hey everyone this is Cena with another episode of into the bite code my guest today is vitalic buin his third time on the podcast so this is a conversation about politics and political ideologies we talk about the transition from the 20th century to the 21st century and what the political ideologies that are coherent with this new world look like and we look to the Future and talk about the main dimensions of uncertainty as we think about how things can develop from here I hope you enjoy I thought we could spend the time today talking about politics and political ideologies more specifically and um I know this is something you've been thinking about for a long time and kind of diving into more deeply recently and maybe maybe as a way to kind of ground the conversation and why why this is something that is worth thinking about at all today I feel like there's a there's a sense in which uh from reading reading your writing um I get the sense that there's kind of a first principles way in which the political ideologies of the past don't translate into the modern world as well as we've kind of moved to the internet to these kind of like more Global public goods um there's there's a bunch of things that you know um that are relatively new in the world and are going to only get kind of more accentuated going forward and then I also feel like you kind of point out specific ways in which existing political ideologies are kind of failing us or are falling out of popularity right with say uh Miami Banning lab grown meat even though they're supposed to be a you know libertarian you know individual rights type of state so with that as a preamble I'm I'm curious how you would how you would characterize like where we are today why why this is a problem that's worth focusing on today and thinking about so I think I could give uh two answers one of them is a crypto specific answer since we are crypto people and like that's I think the entry way into this for a lot of audience do and uh the second is a big picture General answer so the crypto specific answer is that I think first of all the reason why we all got into the space right it does fundamentally have to do with all of these ideals about how the economy and Society could work better right trying uh to create a more free and open Financial system as opposed to one where um no big Banks get bailed out and nobody else does trying to create something where individuals can have more privacy but at the same time the rules of the system and the way that the most powerful things work can actually be made more open and more accessible and readable and understandable by anyone uh the very International nature of the crypto economy and the way that the technology allows people to be in this space together with each other and you know economically and culturally interact with each other without any regard for borders and I think all of you know these ideals and more right like bring in the entire free and open source software movement are the reasons that initially attract us to this whole space and at the same time I think political ideologies have a lot of relevance to how things can be done inside of crypto as well right I think one of the biggest differences that I've noticed between ideologies that are very modern and very internet native versus ideologies in the 20 20th century and there are many differences but just zero in on one of them is that ideologies of the 20th century tended to be focused on what the government should do right they focused on should the governments respect property rights or should the governments impose heav regulations and taxes or should the government just own everything should the governments value economic freedom should it value economic equality uh what kinds of ways should it guarantee civil rights and so on and so forth right and ideologies in the 21st century and I think when I say 21st century I'm going to put on a bit of a historian hat where we to say the 21st century began around 2020 to 2023 in basically the same way that the 20th century began between 1911 to 1918 and I know the 19th began in 1789 uh but you know ideologies of the 21st century right if you think about like something like eak for example right uh these are ideologies and just to give another example even Glen's plurality movement biology is Network States just crypto itself their ideology is that speak primarily not even to the government often at least partially to governments though often they explicitly recognize that governments exist in the world but they also speak to corporations they speak to entrepreneurs they speak to indivi intellectuals they speak to cultural actors they speak just to programmers independent software developers even know musicians pretty much everyone right and this to me is an example of a thesis that I in one of my posts a few years ago I think this is like one of end notes on 2020 I think I called it the dense jungle and the dense jle J Le thesis is basically this idea that big X is here to stay for all X right by which we mean that big governments and big business and also big big protest mob and big cryptography and like big anything for for like any x uh you know regardless of whether you like that particular thing or not and the uh observation I had there is basically that if you take any of the political perspectives that existed about years ago you might notice that if you define success by the absence of a thing that you don't like then you probably feel frustrated if you define Yourself by being Anarchist you feel frustrated if you define Yourself by being anti- inequality you feel frustrated and so on and so forth right but if you define success by the presence of a thing then you know we all freaking one right uh so you know we have all of these really advanced cryptographic Technologies we have this highly International economy where if you want to you can go be a digital Nomad and it's easier than ever to become independent of anyone specific country and uh there's a lot of these new methods of of cooperation that are like much more distributed and non-corporate at the same time open source is very powerful and so on right and the dense jungle thesis basically says that the whole point of the 21st century as a result of the rapid growth of communication information technology is that all of these forces are simultaneously supercharged like every form of coordination and uh you know whether we like it or we don't like it is more powerful than ever before and all of these different forces are basically forced to contend with each other in this Arena that at the same time has not grown at all right and so think about it as being like the difference between um know imagine like Hunger Games with 24 rats inside of the Roman Coliseum and then imagine if over the course of the game the rats grow and they turn into 24 elements elephants that are in the size of the same Coliseum right this is the fundamental uh condition of these super organisms in the 21st century so so closing that bracket a bit right so in the context of this dense jungle thesis you just have all of these powerful superorganisms that are powerful in different ways and modern ideologies really speak to all of them right and one of those actors is the crypto space itself right and one of the interesting things about the crypto space is that it has lots of governance happening including formal including informal including everything right uh like I recently made this post where I reviewed the two books on the Block size War right there was Jonathan beer the block size war and then Roger V's hijacking Bitcoin and I think uh one of the reasons I care about this right is because like these are they might be some of the very earliest like real books of post internet history and what I mean by word real here is like history is like at its most real where you have these like deep conflicts that feel existential to their participants right yeah you know people don't get like animated and excited by like the history of changes in grain prices between 1868 and 1892 right it's like the big stuff and uh these uh Wars that happened in Bitcoin I think the reason why they're meaningful right is because this was they they just happen right at this this era where Virtual Worlds finally became big enough and powerful enough that there's just this really huge critical mass of economic value that was in them and on top of that they were immersive enough that people's uh know lives and people's emotional energy was all sunk into them and all of these things were kind of true in the 2000s if you think about like second life and World of Warcraft at e on line and I remember reading articles about like $225,000 ships that got blown up and like that was a really big deal right but now you know you have like $150 million being stolen from a dow and like Bitcoin bcoin Cash When the forks they were like multi-billion dollar chains right and uh the reason why I care about this is that I think when you read start to read books of Internet history and then you start to compare that with the knowledge that we have about like regular uh you know the history that we learned in school in the best case or the history that you learn from podcasts in the I mean well podcasts have very wide distribution of quality of course right and you know some of them definitely tell you very wrong things about World War II that you should definitely not listen to but I think hardcore history on the other hand is great and but you know you get to see these different sides and you get to ask like what are the real human universals right and you know what are the things that that are these very deep and enduring traits of a combination of human psychology and just inherit properties of like Game Theory and interaction of multiple people and multiple tribes that are so robust that they survive across media as different as um you know Wars between countries and uh conflicts within a blockchain and the internet and uh I think there's like things that you can find right there the yeah even like patterns such as for example how Bitcoin people uh you know would accuse ethereum people of intervening in this Civil War and you know supporting the side of Bitcoin cash which a lot of ethereum people you know did because like a lot of the reason why people went to ethereum is because you know they believed in no blockchains that like technologically progress uh more right and uh then and then you know you compare that to like you know conflicts between countries where it's like pretty common you know accuse like whoever your opponent is of like foreign interference and you know supporting some local Rebel movement that you don't like right and of course you know the psychological reason why you do this is because if the frame is just you know your government versus The Rebel movements then it looks like you're the Goliath Ying to David and you know you're kind of on the narrative back foot there uh but if on the other hand you can rep portray the David as being the uh uh Pawn of an even bigger Goliath outside then like that kind of like that flips The Narrative right and you know these are things that we see in might be like totally incredibly different media right so like even things like that they happen in crypto right and then at the same time you know we have more regular things like we have hard forks and then you have Dows that are on top of ethereum you have projects that are forking in all kinds of different ways um you know you have projects that are competing with each other projects that are cooperating there's all kinds of these like very rich and very complicated uh relationships and I think a lot of the political philosophy has has a lot of very meaningful things to say about those kinds of topics so that's the crypto part of the answer right which is basically that I think you know social and political ideals are what got a lot of us into crypto and at the same time I think uh like th those ideas and newer versions of them have a lot to teach us uh in terms of how this space and things in the space should keep moving but maybe we'll pause here before we don't get into into big picture stuff yeah that that resonance between crypto and the broader world is a really interesting one and um yeah the idea of the Bitcoin blocksize War as one of the first real events of Internet native history is is a really good one um let's get into the broader picture what's what's the kind of more um you know geopolitical um uh you know physical world version of of what's why why this is a pro problem that matters yeah I mean I think this is where we get back to the dense jungle thesis right you know big X is here to stay for all X um and I think this is a a really interesting period in history because the there's a lot of old things that are falling away and there's a lot of new things that are coming in at the same time and this is not the first time that something like this has happens right like uh a famous quote about World War I is basically that you know people went into the war on top of forces that came out inside of tanks and like that is a real technological change that happened inside of the span of literally like less than four years right think the tanks even started to bit in 1917 and the psychological impact that that had was profound and like it really felt to people like this big shift from a a premodern world going into a modern one and I feel like the time period of about 2020 to 2023 was a similar shift in terms of going from the 20th century to the 21st century uh so if we think about some of the major events that happened right so one of them is of course Co and Co it was a major pandemic it was a major event that the entire world went through at the same time and where the entire world was uh really in sync in a way that was uh not really true previously right I mean World War II you could say the whole world was like kind of its sync but you know even there not really um and it was also this transition from uh analog to digital right there were a lot of these step function changes that really happened and uh a lot of people learned a lot of like more digital ways of living and really haven't gone back um then in a lot of ways it was also the Triumph of technology in the sense of the covid vaccine right and know there's a lot of evidence that basically ended up saving millions of lives okay I'm going to get canceled from the bigcoin Maximus podcasts um hopefully not all of them um but uh I and like that's interesting right because the entire 20th second half of the 20th century like to me it was really characterized by this kind of post World War II post uh 1960s techop pessimism right where like there's this strong dominant Vibe of you know technology is something that by default can only interfere with and harm the world and uh we need to go back to simpler ways of living and Go Back To Nature if we wants to be healthier and that's a sentiment that's still strong right but and but at the same time you know this shift to artificialness as being this Lifesaver was I think one of those like really big like Century pivots so that those are a couple of the consequences of Co and obviously I think there were a lot um so so another one is that I think the idea of freedom is one that it easily goes off the rails if it becomes too abstract and ideological for people right and it feels like every new generation basically yeah has you know to have a new example to Rally around and relate to and the I think you know the lockdowns like were this know like very big memory like that for many people and I think it's important for everyone listening to remember right that there's definitely some parts of the world where lockdowns were quite minor and other parts where they were like incredibly severe right and then you know you had the entire Spectrum um and on top of that also censorship right so you know the whole debate of you know should experts sort of control the parameters of the public discussion as a result of already coming up with the correct conclusion in the context of some expert discussion that they had in private and mean we actually did see the experts being very wrong in a bunch of important cases right I mean you know to be clear the anti experts were like crazy wrong in lots of cases too right but know even like the who has a tweet that's like still up that says Co is not airborne right and you know there's a long complicated story around that but like that really ended up like screwing up the process quite a bit right and like these are generational memories and then of course I think uh you know co uh and Co the pandemic uh never ended but you know in 2022 of course you know things also shifted again with the start of a major war and then in 2023 of course there was another um on top of that that you know it has some very different connotations and like a very different situation to it as well so it's uh like these are all things that really shape the public Consciousness in pretty deep ways and they all happened like at the at the same time and these are kind of negatives right these are kind of big cataclysm events that just shock people if you look at technology and then in addition to digitization one of the big ones that we saw was that like I think this one is important for people to meditate on AIS are passing the Turing test like remember you know when you were growing up we were all taught that the Turing test is the marker for okay you know these are are not a anymore this is like serious happening they are within range of what might be called human level right and like the modern like top level AIS now are at the level of quality where like they yes if you set up an actual formal experiments then a lot of the time they totally can fool people into into thinking that they actually are people right and that's something that I feel like Society has still not fully updated on right and I think that shift happen around 2023 or so um and uh that uh happened uh Without Really people paying that much attention to it right but at the same time it's like a really profound thing right I think one of the other things that really defined the end of the 20th century is this sense of uh technological stagnation right and you know you have entire movements life progress studies that basically formed at that time that were all about trying to get out of it and then now we have like the exact opposite of stagnation I think it's pretty obvious that you know this era that we're in is the last era before the era of some kind of superum intelligence now we have no idea whether that era is going to be you know five years or 50 years or 100 plus right but you know we are in the last era and uh that's uh something that I think is worth taking really seriously so yeah again a lot yeah yeah I mean I feel like this is this gets into the weeds a lot right but the point is that like so many different things about the world have fundamentally changed that you know the world has moved from being offline first to being online uh first a lot of uh like Vibes have become really heavily reorganized a lot of people are kind of feeling at a loss in various ways and like especially politically again not knowing where to go and so I think there's this great value in trying to like actually find you know what are the new ideas that really will appeal to people and bring about the kind of world that we want that we want to see and I think this is one of those really valuable projects to be thinking about into the bite code is sponsored by splitz are you tired of sacrificing security for usability splitz believes is still way too hard for teams to self- custody their onchain assets they're building a new kind of Internet native Bank on top of ethereum splitz makes it easy for teams to manage the whole life cycle of their finances from structuring revenue sharing agreements using payment flows like splits and waterfalls to managing those earning once you receive them using pasis and smart accounts splits is being used by teams like protocol Guild Zora song camp and others I'm a big believer in them and recommend checking them out you can learn more at splits. org MH yeah there's a there's a way in which it feels like yeah the previous era has just ended and where we've all been reawakened to the importance of these questions when it comes to our personal freedoms like with very visceral examples that we've lived through and yeah there's so many changes on you know the world becoming more globalized and synchronized with technology moving forward like all the kind of parameters of Life are are shifting in in very in very meaningful ways um looking and and and also thinking of this as the possibly the last era before we have super intelligence really kind of dials up the urgency and importance of thinking about how are we how are we coordinating how are we decision making you know how do we kind of like enter this next era because it's a very important one um and so maybe maybe thinking about now what what this next you know what the Contour of this next phase of you know human coordination coexistence you know decision making all of this stuff could look like and one of the pieces that you've kind of linked to and I I thought was really interesting was uh Glenn's piece on the kind of three political ideologies for the 21st century that they flesh out further in the plur plurality book and the kind of underlying premise of of that is that um kind of political ideologies and Technology kind of like are a are a dependent pair like they're they're they kind of like go together and in this era where we have kind of AI passing the touring test there's a there's a version of the world that uh that you know that that could lead into that's kind of different than different like kind of forks that we could go down so I'm curious how you would think about like the if if we were to think of parallel universes over the next like you know five to 50 years what are different versions of the world that we could live in what are kind of what are political ideologies that have coherent kind of inner Logics that could be that could be stable with the worlds that were in entering into MH so I think there's a couple of major dimensions of uncertainty right so one of them is know of course the rate of AI progress right because you know there are people who seriously believe that we are literally on fouryear timelines away from Super intelligence I personally yeah think that that's probably false but uh you know there there definitely are people who seriously got to think this way um and if that's true then like everything goes out the window right and like I feel like I've always sort of known this in the back of my head like I remember not being in high school and uh you know during the daytime I would go into a geography class and they'd be telling me about demographic projections and uh you know what's going to happen in China in the 2090s and you know the need to have certain Family Planning policies or not and uh then uh you know in the they I'll be reading R CS wild talking you know the singularity being imminent and it's like dude like if that stuff's gonna happen then like we don't freaking know it's going to be the case in the 2090s it's like what do you mean the population of China is going to be yeah somewhere between like 0.95 and 1.05 billion it's like no I mean we don't even know it's going to be above a 100 million we don't know it's going to be below 100 billion right right it's like the classic case of using past data to model the world and not realizing that the model itself has like very deep uncertainty yes uh so I think technological uncertainty is one of those big axes the other big axis to watch is the level of conflicts in the world and the level of conflict has increased massively in the last 10 years and that has very direct human costs right mean you I visited Ukraine myself know a couple of months ago you know go around the streets and you can definitely I like see people walking around with signs of some pretty crazy injuries right and that's like a direct you know human cost that's like very bad for people right and like you know this is going to affect you know Society how you know children think can grow up and all of this right and so conflict like always has these like very direct very uh bad costs um it also has indirect effects right and uh the one example of uh this is uh that one of the ways that I think about uh like Silicon Valley ideology in about let's say around 2010 is that I think people then like basically thought that they were creating the kind of stuff that that we think were were creating when we're creating decentralized software except they and the users and like basically the world assumed that all of these uh you know control related properties don't really matter um and uh the the reason basically is because the world was at peace right and the world was like at peace in multiple meta levels right like you know the US and China had very good relations compared to today but also um like for example the you know you did not have like major Venture Capital funds just that explicitly labeling like large portions of American Elite society as the enemy and on the flip side you did not have you know large shs of American Elite Society openly calling for censorship and uh so no one was like the extents to which people were trying to exert power over each other both on the physical level and on the virtual was much uh lower and I think this is also a big part of why yeah know silon Val was able to scale so successfully right which is basically that the whole issue of power indid was in the background and so people did not really mind that know all of this American tech technology was just taking over worldwide and that definitely did change over time like uh from my time in China I've definitely heard like at least once that actually the Snowden Revelations I like really turn Donald lot of people's minds right like the side of that whole situation that you know it has gets discussed a lot is you know of course you know the Chinese government wantan in control which is you know very real the other side is the Chinese government not wanting to be controlled by the United States right and uh that's and like this growing use of Technology as a a lever of control and guess a lever of exploit creating vulnerability that you can or dependency that you can then exploit is something that really rose up over time right and at the same time that like that has this like two-way feeding effect between other kinds of conflict right because you know if two countries both think that the other is going to blow them up then like they're not going to be in any mood to be super open to accepting freedom of speech or even like freedom of tech platform competition across both of those countries right but and that at the same time with this kind of technological trade war and is something that can also actually you know escalate these moods of hostility right and I know we've seen hostility go up by quite a bit and that ends up affecting a lot of these uh a lot of these trends right and like ultimately you know we talk about like crypto for example as a trust technology right and you know ask like you know what is the enduring advantage that actually makes it possible for it to work internationally when so many other Financial systems don't right and like that friction doesn't just exist because like programmers and banks are stupid right like that's friction exists in know for a bunch of reasons but like a big one is definitely you know like limitations in the extense to which jurisdictions stress each other and so that kind of stuff I expect will continue to increase right and uh so the question is now like where do things go from here right and like I'm you know again I'm sure you've listened to you know like stuff I've said and stuff I've written I'm not one of these people that will ever give a bombastic claim of you know oh World War III is going to happen or like no you know this the world is becoming normal now calm down relax like [Music] I'm I always see a range of possible Futures and uh actually you know it's like on the one hand that kind of sounds like a very sort of you know like weak man kind of beta thing to say right but on the other hand it's like if you actually Express that position on prediction markets versus uh expressing the kind of Chad like yeah I am certain you know position it's like yeah you know no you know sorry but the beta man is gonna be the landlord renting the chander house in 10 years I mean there are exceptions right so like for example you know there are people willing to bet that there's like a a 4% chance of a civil war in the UK this year and so I ended up uh putting a little bit on the other side of the V B and that for for that one it was just like a matter of basic math right it's like if you think there's a 4% chance of a c war in about 40% of a year that means you think there's 100% chance of a Civil War in 10 years and that's just crazy so but uh yeah in general I think you know like markets are good because they give you that accountability and then make you realize that like well actually you know if you are the beta male and you recogn the uncertainty in the world and you don't try to kind of Chad your way through it with bombastic statements then like ultimately that's the more correct perspective uh so you um I yeah so I see a range of possible Futures in terms of you know how conflict the world is going to get right and I think there definitely is a possibility that uh like basically people have kind of had enough of this in the early 2020s and things are actually going to be more peaceful going forward and there's also the possibility that for whatever reasons possibly even surprises that things will keep getting worse right and this uh like there's a whole range of possibilities because I think uh if you think about some of the plurality ideas especially if you think about some of the very large scale ones right like there's definitely a certain idealism to like wanting to create and deploy large scale mechanisms based on principles that try to benefit all of humanity and that kind of stuff generally happens if there is Goodwill and if there is a mood of like people being tired of fighting right so you know un founded when people were tired of World War II a lot of the ideas of modern liberalism they were uh founded when people got sick and tired things like for 30 years more in Europe in the 17th century and so on and so forth right and if things go in that positive direction then the question is like how do we really best Harvest that and like really put Humanity in a strong position to create the kind of world that we want to see and be you know well suited to handle these technological challenges and I think a lot of the yeah plurality ideas uh are potentially very well designed for that right but then on the flip side if the world becomes this know more hostile and more unforgiving place then like idealism is not the thing that this defines institutions right I think or the thing that that happens is you know basically you have a couple of large players you have a lot of people that huddle around the large players for safety and you know you have people who was whose strategy is to stay neutral and like essentially be some kind of you know whether you call it Counter Culture whether you call it non allign movements what do you call it decentralized movements or whatever else and uh I think there's definitely value in like crypto both as a technology and as a community in trying to just create something that keeps working across the world even at a time when more and more other things are going to start free and uh there's value in crypto as a community actually continuing to maintain some of those links and connections right like one of my favorite things about the Ico era back from 2016 to 2018 is how projects will just Naturally by default get these very International communities right you just start a sale and you and it's just in your interests to raise as much as possible and so you're just going to do the work to have a community in the US the community in Europe and the community in China and the community in Japan and so forth right and like the project would take all these very diverse people and tie them together right and in modern times unfortunately there's this like shift toward Insider investment and I think uh that has a lot of downsides but one of those downsides is definitely that like it's basically a group of like 10 20 people that all talk to each other right so that so like it's not really connecting people who would otherwise not be connected right and like the priority idea that like I really try to emphasize a lot in my review is the idea that like we really wants to focus on connecting people who would otherwise not be connected right it's the you know peerwise uh you know like matching correlation discounts match bridging bonuses is the term that pja likes to use uh and so on right and it's like that kind of function that I think crypto as a space can play like both sociologically and uh technologically uh so that's uh but then at the same time I think you know we do have to be mindful of you know the possibility that if things go very bad like people are going to have way bigger problems in anything that digital coins and digital records can solve right and so I think uh this is one of those reasons why like I keep like putting a lot of money into the bio space for example right so like at the beginning I put a lot of money into longevity because it just seemed like an obviously super undervalued sector and I think it's a it's still super important though it's definitely less neglected than before um also with the baly and conro efforts like I've been focusing some on like airborne disease resistance and resilience and uh that's also one of those downside protection things that's going to be very important it could end up being very very important um but yeah there's definitely a level to this where like crypto at best only helps a little bit right and it's importance to be mindful of that and then also on the positive side I think like the value of crypto is basically that it becomes this of atory for all kinds of really fascinating social mechanisms and things that begin in crypto like it just becomes this really effective generator where if it survives here then it could just succeed and prosper anywhere right and know things like know crypto social apps like lens and foras or anything think you know they are becoming really showing their lasting value right and like definitely not know hyper growing sort of diff users yet but I think like lasting is a type of value in itself and like something like poly Market um is something that is being cited by mainstream political intellectuals like even the types of people that would normally just casually say like oh yeah crypto is useless like they reach screenshots of poly market right and uh like there's a lot of people who quietly use poly Market basically as an news site right because like one of the sort of black pill things about news right is that it's often not just telling you what happened it's also telling you how you should feel about what happened and that second part because it's so subliminal it's like so easy for it to be incredibly misleading it's like a very adversarial environments right and uh prediction markets the one piece of the puzzle that they solve is that basically if you see that something that's happened you can just like quickly open up theing market and you can see in 5 seconds is this big deal or is it a non-event and if it's a non-event then you stop carrying and then you you know like flip over to looking at the next cat me right but you know if the markets tell you what's a big deal then like that that's a signal right and that tells you what worth actually spending your attention to understand like what's actually going on here right which I mean it always there's always some chance that it's still manipulation but like at least it gives you that signal where you can go and check um so these are like you know examples of this kind of like you know even peace time value that like crypto as a a technology can provide right and decentralized social and I think to me it's like the extension of the spirit of Open Source to these large scale collaborative platforms right because the thing that foraster gives you is like and lens at the same also right is that they create this network where anyone can build a client that creates uh their own view to the Network right and so like it really solves these Monopoly problems right because if one client have some property don't like that you can just go and start your own client right and uh you know you can go and create your own client you can have your own your own rules you can have your own content you know prioritization and filtering algorithms and you don't have to start from scratch because you're creating a window to the same content so you're sharing the same network Dev right um and then you know within the context of Finance right there's definitely I mean even now a lot of International Financial operations that crypto like even today is just quietly making easier for a lot of people and like this stuff is not advertised right like it often doesn't show like the reason why crypto remittance startups tends to fail is because you don't need a freaking remittance startup to do remittance it's like no you just like buy the coins at exchange you just move them and then you like sell them at the exes right like the whole point of this space is that it's a DIY sector and so of course you know DIY activity is not going to show up in the statistics in the same way right and there's just like all kinds of people who have quietly discovered Ways by which it makes it uh their lives much easier to be able to just you know hold and move money in some ways right and there are ways in which crypto is valuable only in uh time of conflict right like the the countries in which it gets the highest adoption are realistically countries where the existing Financial system systems are the weakest but at the same time there are other applications of crypto that like actually only really work well if you have at least like some basic rule of law somewhere right so like real world assets for example right like if you don't have real law Ru of law anywhere then you're not going to be able to have any kind of crypto dollar except for the kind of fully decentralized RVE version and that's you know that has limits to its capital efficiency right and so I mean maybe yeah you know the synthesis of both of those two right is basically that crypto can be a way to allow uh know like countries companies and environments anywhere in the world that do have stability to basically be able to like really leverage and project that stability into the rest of the world and allow other people to benefit from it yeah so yeah so like there's interactions between like types of technology and degree of conflict in the world um and in terms of other axes of uncertainty um I mean one of them is just like how effectively the crypto space itself is able to really deliver on its core ideals and at the same time really scale for the next stage of users right because to me crypto today is in this uh interesting uh predicaments where there are successful crypto applications but they often ends up compromising on the decentralization right it's like you know usdc and a lot of it happens inside of binance accounts or on Tron um and then on the flip side of it you have you know poor Lis which just keeps working hard on building broy as this like fully open source self- custody accounting software and he just like gets a hard time even you know like getting the donations to support himself right so you know definitely you know encourage people to support know came those kinds of projects where we can right but you know there definitely is this Phenom on where like there's this stuff that succeeds and but the stuff that succeeds end up ends up being a little far away from the values that we came into the space for um mean so one example as like the finance you know like stable coin transfer stuff I mean another example of course is you know like all of these you know like pump F Sun pump five like whatever right and there you know like there I definitely feel you know like why a lot of people have this kind of mood of nihilism as a result of that though I think this is one space where like CP in particular should not beat itself up too hard right because like I definitely see nihilism in Twitter outside of crypto too right like if you just look at the kind of stuff that's spreading you know like outside of uh crypto like you know there's definitely yeah a there's definitely like some quite a bit of crazy and dark stuff there is I mean you know the usual election season stuff like there's definitely a feeling of kind of missing hope and that so I think this is a problem that mean crypto needs to work through but know like really it's very far from being exclusive to crypto itself right so yeah like this is know The Duality that we're in right basically that you know there are things that are idealistic and only a little bit successful and then there are things successful but very not idealistic and like the big unlock is going to be if we could figure out a way to be very successful and very idealistic at the same time right um and I think there are Ray of Hope here right so okay so one example of this right is let's like zero in specifically on the question of if you have a crypto app like something like crypto social then how do you log into it right the the pure answer is well you log do it with an ethereum wallet the problem is that this sucks for adoption because now if you're getting someone on board you have to not just get them to download your app you have to also get them to download this other app and that other app also did talk about setting up a 12 seed phrase and then there's all all of these unfamiliar con Concepts that just multiply on top of each other uh but then the other approach that people did a couple of years ago is like what they call social L right which is like a phrase that I totally hate like no you know being social is a fundamental part of being human and I will not let web 2 companies get to own the word social as some kind of trademark that refers to there like centralized CR right like that is a hell die on um but look what they mean by that is of course like crypto social apps where you can log in with your Google account and it's like it's solv the onboarding problem but at the expense of just like burning everything that is beautiful and good about crypto and uh so the question is like what's the synthesis and to me the synthesis actually is a abstraction and ZK email right so here's what you do if you create an app then you can create an app where at the bottom level of the software it's an app where you sign in with ethereum and you're just doing everything with an ethereum wallet now what happens at the at one level higher than that one level higher than that is if a user does not yet have an ethereum wallet then the app can automatically create an ethereum for them using ZK email right you can just automatically generate an ethereum address that is controlled by or or like I guess is recoverable by a an email that is sent from your email address right and uh that's the flow that you can give to beginning users and then what do you give to experienced users well experienced users if they have an ethereum wallet they can just link their ethereum wallet and if you do it this way then one you can serve both types of users but two you've created an open pathway for users to migrate from one to the other right because once you've given someone a wallet then they're going to be able to take that wallet and they're going to be able to migrate it into a real ethereum wallet and then they're going to be able to add their own uh recovery Guardians if that's what they wants to do right and I think like this is what we want to do right we want to like actually you know like move people over from you know the web two approach to the web 3 approach and we want the web 3 approach itself to you know have give people the full spectrum of options right so there's like full um you know like Bitcoin maximalist style like 12 word 12 words that engraved in titanium that's 19 feet underground um you like the the maximal speed right umh but and then you know the other approaches like you know you have CK email and then there's like a whole bunch of approaches in the middle right like you could have a two of three between a key that you control a CK eail and a ZK wrapper of your government ID right and you know and then if you're non- American then like that already gives you a redundancy right because uh then you know you have your government ID that's from one jurisdiction and then ZK email that's you if you're using a Gmail accounts Google is an American company and so you just already have jurisdictional diversification and uh you have like totally different Tex Stacks that are controlling those through recoveries and so you you already have this like very high level of robustness right and then you can add social recovery through your friends if you want and you don't have to ask for their etherum addresses you could also ask for their email addresses and you can generate an A Z email address for them and so on and so forth right so that's uh yeah the path that I see right and it's like if we can find or things that are like that and we if we can create applications that are both like mainstream friendly and that still have the openness and decentralization and permissionless properties that we really care about then we can make something that's like really beautiful and interesting as an ecosystem and you know we will be in a position to both really get a huge number of users and at the same time like actually be this really robust text deck that actually will continue working for everyone even when other things don't so yeah that to me is you know the upside right but the question is like how successful are we actually going to be at executing on that kind of thing and then like it's the same thing in every vertical right it's like how successful are we going to be at actually creating a financial system that's like actually tied to and supporting some kind of real world economy right and like that doesn't necessarily have to mean RW ways that are backed by yeah you know things that are held at Banks right like if the next you know trillion dollar AI company becomes a dow that is where you know Shares are tradable in crypto then like that's also a connection to the real world economy right but like you need some kind of ultimate tie to the real world economy right uh so I think that's another one of those variables um then uh you know a third variable might be you know crypto's success in payments um then a fourth variable might even be you know like how the whole privacy situation both from a technology perspective and from a regulatory perspective ends up laying out and so on and so forth right so yeah and I think you know basically you know to summarize right the two big dimensions of unknowns for like one is what is going to be the DI where is the dial of conflict in the world going to be set for the next few decades and the second is you to how are all of the different Technologies going to progress right well that second dial it's like actually many dials right because like AI is separated from crypto and both of those are separated from bio and inside of Bio there's like a whole bunch of different things that you can do right it's like focus on civilization more pic resistant you can focus on things with neuralink if neuralink succeeds then are we going to have bcis that are open source and know like formally verified or are you going to have you know like a zero day attack where where a forign adversary get like right into your mind uh so it's uh I think yeah there's many possible Futures and I think you know we as a community have a lot to contribute on all of them and yeah I think I mean getting back to plurality i b right like the the core idea there basically is like how do you take these animating ideals of having an open and Democratic Society and like actually concretely applying them to this condition of the 21st century where we are in the death jungle right and I think I would love to see know the crypto space being a testing ground of really making an Earnest effort at trying these kinds of things out and using them to solve problems within the crypto space and then progressing them further from there and by doing so benefiting The Wider World well said that's a great note to close on thanks so much again hey I have a small ask here if you've been listening to these conversations and want to support what we're doing here I would really appreciate if you leave a rating and a review for the podcast it might seem like a small thing but it actually makes a big difference to help other people discover the show also thank you and I'll see you again soon Back 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