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.
