If you create a group that just goes
fundamentally against like the vast majority of people's values,
then it's just going to be hard to find volunteer effort for that sort of thing.
Let's talk about something that's a little bit funny,
which is if you're start to replace government,
as we were talking about it and you see it as a monopoly on violence,
you notice that very often there there's a very funny
role played by organized crime. Now, of course,
when we think about organized crime, we tend to get emotionally excited by it.
For whatever reason we make lots of movies about it.
It occupies the mind is something terrifying and alluring,
and there's sort of two weird aspects to organize crime.
One of which is violence as a
contract enforcement mechanism. In other words, you're you're gambling.
So you don't have access to the regular court system.
Now you have a gambling debt.
And so just the way our government would put you in
jail. If you you know,
started doing things,
you couldn't fulfill all of your obligations and you were doing harm to lots of
people and you couldn't be stopped.
Organized crime has to do some, it can't maintain jails,
so it can put the hurt on somebody for means of contract enforcement.
So it's, it's not looking to do violent things.
It's looking to run illegal businesses for which there's demand,
and then it has a problem of enforcement. And then there's another part of it,
which is violence is the product. So for example,
a extortion and be shame,
if anything were to happen to this lovely business that you're running a,
is a veiled threat, pay us, or we're going to do harm to your business or,
you know, contract killings and the like,
are you worried that effectively by introducing parallel
structures,
both in the form of currency and in the form of
contracts, smart contracts that are the cynic one on, I guess, of, of,
of the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, right?
That the killer app that is most likely to happen while the
technology is still clunky and cumbersome and difficult is in the
parallel space that either you are
going to replace organized crime as a place to do
contractual business outside of the normal scope,
which could be a benefit because organized crime still exists and is a
bad thing because it uses violence and you would use math and in place of it or
that it could actually be used to facilitate violence by,
you know, using let's say,
prediction markets or something else to induce people to commit crimes
where the committer the committer of violence
has unusual information about where the violence will be committed and therefore
can profit from it.
It's definitely a worry that have iron lots of people in the crypto
space I've had since the beginning though,
I do feel like at least so far have been surprised.
Like it feels like less of it as happens than we had.
That's the thing. Yeah. Now what do you,
what accounts for the idea that something that can be drempt
has mostly not occurred?
I definitely have a car.
Maybe it's a great thing about humans that we didn't realize that we're not
nearly the horrible people we thought.
Yeah. And I definitely have a couple of theories about this.
So one of those theory is,
is that like basically a lot,
like a lot of things that people do,
and especially a lot of things that people do in the InfoSphere,
because like public goods are kind of chronically underfunded and all of that
rely really heavily on Goodwill.
And so know you have Goodwill that if
someone,
if you pay someone to write some piece of piece of software for your website,
it's not going to include some blood is code. Yeah.
Some bug that'll steal people's money or tell the FBI where you are, that you,
if you create a system for enforcing agreements that they'll actually get
enforced, and even like on internet, internet forums,
they depends on kind of a lot of volunteer labor for just things like
moderation.
And if you create a group that just goes like
fundamentally against like the vast majority of people's values,
then it's just going to be hard to find volunteer effort for that sort of thing
and like this.
So that's probably the big, the big reason, I think why it's so far,
we don't really see kind of, you know,
complicated decentralized structure is being created to facilitate
like black, black markets for killing people and so forth.
We'll start off with something more mundane, like a numbers racket, right?
So a numbers racket would probably be a much simpler application.
So what do you mean by numbers? Racket here?
Well, something that takes the place of a lottery where some,
let's say some naturally occurring number that would be printed in a
newspaper.
And presumably nobody has the influence over what number gets printed,
constitutes the lotto draw.
Yeah. Lotteries have existed on watching since the beginning.
Even there's definitely been this kind of sub community of people that created
these kinds of provably fair Ponzi contracts,
where I know we have a smart contracts and you can throw money in.
And as soon as like, if you're the end person just throw money in,
as soon as soon as two and people throw money and you get like 1.9 to a bank or
something like that. And like,
this was just a fun game that people have made and
participated in even fully knowing what the economics of the thing are. So,
yeah. And thing, things like that have definitely happened though.
I don't like though gambling is this sort of
thing that like, there isn't like there isn't this kind of nine, nine,
9% plus consensus that it's really horrible and evil, right?
Because like on the one hand, like lots of people want to ban it,
but on the other hand, people do it.
And it's something that people
see negative consequences of. But at the same time, it's like,
it is something that people participate in and enjoy.
Whereas the men extremely bad stuff like that,
there's definitely this kind of,
this kind of barrier between kind of things that are edgy versus things that are
just so far over the edge and for things that are so far
over the edge,
like it is like even with smart contracts and even with all of those things,
it's still hard to coordinate those structures.
And I think like the blockchain,
like the blockchains inability to directly read facts about the real
world could even be a saving grace here because like,
because of blockchain,
can't directly read like whether or not something in the real world happens.
It basically means that if you want to have some application,
whether a prediction market or something else that does.
So can we say a little bit more about the pro the intellectual problem that
you're you're touching?
So the idea is that there may be something that's very perceptible to us
about the real world, but we might naive easily think,
well, the computer should be able to tell whether that happened right.
Or it didn't happen.
And that that's a surprisingly difficult thing to code up
reliably. So that the interface between the world of,
of bits and bytes in the world of otherwise physical
reality which often we don't realize we're thinking about
subjectively
that it's hard to maintain that interface.
So that the way in which the things that have happened in the real world
can be definitely agreed upon without any kind of adjudication inside of the
digital. Right. So I don't know. I don't know how to say that. Well.
Blockchains are in a fundamental way, programmatic medium, all,
they see it as like data that gets fed into them and what they can compute as a
result of that data.
And so if you want to create a smart contract that
says, if someone figures out how to,
what the F prime factors of a big number of RPA them a reward,
you can do that because prime number from factors is something that you can
multiply together and verify.
But if you wants to have a smart contract that says,
if there is a hurricane in Sri Lanka, then pay 500 bucks,
then like you can't do that on the blockchain itself.
Cause like computer code has no idea what hurricanes are and has no idea.
What's real Lanka is a.
In that case, you could have a, a designation that, you know,
that the national.
Correct. You can,
you can get data from third party sources and this is the thing.
Nobody else turns it into data.
This is a, the, the thing that a lot of applications are doing,
but the thing that's important to keep in mind does that as soon as you do that,
like you're a smart contract has no longer fully tried.
Right? Right.
So there's this concept of which is like a utopian concept concept of
a trustless legal system,
so that you don't have the messiness of humans anywhere in the system.
And you can have complete faith and con and confidence in the contract that
you've struck. Yep.
And like outside of a pro like basically giving bounties for
solving math problems. So like it's not something that you can 100% achieve.
So I can't necessarily ensure my vacation that if
if I go all the way to Argentina and the weather is
terrible it pays out because we can't agree what terrible weather is.
Right?
Like you can create structures made out of individual participants
that can try to and have aligned incentives to get people,
to kind of give, to give correct results.
Like you can have complicated kind of contraptions involving people,
giving different answers and policing each other and rewarding people who give
the same answer that other people have committed to. And things like this.
But like, you can only try to approach the,
like the ideal of kind of correct truth. Like you can never 100% reechoed.
Now you started Ethereum in 2014.
Started, started end of 2013. I mean, it launched in 2015.
Okay. Would you say let's use launch date as an artificial date?
Would you say you are more or less excited emotionally?
Hmm. Then you were, when it started, you've now been through,
you've logged some miles here.
I
definitely definitely an excited
I think that main differences kind of more D like definitely a kind of
excited in the sense of like four years. Well,
definite like I kind of, as opposed to indefinite, like four years, yeah.
Four years ago was about like, Hey, let's make this platform to kind of try a,
really a bunch of really cool things.
We have no idea what's going to happen and let's just stick it out there.
And now, like we know things about things that people are already,
we know things about things that people wants to do. And we,
and we also knew no more about Nick, what the limitations are.
And so instead of just being this kind of extremely fuzzy dream of like,
let's stick smart contracts and algorithms and kind of trust or certify
everything, right.
It's something that's kind of both more
moderate,
but also kind of more like seeming much more like
at a, like,
it actually has a big chance of kind of transforming the world kind of precisely
because that's when you've moderated to some extent.