to have electronic locks on everything else can be protected in this way if it's done with due process see deplatforming today is done in this arbitrary Corporate Way right but you can imagine a world where deplatforming is more Humane than violence right it's something where okay you're suspended you're this you're that you're locked out of this locked out of that that's your punishment you can still you know like go to work or whatever but you know the actual punishment is you can't go to the club or something like that I don't know um and uh and right now it's being wielded in this totally arbitrary fashion but there's a form in which with due process and with societal approval around it a digital punishment could be more Humane than a physical punishment potentially and I'm not saying it totally replaces it I'm not saying oh you know some people say oh my God you think there's no need for violence ever no I'm a I'm a realist on that I'm trying to think of of a good example of this you know if if um if you have an issue where there's there's somebody who's people do this in buildings already right to get up to the 30th floor you you might need a key card to get in there that's an aspect of security there where it just kind of discourages folks from entering it makes the space more secure it's digitally secure you don't need a guard because the key card is is is stopping it the guard would actually have to be intimidating at the front door but this would actually block it into for you different sloes and Gates so anyway just some thoughts but you know actually it's not totally land do you know what we should call it Ania Anatolia is that good right so Anatolia the national currency salana everybody's a volunteer uh I'm glad you're thinking about this because I actually think that all the salon of phone holders could maybe crowdfund some territory maybe do something interesting there I I do think that the crypto phone is an important thing for civil rights and property rights and so I'm going to try it out Simply on that basis I don't have any stake in it or anything like that um I you know I hold salana I hold ethereum I hold Bitcoin I hold all this other stuff but the the crypto phone is something which I I believed in even before you guys announced and I've talked about it for years so I'm glad really glad you're doing it so thank you for that all right and so with that thank you very much Anie thank you for having it Back To Top