64 - Legitimacy | Vitalik Buterin

Transcript

[Music] welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the opportunity i'm ryan sean adams i'm joined by david hoffman and we're here to help you become more thankless david metallic on the podcast again another cannot miss episode what did we talk about we talked about legitimacy this invisible force that vitalik has named as legitimacy that we are exploring in today's podcast and we go through the ways that the concept of legitimacy impacts our lives our lives as individuals and our lives as part of a

greater society and vitalik makes the claim that legitimacy is one of the world's most powerful forces and as a society we don't really talk about it but it really guides a lot of our day-to-day lives and it's even more true in the cryptocurrency space and i think the fact that legitimacy is one of the the most powerful forces in the cryptocurrency space is perhaps why this space is so revolutionary it answers the questions as to why this industry is so bottom-up why this industry is by the people for the people because because the people are enabled to bestow legitimacy on the things that they see are good uh and so we we talk

about a number of different subjects both in and outside of the world of crypt cryptocurrency where legitimacy really has the reins as to what is true and how the the world moves forward uh and so really enjoy this conversation with vitalik buterin as always yeah i guess i you know i'd say a couple of things that's really impressed upon me with this episode i i feel like if you don't understand the concept of legitimacy even if you don't call it legitimacy you don't really understand what's going on in crypto because legitimacy is really the answer to so many of the questions like even basic questions david why is cryptocurrency trading over two trillion dollars right when it grows like you know 11 to 12 years ago is when it

started how did we come this far the answer legitimacy why are nfts valuable why was a beeple nft why did that sell for 68 million dollars answer legitimacy how come when i um like try to fork a bitcoin how come you can't fork your own bitcoin create your own alternative how come i can't do it how come there is only one bitcoin answer legitimacy why will uh why do we have confidence that ethereum's monetary policy won't change in the direction of increasing inflation but only will change in the direction of decreasing inflation answer legitimacy like it's kind of the answer it's almost like the theory of everything for crypto and until you understand it um like i

don't know that you have comprehensive answers to all of these most common questions vitalik said it's legitimacy all the way down i think he's right yeah and we can even go all the way back into history modern history and talk about uh you know the current situation going on in russia with alexey navalny but we can go all the way back to just very historical primal examples of how humans choose to coordinate and how legitimacy is like this emergent higher order of acceptance of society and how when when everyone chooses the same outcome that outcome is bestowed with legitimacy and we can kind of build our social organizations upon that in initial kernel of legitimacy and that

initial kernel of legitimacy carries on forwards into history uh into the future and gains legitimacy every step of the way so while it is extremely apt for the world of crypto it also helps answer so many of the other questions that i think are really confusing to people today in modern society like why is the left and the right in america have so much strife between them why do we distrust institutions it all illegitimacy has a hand in answering i think every modern day social question yeah so vitalik is like again part part technical mind part philosopher part anthropologist just has a fantastic lens on legitimacy so he was the perfect

guest to explain it and he wrote a fantastic post that we based this episode on so that is the bulk of the conversation you're not going to want to miss it we also toward the end we talked about vitalik's thoughts on ultrasound money on ether issuance i thought that was a definitely stay tuned for that that was a a very interesting part of the conversation and we ended in uh him giving us a snapshot of time ethereum in 2021 what is in in store for it as a network will it become a global store of value reserve asset he even reflected on that too so this is an episode you do not want to miss david and i are giving some more conv had some more conversation about this episode in the

debrief so if you are a premium subscriber you should already have access to that at shows.bag so with that we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the unit swap ecosystem is the uniswap grants program

is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and will say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uni-swap dow apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost 3 billion this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the uniswap dao no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless

synthetics is ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol what does that mean synthetics is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets which are assets that are priced via an oracle rather than bids or asks traders can use the quenta exchange which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by synthetics traders on cuenta can trade synthetic tokens like sbtc s oil or sd5 because quenta is powered by synthetics traders experience zero slippage on their trades no i didn't mean low slippage i meant no slippage because that is the power of the synthetics platform no slippage on your trades you can also easily short assets with isynths which are synthetic assets

that move inversely to their target asset synthetics isn't just for traders developers can build on synthetics to access the infinite liquidity offered by synthetic assets or investors can stake collateral to the protocol and earn fees that the protocol collects if you're a trader and you're looking for a trading platform and not found in the legacy world check out cuenta.io if you're a developer or you just want to earn yield on your collateral go to www.synthetics.io where you can stake your snx or eth and earn fees from synthetics all right welcome bankless nation we have vitalik buterin back on the podcast and vitalik you recently wrote a piece titled the most important scarce

resource is legitimacy and we are going to be talking a lot about legitimacy today on this episode vitalik welcome back to bankless how are you doing today sir thank you i'm i'm doing great and it's uh good to be back on bank list the greatest ethereum podcast at tm wow wow you heard it here folks it was a tm i want to know who has the tm though hopefully that is uh is settled on ethereum and not in the nation [Laughter] metallic you started off your blog post illustrating this massive difference between ethereum and bitcoin security budgets versus how much each of these respective systems allocates towards

research and development expenses you said bitcoin is paying miners 38 million dollars in block rewards plus 5 million more in fees per day and ethereum is is doing 19 and a half million dollars in block rewards plus 18 million dollars in transaction fees per day all going to security which is a necessary expense but you juxtapose this with how much the ethereum foundation has to to spend on research and development which is just 30 million dollars per year and you do a similar compare and contrast versus like the the bitcoin innovation expenditures as well which is similarly very very low versus the security budget for for the ether for the bitcoin blockchain but you didn't you didn't do this to suggest that ethereum and bitcoin should find ways to direct some of their security

budget to pay for human salaries for research and development but rather as a thought experiment as to why this crazy discrepancy in funding exists and why we are okay with massively overpaying for security so two paragraphs that i want to read out that are in the the blog post themselves for the listeners that haven't actually read the piece you wrote even though we could easily identify some valuable public goods to redirect some funding to as a one-off making a regular institutionalized pattern of such decisions carries risks of political chaos and capture that are in the long run not with it we are faced with this interesting fact that the organisms that are bitcoin and ethereum ecosystems are capable of summoning up billions of dollars of capital but have

strange and hard to understand restrictions on where that capital can go and it's a social force that underlies all sorts of extremely powerful mechanisms far beyond the blockchain space for this reason that will be clear in the upcoming sections of the article i will give this powerful social force a name legitimacy the powerful social force that is creating this effect is worth understanding and so vitalik we would love to explore the power and value of legitimacy with you today so let's start with this very basic question what is legitimacy um uh so the thought experiments uh that i just started the post with right it's basically a kind of calling attention to

this strange fact that like ecosystems and uh like groups of humans more generally they have a kind of physical ability to uh summon up resources um like each of us has the physical ability to summon up a certain number of hours of effort every week we have a certain amount of physical resources at hand and so forth but then there also seems to be this different thing this kind of social ability to actually sum it up and direct resources toward particular tasks and our ability to socially direct resources toward particular tasks is often a kind of wildly out of sync with the physical ability to uh direct resources that's in the hands of each

individual person right and so in this example like we clearly have the physical ability to summon up resources worth billions of dollars potentially to any task but we socially seem to have the ability to put those resources toward uh network security but we don't have the same ability to put those resources toward other things and like funding protocol research and development is one big example right and so you start thinking about why um this is the case right and you also start thinking about well why is uh it the case that we have these uh kind of socially mediated resources

uh in a lot of other contexts more broadly right so like i bet after this i brought up this case of uh the steam project and how a justin sun bought up a bunch of the steam tokens and he started using them to try to kind of consolidate power and sort of do an authoritarian take over the steam network but then the community just said like you know no screw you we're going to make our own fork and we're going to delete your money in the fork right and the fact that this was possible um is basically proof that well actually justin's son regardless of what any ledger theoretically said never actually owns those coins right like if you own something you have the ability to use it for whatever he wants well he clearly as demonstrated by reality did

not have the ability to use those coins uh for whatever he wanted he his ownership of the coins was actually kind of controlled by these unwritten social contracts that the steam company had with the community and that he then inherited when he bought steam the company and so we have these situations where basically large collections of resources are controlled not by like physical force not even by private keys and not by any kind of formal arrangement of individuals but by a social contract right and so like this is what happens uh in the the answer like with say a blockchain right like the ethereum blockchain for example

like it's clearly capable of making the decision to switch from pumping five million dollars a year into proof of work to or 5 million eat a year into proof of work to pumping one million a year into proof of stake um but it would not be capable of uh switching to pumping one million if a year into say life extension research even though like i personally really love life extension research and lots of other people love life extension research uh so like we need to just like properly think about and understand this concept like what does it mean for coins to be owned by social contracts like what what is actually happening in this phenomenon how do we describe this phenomenon and if we understand this

phenomenon better like it's clearly this very powerful social force that you know we could potentially even try to apply and try to use it to fund more uh all kinds of uh good things that we that we like uh so then it gets to this concept of legitimacy right and so the idea behind the legitimacy is basically that like in society in general there's a lot of cases where there's some action or there's some kind of pattern of behavior and there's this shared accept expectation that like some pattern of behavior is something that's supposed to happen and everyone

plays their part in enacting the facts that this is a pattern of behavior that's supposed to happen because like at least in a big part because they expect everyone else to share that pattern as well right uh so like the simplest example of this is like which side of the road do you drive on right and i mean for most people um listening to this it's uh you know you'd be on the right side of the road but you know for something in some places on the left side of the road and like there isn't really any like coherent reason why one is better than the other there's no right side of the road maximalist then vitalik yeah i guess i don't know maybe there

are a few but like again to be honest like i'm not really a car person so i said yeah like yeah i had to think for a couple of seconds to remember like which side of the road is which but um the like the point is that like even if um you know tomorrow the police completely disappeared um you know there are some things that would start going wrong but like i would predict that almost all people like say in the united states would just peacefully keep driving on the correct side of the road and not driving on the incorrect side of the road because they know that you know if they start driving on the incorrect side of the road like that's just going against the consensus is the thing

that's like is the thing that's bad both for society and for themselves um like and like there's just this high cost of disrupting the consensus and it's a high cost both of both to kind of the wider society and just a high risk to themselves personally uh and so they just continue driving on the correct side of the road and by doing that they just sort of become part of the process of enacting this consensus and this is something that exists in a lot of social situations right so like one example of this closer to home in the blockchain space is like if you look at something like the dow fork right like there's the question of um you know is was the dow fork legitimate right and if you think that the dow fork is

legitimate then what when the dow fork is happening then you're going to you know go in peacefully download the ethereum client that implements the the dow fork and you're if you run some ethereum service you're going to hook up that um clients to that particular or your ethereum service to the client that implements the dow fork when you talk about eth you're going to talk about it as being the code the coins that are on the dow fork but if you do not like recognize the dow forecast being legitimate then you're going to do the opposite and you're just going to keep running the client that does not implement the dell for right and so this is also one of those situations where like you have a yeah like there are reasons to wants to favor

one side or the other but there also is this kind of strong overriding uh pressure to sort of favor the side that is brought everyone else broadly accepts and like this this pattern of kind of everyone watching what everyone else's expectations are informing their own expectations based on that and like this kind of pattern right of like everyone watching everyone else and this being motivated even in part because like there is even an over this big self self-interest in uh going along with the consensus like this pattern is the thing that i call legitimacy right and so like in 2016 like we found you know the

dow fork is like what was legitimate and uh in 2017 the bitcoin uh segwit for example was uh legitimate and like i'm using the word legitimate in this very kind of positive sense right this is positive as opposed to normative like something can be legitimate even if you don't like it right like you know the government of north korea is legitimate inside of north korea because there's a pattern of acting like it is uh so but like this is the kind of like the social force that we're talking about right like it's uh you know basically which side of uh you know the equilibrium could fall either way and the question is like which side does it fall on and

that ends up just like deciding a huge number of things in the world guys uh when when i read this post it was sort of a missing link for me because i think legitimacy is a hidden force to use another popular podcasters vernacular behind so much of what happens in crypto and it answers so many of crypto's uh frequently asked questions and that's why it is so important to understand what it is uh and uh and to get your your mind wrapped around this as a mental model i think what one thing you're saying vitalik is basically in in 2016 with the dao hard fork there was a

a fight for legitimacy of which is the the real ethereum quote unquote and um it seems to be the case that the real ethereum is the ethereum that did hard fork as a result of of maybe the market cap of ethereum the defy economy that's built on top of it the community that the ethereum economy has versus the ethereum classic fork so that was really a i guess a battle a social coordination game for legitimacy that's how you'd frame it absolutely vitalik just to recap and define a few things that you said uh leading up to this is you talked about this the steam

blockchain versus dress and sun and and the dow fork um and i i want to just make sure that this concept of legitimacy is is formally instantiated in the listeners brain where you're saying that uh justin sun didn't actually own the steam tokens that controlled over the the steam blockchain even though he had the private keys that controlled over the address that held these tokens because there was this invisible force this hidden force that exists out there in the world that in in that force was allowed to influence the control over the system and the force of legitimacy actually put the power of ownership over the steam ecosystem into the hands of the community and away for

jump from justin's son and now that this event happened we can retroactively look at what happened and say that well justin sun had the tokens but they were removed from him by this invisible power that is legitimacy and so there is a is a while we can't feel it well it doesn't exist anywhere it's not tangible there is this hidden social force out there kind of like the dark matter of the universe this this hidden force of legitimacy that is directing our lives both in like both in the meat space and in the crypto space and perhaps especially in the crypto space um anything you want to add on to that oh i think that's uh definitely an excellent summary and i think like these

kinds of hidden forces are definitely everywhere and they're extremely strong in the crypto space i think because the crypto space is like really all about uh just kind of trying to summon up value in entirely out of a conception of legitimacy in a lot of ways right like the crypto space controls no physical resources the crypto space that controls no legal rights the crypto space controls no uh guns and uh and boats uh so like you know what gives bitcoin the value what uh that it has what gives each the value that it has like legitimacy is pretty much entirely responsible for these things it's very

much a battle for hearts and minds it's a battle on the layer zero sort of the the social layer as we've said before i wanna prompt back to the the original story that david opened with just to see if we can tie that on a boat maybe answer uh the question of why legitimacy was such a factor there uh and then we can define legitimacy legitimacy a bit more in other contexts but the reason that ethereum couldn't just siphon off issuance and put it into a development fund was because we don't like there there's no legitimacy in the governance of that development fund so if you propose an eip for instance to uh create

ethereum issuance to fund charity of your choice that would be an illegitimate use of the ethereum social contract i remember just a quick story back in 2019 this was actually sort of a real thing that was contemplated we were in the depths of the bear market ethereum there was kind of the question of is ethereum dead price was down the community was discouraged even though we were building so much during that time it was it was sort of a discouraging time for many being in the space and and eip was proposed to answer the question that that you posited at the beginning of your article which is how do we make sure that ethereum client development at the protocol level is funded into the future and so eip 2025 was proposed and

the title of this eip was block rewards proposal for funding eth1.x and what it actually did was it proposed funding to a good cause which is the future development of ethereum and ethereum clients in the ethereum protocol um and there were a number of great people behind this kevin o'kee was one who uh he's created a fantastic distribution mechanism public goods funding mechanism in get coin but the difference is this is embedding some sort of issuance to some third party unnamed third party on the base layer which is a question of legitimacy and at the time i felt like um ethereum needed a bit of

a wake-up call a bit more of kind of a bitcoin or mindset of what could happen if we are naive about the issue of legitimacy i didn't call it then and i created uh eip202208 that's just kind of a joke um i'm not sure it landed among everyone but this was sort of a a riff off of the other proposal and i basically proposed an eip to report uh to award block rewards to thought leaders people in the media space with great twitter accounts i think some in the ethereum um community felt like i wasn't being maybe sanctimonious enough about the eip process it was it was a joke but i surfaced the joke that was the point yeah that was the point uh satire but i surfaced the joke in

order to provoke this this very conversation if an eip could be proposed to siphon off issuance for development why couldn't it be proposed to siphon off issuance for anything and then what's the governance process for that eip getting passed and it was very hard to justify the legitimacy of those things um any any thoughts or reflections on all of that yeah i think let's you definitely gave a good summary uh i would say one of the things that became obvious as a result of that um is uh and then here we could probably kind of go down a bit to what i talked about in the next section of the post is like where

legitimacy comes from right like what kinds of sources of legitimacy there are um and my point there is that like legitimacy is something that can theoretically come from a lot of places but it's really heavily dependent on like human coordination and consensus and so legitimacy can most easily come from like things that intuitively appeal across broad groups of people um and so i gave a few examples right like one example of a legitimacy is just legitimacy by brute force right like if someone like takes over some community or exerts a really strong influence in some community

even if they're not liked if they're feared by enough people then people kind of get into this mode where like people realize that no one else is brave enough to stand up against them and so they and so they themselves start being uh not being brave enough to stand against them and like this isn't a pattern of legitimacy that everyone likes but you know it is still a pattern of legitimacy right um is it another of this the nation state brute force vitalik sure yes and many nation states are definitely an example of this um a second example is um legitimacy uh by a fairness right and you know this is a conception of legitimacy that i think

you know we all consider to be much more pro-social right and so something is like gains legitimacy if it's perceived as like satisfying some intuitive conception of you know being fair of not uh unfairly favoring some groups of people over other groups of people um the concept of credible neutrality that i wrote about last year kind of really ties into this right and i think this uh gets to the core of why like say yeah funding network security is much more easily accepted than funding developments because network security is a very cleanly defined uh thing and it's also a process that at

least formally anyone can uh kind of come in and participate in on a kind of formally equal terms and so it's something that people fairly easily accept as like yes this is something we all agree is necessary and yes this is something that we all agree is not a giveaway to a certain group of people right and so we're okay with funding blockchains for network security but once you start funding developments the problem is that i think emp 2025 it didn't just say we wants to redirect 0.045 east per block to developers and said we want us to redirect 0.0458 per block or whatever the number was maybe it was so far for um to this specific group of people that we

consider to be the east one point x team right right so in order to be okay with that eip like you basically had to have an opinion not just about the cause but also about that that particular group of people and so that's not a very socially scalable thing to i try to convince people of and that's something that just does not benefit from like legitimacy by fairness at all right uh so now theoretically like if someone had proposed like if bitcoin grants quadratic funding had existed and someone had proposed gitwin grants quadratic funding as a recipient of that point zero four four then like maybe it would have been more successful um and like maybe one could imagine you

know a a world sometime down the future where the ethereum ecosystem has a big enough funding crisis that people realize that you know public goods funding is something just needs to be expanded upon and someone suggests um hey you know like let's take like 20 percent of like say the eap 1559 burn and direct it into gitwin grants and like that actually gets accepted like that's something that i think the ethereum ecosystem is far away from today but you know if in the future like there's just a large necessity for public goods on a larger scale than is possible with just people's existing funds like that's something that conceivably the community could could move toward accepting and it

would have an easier time accepting that than it would accepting you know hey let's give point zero four five eighth per block to like alexia could have steam or to even to justin drake's team or to my or to some team led by myself or to pretty much anything that's like organized around specific people um so that's like another example but you know at the same time like even even still like the thing that has even more legitimacy is that instead of uh trying to change the layer one base uh or change the base layer is to try to do these things at higher level layers of the ecosystem right because like status quo pressure itself is something that that has higher

legitimacy at layer one than it does that layer two um so that's like that so that's what you never see by fairness there's also legitimacy by process so legitimacy by process basically says if a process is fair then outputs of that process are fair um there's legitimacy by performance so if a process had good results in the past then that process becomes something that gains legitimacy over time uh there's legitimacy by participation so a mechanism where people feel like they can be part of enacting the process is a mechanism that people are more are likely to accept more easily so there's all of these kind of complicated concepts that uh

like affect people's perceptions of what is legitimate and uh what isn't right and like they interact in complicated ways right and like the way that public goods funding happens um you know within the ethereum ecosystem and even beyond the ethereum ecosystem is very heavily influenced by uh all of these things so these are some of the sources of where legitimacy comes from and i want to kind of quickly maybe recap some of these uh for folks so you said legitimacy by brute force we defined that legitimacy by fairness we talked about that a bit an example of legitimacy by a process something that that most many listeners are familiar with of course is is probably a democracy right so

if um i have the ability to vote on a new leader every four years uh i'm probably less angry when the the person i picked doesn't go through and i'm less likely to revolt because hey this is just part of the process i get to pick every four years so does everyone else in another four years i'll get another shot at it so i'm not going to lead the revolution and support you know candidate x uh as a result that's an example of legitimacy by process right right now so legitimacy by process goes from uh processes to outcomes the one right after that is a legitimacy by performance which goes from outcomes to process right and so i gave the example that democracy is an example of

legitimacy process um successful dictatorships uh sometimes are described as getting legitimacy by performance like you know this person ran the country for 30 or this group of people ran the country for 30 years and like we've had six and a half percent gm economic growth for most of those years when the rest of the world was moving forward more slowly and so like they gain legit like they gain legitimacy as a process as a result of like them being able to achieve this outcome now once again i was going to say i i just can't help like weaving in some kind of crypto lessons here because i feel like um there are many cryptocurrencies right now that get at least some short-term legitimacy by performance um so people

observe this the coin price goes up oh it must mean that this is a a good asset it must mean that this chain is is decentralized it must mean that this chain is long lasting um you know chains like the binance chain for example they are having some success with defy quote and so this is legitimacy by by performance essentially yep that's absolutely true and legitimacy by performance is definitely one of those uh interesting things because it's often how a kind of intellectual revolution happens like there's this sort of equilibrium of conformism among you know the right thinking people where the

right thinking people have certain ideas that they think are legitimate but then something outside of those ideas just starts performing and it keeps performing and it keeps performing and the people within this kind of self-affirming circle of intellectuals just keep ignoring it for a long time but then eventually like people that are kind of further away from the center like they just see you know hey this thing on the outside is performing well and you know we don't give a crap about these principles like look this thing is successful and like that often ends up overthrowing things right and that's something that some like once again you know i have to keep giving this disclaimer right like the legitimacy that's not something being legitimate does not mean that you like

the thing right and sometimes the thing that you like loses legitimacy anything that you don't like games would you understand um one interesting thing that i think the us might be experiencing over the last 10 years or so is actually it feels like the process of democracy is actually losing some legitimacy and so like one example of this right is that on the democrat side like we saw the whole not my president's move uh movement you know hashtag back in 2017 and that's a very direct and literal example of basically just declaring hey i'm going to dip my toes into like basically saying well you know it's too bad if he was elected by democratic

process like i just think that this that this new person is horrible and that and that just overrides the process um and then of course on the other side i mean you know into the end of 2021 we saw um you know people denying the legitimacy of the election results right and so on both sides like you if he wants to try to kind of like analyze that from a social science perspective you know that's a process just like people are sort of dipping their toes into the idea of just not accepting the outcome of the process and just acting like well if they don't like the results they should just act like the result isn't a a legitimate result and you could you you can argue performance is like one of one of the reasons behind

that right so like this is an example of a of how it transitions in legitimacy could happen and like once again you know sometimes these transitions happen in directions that you like sometimes these transitions happen in directions that you don't like right um in the crypto space another example of this is a proof of stake right like the legitimacy of proof-of-stake like does a chain running on proof-of-stake sort of get the aura of being a first-class decentralized system that you want to put your applications onto and that's something that i think is like is rising over time right like maybe five years ago the proof of work had much more legitimacy but now as ethereum's proof of stake is getting closer as we see

more and more chains running on proof of stake like it's becoming just more and more accepted by this larger and larger community and that's uh something that um you know is definitely really disliked by this kind of self-affirming clique of intellectuals within the bitcoin proof of work camp and they just like keep on shouting their arguments about no nothing at stake no costly simulation no rich get richer and now of course you know we have our intellectual rebuttals to that but like the it's almost the fact that the intellectual rebuttals are now gaining steam is i mean

like in part i like i wants to think that it's because my arguments are logically amazing but you know we as you said it's not just because the arguments are logically amazing it's also because of legitimacy by performance and this kind of hidden social force that's subconsciously influencing everyone and ethereum just looks like something that's strong and looks like something that's rising and so that's something that you know people want to uh kind of rally behind right so let's talk about two more vitalik that you have these these like theories of legitimacy as we said we talked about continuity fairness process performance you mentioned very briefly legitimacy by participation but i think that's an important one in the context of crypto and has many many aspects so

the fact that anyone can open an ethereum address right all you need is an internet connection uh that's something you don't get in the traditional banking system for instance uh so that is more participation the fact that anyone in a more decentralized proof of stake network um can spin up an ethereum node perf uh validator node provided that you have the necessary stake to to validate um it's much more permissionless democracies have legitimacy by not just process but also participation in that every citizen has the ability to to vote talk a bit more about legitimacy by participation then we'll we'll talk

about the last one which is legitimacy by continuity and uh that'll give us a grounding for the rest of this so what about participation sure so legitimacy by participation basically just means you know if the process has it just gives you and gives its participants an ability to actually shape and be part of the outcome of the process then this is something that people are likely to accept right and participation is not just fairness right um like it's like part of it is fairness because uh systems that um everyone can participate in are systems that are more likely to be fair but it's also a

somewhat different psychological force right it's more like if you uh it's like a desire to have a force sort of psychological self-consistency like once you go to the ballot box and you make a vote like you feel invested in the process and like you feel like you know you are a person who is part of to implementing the democracy thing and so this you know makes you wants to also be a person who's part of implementing the democracy thing in other contexts right and you know in the case of the blockchain your ability to run a node um is definitely a legitimacy by participation um and it's also other kinds of legitimacy as well right it's also just

kind of like intellectual legitimacy of just the idea that self-verification is important and it's like a key part of what makes something a blockchain instead of making it making it a centralized system there's some legitimacy by fairness in there as well um bitcoin grants is also another example of legitimacy by participation like you know you yourself can affect which direction the matching plot goes if like you go and participate um so i guess um like one example of this right is um that like there are fair systems that you can't participate in right so like for

example if you're 16 years old then you cannot yet vote but even if you're 16 like you might be you might still be convinced by the intellectual arguments that you know the average 16 year old is a lower quality political participant than the average adult and so like they again we can debate how true that is but let's leave that aside like you might be convinced by this argument um and you might like and so uh you know you might still accept democracy being fair despite the fact that only 18 year olds can participate but you know you're still not going to get the legitimacy by participation components um but and so like this might be part of why um you know there are actually are all of these like youth political

movements and like schools and um you know like often actively encourage like kind of teenagers to start um you know doing like doing civic engagement of some kind right like it's this alternative route to actually getting legitimacy by participation i kind of started earlier so this is definitely something that happens a lot and i definitely think that like decentralized systems heavily benefit from this because like there's no part of a decentralized system that is closed off to you right if you want to read the chain you can read the chain if you want to send the transaction you can send the transaction um if he wants to participate in consensus you can go participate in consensus so

like that aspect where like there's no part of the chain that uh of the chain's activity that is not something that you can conceivably be part of is something that i think like it does really contribute to the legitimacy of public chains um and it's something that i think like isn't is one reason why kind of like more fully decentralized systems like ethereum and bitcoin are likely to have more legitimacy than these like more semi-centralized chains that really that like intrinsically depend on delegated pools right because like if you have one of these chains that have that real that like relies on like mandatory delegated pools and there's only 21 validator slots well you know everyone knows that they have

no chance in hell of becoming one of the 21 and so you know like the idea that like you are a second class participant and like there is this one class of participant that's above you in a horrible sense so i think that is going to weigh on you to some extent absolutely so all of these theories of legitimacy we're talking about so so much about where we're making analogs to traditional institutions is because legitimacy underpins is the foundation for all traditional institutions and of course blockchains public blockchains cannot like ethereum cannot use legitimacy by brute force violence is just not an option so legitimacy needs to come from all of these other sources that we've just named the last one and then we'll we'll continue on with the conversation is legitimacy by continuity

and i think that's an important applicable one in uh crypto maybe maybe this has some relationship to what we have called previously the lindy effect so the idea that if something is legitimate at time t by definition it is legitimate at time t plus one into the future um perhaps even more legitimate at t plus one exactly and so uh bitcoiners will say yes and the bitcoin network has been humming for the last decade plus uh and its monetary policy has not changed it has continuity and therefore it is a good store of value can you reflect on legitimacy by continuity in time yeah and i think legitimacy by continuity is important

because it just is the reason why we can have these like social structures that last for like longer than a week at all right like if we did not have legitimacy by continuity at all then you know every political system would be up for like total revaluation you know every every tuesday and if people thought it this way then like you know it'll just be like hard to coordinate things that last longer than a week uh and that's like it's one of those things that we think about the least uh because it's just something that like by definition happens by default but it is important right and as you said like the longer a system lasts then you know the longer it

does acquire this lindy value and uh you know when newer people are coming in and they're trying to like see you know what is the system that i should get behind because it's the one that i expect other people to be getting behind like it's this long track record of uh survival is definitely one of the factors that they're taking into consideration so vitalik the through line that i'm really seeing here with all these different forces that legitimacy arise from is is we call this a social force and it feels very much like a a bottom-up force a a populist force um people choose uh in these various different mechanisms what is legitimate

versus what's not but is legitimacy explicitly a bottom-up phenomenon in the article you wrote in general legitimacy arises because the thing that gains legitimacy is psychologically appealing to most people does that mean that legitimacy is a people first force um legitimacy definitely a subject that comes from people first but um two caveats right like or well one caveat basically is that the thing that gains legitimacy it can be something that's very centralized right like for example you know within the tron ecosystem you know like justin's son has a huge amount of legitimacy um within um you know the bitcoin sve ecosystem craig

wright has a lot of legitimacy um and of course the centralized figure can um in a lot of cases also gain legitimacy by brute force as well right uh so like it is something that comes from the people but the consequence the consequences that it has and the things that it empowers can be centralized in some ways a lot of the time and so that is something that like is worth watching out for right and so even but even with a dictatorship where you know legitimacy comes from just raw unbridled power which the people must be subservient to even then it's still kind of a bottom-up force because the collective people identify

that there's a lot of power there and so they should be subservient to it and even then we've we've seen institut instances throughout history where there is this top down control and then something happens that allows the people to question that control and there's a collective shift where everyone realizes that perhaps they actually have the power to determine what's legitimate and there's a populist uprising right so using these kind of uh mental models let's talk about uh a stable equilibrium how do we find stable equilibria when it comes to legitimacy and all these other sources of legitimacy that we've gone through uh again i think like the equilibria are stable most of the

time right like the the shift in equilibria is one of those things that's like more catastrophist than gradualist to use an evolutionary analogy right it's a the sort of thing that kind of is steady for a long time and then like sometimes you can see that when a shift begins the shift starts off slow at um at times and the shift starts slow and then when the shift gets to a certain critical point it just happens quickly right and the reason why things work this way is because like just going back to a kind of my characterization of what the legitimacy phenomenon is it's a pattern of people behaving in a certain way because they see everyone else behaving in that way and like

there's a big risk to stepping out of line alone that doesn't exist if everyone steps out of line at the same time right and so if um everyone considers some idea or some conception as being legitimate and that's uh something that's very strong then if you start kind of going against it then you're not likely to have much of an effect and you're even likely to like sir at best waste time and at most like kind of hurt your own interests by going against it but then the thing that you can do right is that you can sort of start like dipping your feet a little and you can start like say publicly questioning the concept slightly but not actually going against it in your actions

and then once the the first person who does that they do incur some social costs but then the second person who does that incurs a lower social cost and so legitimacy starts kind of slowly decreasing over time and then eventually there does some come some critical points where like people have done enough public questioning of the concept that it just what it can start flipping from like um resistance to the old equilibrium being underground to resistance to the old equilibrium being like very open and very overground fairly quickly right so i think the more interesting way to frame the question is actually not even how do you identify conceptions of legitimacy being

stable because that's the norm the interesting thing to identify is like how do you identify when a big shift in the a conception of legitimacy is about to happen and i think people have an intuitive feel for these things especially because in the last five years or so in both crypto and in the world in general like we've had some of these shifts in legitimacy and they like you know you can feel it how these things sort of happen gradually and then they happen suddenly and sometimes only when they happen suddenly do you look back and do you realize that like hey these things that people were saying in the two in the two or three years before that actually were a prelude to that i think a very relevant current event

here is the alexei navalny uh case with uh with russia and vladimir putin right now where alexi navalny was uh ostracized from from russia he he fled uh he was tried he was poisoned by uh the russian you know inner party uh then he comes back to russia and was immediately jailed and is now uh perhaps on like the last strings of of his life in jail under vladimir putin uh and and the what you just said recently was that um the first person to question legitimacy illegitimacy probably loses a lot of social power and social force but then what that person is doing is allows for the people to come after them to more easily question the legitimacy and if

this trajectory trajectory flows alexey navalny who is already a hero of the russian people and there's already this showing of solidarity behind this individual i think what a very apt current event to illustrate the power of legitimacy is under is going on right now in russia and i think that for it would be a useful mental model for listeners to uh really understand how legitimacy is flowing in current times right yeah now it's definitely a really uh interesting although of course you know very unfortunate for her i'm alex again as well uh in a situation to be watching it's uh you know the question to see is basically you know to what extent and

or whether or not a serious equilibrium flip does actually happen right like equilibrium philips have happened before in russia like you know the whole switch from uh communism to post-communism was one of those big examples of uh an equilibrium flip and you know like someone like my dad definitely remembers that how it was out as it was happening um so that's like there's two ways that it could go right like it could either kind of continue snowballing and um eventually um you know big via either has to make serious concessions or he kind of actually ends up again you're getting taken out of power somehow or you know the other possibility of course

is that like it does just sort of fizzle over time um and the sort of equilibrium does kind of re-establish itself but even if the equilibrium re-establishes itself like it i think it definitely would it would be a shift from a kind of like legitimacy by performance which is the thing that i think did sort of buoy up putin for the first like 10 years of his uh presidency to like be just like clearer kind of just like legitimacy by brute force and that kind of like that kind of switch is something that like could can have like bad long-term consequences for him for him and uh

his government as well uh so yeah i mean we'll see how it goes and i definitely i you know wish the best for and the russian people has been on russian myself but uh we'll we'll see how this goes another example that i think is is kind of visceral that you give in the article is kind of the uh the the general in the army example or maybe a captain in the army and um i am uh i i really enjoy listening to dan carlin's hardcore history i don't know if you guys have ever listened to it but um i listened to all of them okay well amazing so he did this this whole series called king of kings and it was basically persian assyrian history anyway there are many episodes in that

like hours of listening if you get bored of bankless guys it's a little you know get bored of krypto go to dan carlin but um he gives very visceral examples of what it was like to fight at the front lines of um you know in an ancient army essentially and the captain or the commander's main job was social coordination the captain had to make sure that his troops would not break rank because if the line broke there would inevitably be a slaughter and so the captain would have to have a show of confidence be you know decorated and like you know bright armor uh be standing be sitting on a horse um and had to instill this confidence because

every soldier with the prospect of of certain death and another army about to come kill them uh very nervous at that time what you're doing as a soldier is you're kind of looking around to your fellow soldiers and you're saying oh is he gonna run is he gonna run right so it's like this it's like this real-time human coordination social coordination game being played out at the highest stakes that was a fascinating example of um how i think some of these legitimacy mechanisms almost emerge in human behavior can you talk about that a little bit like sort of the emergence uh there's a line from your article that says with any coordination games that exist for long enough there inevitably emerged some mechanisms these are not necessarily defined mechanisms and words

or legal language but these are mechanisms nonetheless that emerge can you talk about that a bit yeah i think human behavior in general and like especially collective behavior very easily falls into patterns and it's just something that naturally happens over time right and you know you can see why it happens like it's easier for each individual percentage to just like repeat the same habits that they've grown accustomed to and then it is for them to kind of like fill up their habits um and it's also easier to continue along a habit because getting an entire group of people to switch is something that's even harder um so now the the ancient armies are definitely a great example it's fascinating how like while two

armies are fighting each other head to head there's generally not too many casualties um at least immediately but then once one of the army is like does that equilibrium flip it and starts routing like that's when the carnage really begins right and so like whether or not the equilibrium flips is like one of the most important things in a battle and it's something that the captain has to try really hard to prevent right and that's one of those cases where you know yes the soldiers are exactly like they're watching each other they're seeing you know who's gonna uh are these people gonna run are these people not gonna run and you know if other people run but then you start running five seconds

later like just what you're at the back of the line and you're the first that's gonna like you know get a sword or an axe in the back of your spine um so but if you start running and other people don't run then well you know you're you're a deserter and you're likely to get your head chopped off by your own army at the end of the battle uh so that's it yeah it's a perfect example and it's like really tough to be in that kind of situation and and like yeah the thing that everyone wants to do is just like see what everyone else is doing because like they just feel like acting the same way that everyone else acts like just is the okay way to act like does this explain maximism almost or sort of an ardent maximalism david

that as before has called some ardent maximals like almost like barrier troops right that prevent your own army i think okay no that's that's uh definitely a fascinating example um definitely a big like intellectual legitimacy in general is a really important type of legitimacy and just having people out there just like you know saying the raw rasa logans and like talking about how they're going to fight till the end and how their belief in this cause is unconditional is definitely a way of like just showing other like the other people in the community that you know there is at

least this group of people that you know is not going to flee before me so it's safe it's kind of safe for me to continue being part of this and you know continuing to shelter this organs myself that um absolutely is a thing that happens well but some of it's logical too and i'll give an example for bankless listeners we'll listen uh a few podcasts a day ago we had on haaseo who is a crypto researcher also involved in the ethereum community someone who i consider an intellectual has some fantastic ideas and toward the end of that episode he said something that uh kind of blew my mind he said that um you know there are many including himself in the bitcoin community that know that the long-term security model of bitcoin uh fixed cap is actually flawed but then he

also followed up by this um he said he was reticent to proclaim that it was flawed and why is the reason it's not anti-intellectualism it's because actually acknowledging the problem um hastens the demise of bitcoin because so much of bitcoin's economic monetary uh policy and number go up is because of legitimacy of fixed issuance so if you break rank and you actually talk about that even bring it up you could actually be contributing to the delegitimization of bitcoin itself and so it was almost a rational reason why he was reticent to

to kind of bring it up yeah that's very true vitalik how would you uh look when we were talking about how humans just need to be on the same page in order to create this social force legitimacy my mind turned to the concept of shelling points uh how how would you uh where do you see the intersection of shelling points and legitimacy uh how do you see those concepts as related i think legitimacy is a type of a shelling point phenomenon like there's definitely some level at which they're almost synonyms and they like they're definitely sort of like within the same category of idea space um so shelling points are you know just this idea that like if you want people to

like basically people if they have to coordinate with other people on something like if they benefit from making the exact same choice as other people then they would just like choose the the course of action and they just they think it seems the most intuitive to the largest group of people um and like they latch onto just like any conception of intuitiveness that like seems like it's kind of widely shared enough regardless of you know whether or not like they personally agree with it or whether or not it's like logical in some other sense and so yes um thomas shelling's original example was like if you uh tell someone that he

wants to meet them in new york but um i know you you know you don't know what location in new york like what place should you go to and the answer that he gave was uh grand central station and i guess the theory is that like grand central station is this it's this big landmark in new york and it's a landmark that where people know that everyone else knows that it's a big landmark and so you know you're more likely to go there because you're reasoning that the other person is reasoning the same way now of course to be fair if i went to new york i would probably not choose grand central station i would choose times square and i actually i'm not sure exactly what grand central station is um but like this just show this just shows how um you know

these uh conceptions uh like these showing points can be kind of different across different communities and the conception of legitimacy i guess like it's basically the exact same kind of uh phenomenon and though it's something that's not just applied to like one-time actions it's also something that's just applied to these common ongoing processes like basically like i mean it is like i think the the key lesson is just like this idea that there's just so many different contexts in our like collective human activity where it makes

sense to take to make the same choice as other people but everyone's trying to make the choice at the same time without having perfect information of everyone else's choice and so they just have to like latch on to ideas that they expect everyone else to consider intuitive like that's it's just this really important thing and it affects a huge amount of behavior and so i think a lot of people in history have kind of identified the importance of this and also in this article and in many of your other articles as well you've used this uh alternative shelling eye concept as a shelling fence which i'm actually unfamiliar with so so maybe you could help us learn what a shelling fence is in contrast to a shelling point and how it relates to legitimacy

yeah so a showing fence is this idea that like you can go up to a it's a common agreement that you can go up to a certain point um yeah but like you can't go further than that point um so well the shelling fence is actually an ideal analogy because like literal offenses even when they're insecure are shelling fences in some way right like because what you imagine you know you have two farmers and they both have their farms and there's a fence between those two farms then like it's beneficial for the two farmers relationships for them to both agree on like this is my land and this is your land and i'm not gonna like go and grab things from your lines and you're not gonna go and grab things from

my land and if there is just any kind of natural landmark like whether it's a river or even just like whether it's just an actual fence that someone put there uh like that's just the fact that it's the most visible landmark just like is the thing that makes it clear that you know you're not going to go past like that point um and there's a lot of um like one other example of this like say in the crypto space might be that you could conceive of a blockchain community where people in that blockchain community are okay with say a portion of transaction fees being redirected to a debt fund but they would not be okay with issuance

going into a debt fund and now you might ask well like why this arbitrary distinction right like transaction fees are like a unit of currency um a block or reward is a unit of currency and like really 20 of transaction fees is much greater than 0.01 coins of block reward so why be okay with the first thing but not be okay with the second thing and the reason like there's a very rational reason to be okay with arbitrary distinctions like this and that the reason basically is like it's a slippery slope effect right like slippery slopes are not fallacies um you know they're like it is definitely true that once if you start accepting that um you know let's have a 0.01 coin block reward

going to a deathland then you've really kind of reduced the strength of the argument against um having an even bigger defund and so if the community agrees that they want a a medium-sized def fund but they also still wants to kind of keep a barrier that like very clearly prevents them from going even further um because they want to you know protect like their monetary legitimacy then you know saying a portion of transaction fees can go towards our funds but a portion of issue but issuance cannot like it's just a very clear dividing boundary and the existence of that dividing boundary basically allows you to kind of go up to that dividing boundary without compromising on everyone's really strong

agreement that you can't do anything beyond that dividing boundary um and so like that's one um that's one example of something that could happen um another example of a shelling fence is just like zero is a very common shelling fence uh so just the fact that like you don't want to start doing certain things at all um like you don't want to start having a def fund at all you don't want to start like um you know even just like doing coin rescues at uh uh hard forks at all uh because if you start doing them at all then you've severely weakened your arguments against going further and then once you go further you severely weaken your arguments against going even further and so like you just have to like put your foot down somewhere and

say like this is the limit and oftentimes like there isn't a kind of intuitive spot to put that limit except for zero and so that's why like sometimes we just have to agree that like you know we're gonna put our foot down and we're gonna say zero is uh the limit even though from some so like a kind of social optimality sense the best amount might be some number higher than zero like just because of limits to coordination like zero might just be the number that you choose right so like these monetary policy comes to mind yes that's uh definitely a great example like you know there's definitely a lot of bitcoiners who would be willing to privately admit that like yes bitcoin would on net be better if you just said there was a 0.1 bitcoin blocker word

that continues permanently but um in practice um like everyone kind of agrees that um once you start saying 0.1 then like you've really compromised your ability to argue against uh say increasing to 0.5 and then increasing to 2 and then increasing even further and the fact that everyone uh kind of like believes in this slippery slope itself uh kind of contin contributes to everyone's understanding of the strength of not even starting to go down the slippery slope and so like everyone's belief in the show offense essentially is the thing that just contributes to the shelling fence being so strong right so

i definitely expect that you know bitcoin is going to have an extremely hard time going beyond the 21 million coin limit um like i actually think that um you know if uh bitcoin has a security crisis so there are start being successful 51 attacks against it like there's basically three choices that they could take right choice one is uh compromising on 21 million choice two is just accepting the attacks and choice three is moving to at least hybrid proof of stake and i mean i expect um that there is a higher chance that though that if that if there's a security crisis they'll move to hybrid proof of stake just because um you know even if the kind of like the core bitcoin irate

really hate proof of stake like just the facts that ethereum and the fact that all these other platforms are running it are using it without a problem actually does contribute to its legitimacy but if that did not happen right if uh like the the hybrid proof of stake route was also out of the question like they would much rather just accept the attacks than they would um except a uh even slight issuance increase um just uh because uh of these of these shelling fences like basically like there's parts of the bitcoin community that are even actively against making a shelling fence about any specific guarantee of security right like they even explicitly say things like oh you know the bitcoin blockchain is

explicitly something that never finalizes and so even reverting a week of activity is something that does not like explicitly violate the bitcoin blockchain stated guarantees which i think to an ethereum person like sounds very insane and i think in the ethereum case um you know if uh like there was a 51 attack that reverted a week of activity we would just do a hard fork right or at least a soft fork that just like did deleted the attacking chain um but so like that's just like an example where i think like in the ethereum case like just finality and non-reversion is something just like is a stronger part of the social contract and like you could even imagine a

blockchain community that says you know we have a hard community norm against reversions longer than 24 hours and so if the proof-of-work system reverts more than 24 hours well too bad we're gonna have to hard fork it and if that happens like that's just another example of like how you know like if you set the fence then like that fence itself becomes like one of these self-reinforcing thing that's things that's really powerful and so like how you set the norms at the beginning is just really important i think the two ethereum examples one at the start of this was um the block reward to developers eip did not get community traction and did not move forward and that was sort of a shelling fence um right back to that

zero to one another example is probably uh you sort of alluded to this but the um the parity wallet hack that was a an eip that did not move forward because the question to the community for the shelling fence is okay then where does it stop uh which act do we decide to bail out which do we not let's just keep it at zero and not bail anybody out i've got a wallet that has some ether in it that i would like to get back in the ip for this yeah so yeah i think uh the efp999 case was interesting right because the dell fork like it did compromise the shelling fence of like basically no no state intervention and that is something that made a lot of

people upset and that is something that made a lot of people move to etc but even the people who did not move to etc like they were they were kind of scared as a result and so i think the rejection of eip 999 was in part motivated by this desire to like reestablish a develo a shelling fence and say you know yes we did the dow fork but you know no despite that we have standards and like i i think that was effective like i think that's something that a lot of bitcoiners were not expecting like they really were expecting that you know if you do it once you just keep doing it forever but um you know no you like the like eip 999 not happening like it did convince a lot of people that like you know it like the dow fork

happened once but that does not mean that like ethereum chain intervention is a free-for-all um so that was an interesting situation as well so vitalik say the whole world will listen to this podcast and hopefully hopefully that happens and now the whole world is informed about this and this power called legitimacy and now that we have this name on on it we can actually discuss it and talk about it in a more manifested sense what can humans do with legitimacy like if if everyone understands that this force exists can we harness it like what if we had more legitimacy in the world what does it mean to be more legitimate uh if we can harness this power what could we do with it

so one very important form of legitimacy in the world is the property rights right like property rights are something that exits on top of legitimacy right like people are not going to be able to like successfully conquer your house and maintain your position inside the house because like there are these conceptions of legitimacy and you know the police know that if someone conquers your house and sets up camp in it they have to come in and dislodge them and then they know this because they know that if they don't do this then other people and the governments are going to yell at them and they're going to do it themselves and then at some point it escalates to the military and then if the military doesn't do that then you know the government's going to get

voted out of office so there's this kind of towering set of expectations and it even towers internationally internationally to some extent um that are based that are protecting your house right and so if that conception of legitimacy did not exist then you know yes like someone who had more guns can like just like conquer your house and set up shop inside of it uh so the interesting thing about property rights is that just because of like new technology um you often see new property rights or the the need for new property rights uh emerging right so like one example of this is uh well we could talk about antarctica right so uh

people like right now antarctica is this backwater that very few people care about and it's mostly just like a place for scientific research but there's a possibility that within half a century antarctica is going to become more important so the reason a big part of the reason why is global warming right so the climate is expected to warm by several degrees over the course of the next few decades and like people have done kind of the analysis of like how this is going to affect uh the temperature and livability of different places and western antarctica like that peninsula that's like just a thousand kilometers south of south america is expected to potentially become if uh is somewhat a viable place for settlements like within

half a century right and so as one of the interesting secondary consequences of global warming is that we could actually see antarctica becoming this like thing that people care about considerably more than they did before now the problem right now is that like there aren't really strong conceptions of uh property rights around antarctica because like just not enough people care about doing anything with antarctica that like like on the current margins it's not rivalrous basically right but eventually like we can imagine a future where western antarctica becomes um a rival or a sand like you will need a conception of property rights you could also extend this to the moon or space or other areas right exactly

so like one thing that we could agree on for um like antarctica right now is we could just say hey how about we agree right now that we're going to like say have some global body could be the un it could be some special purpose separate thing um put harbor crew taxes on entire on antarctica and just like instead of just giving it to whoever comes first you just like put this sort of like permanent uh sort of like half ownership half whis type mechanism on it and then the revenues from the harvard group tax will just go into a global basic income right so if you do this then you've basically created this global basic income fund and like you could imagine every person in the world you know gaining like

probably not enough money to eat but like at least you know some like tens of dollars a year uh and if that happens like that's something that could be good for humanity right but in order to arrange something like that like you do need to have some conception of legitimacy like he needs to have a wide enough common agreement that um you know western antarctica would actually be a kind like or property rights in western antarctica would be managed under this scheme that like has revenue going to this place that then distributes that's among everyone it gives it and gives everyone a basic income that um you like so that these property rights like would actually just be valid right because if

it's only a few people trying to implement this but like actually um you know just like some powerful country comes in and says like you know yeah no this thing's ours then like that it's not going to succeed right and so like that's just like one just one possible example of like something where if you start like if you start a kind of like engaging in public discourse and sort of shoring up legitimacy behind this idea that you know if western antarctica becomes important then we're going to harbor her taxes and give iran a basic income then like that increases the chance that actually that actually does become the equilibrium that happens but on the other hand if no one starts talking about it then like that's just not going to happen and you'll get a result that's probably less interesting

so i think what we're getting from from that is what can we do with more legitimacy is we can play better social coordination games and that that's what human beings are really good at that's how we found success as a species hey guys i hope you're enjoying the conversation with vitalik so far coming up next we talk about the role of legitimacy inside of nfts as well as the power of charitable giving in adding legitimacy to the value of an nft then we also turn to the conversation of the legitimacy of the monetary policy of ether the asset and we asked vitalik will the most legitimate blockchain have the highest level of security and overall we can't miss the opportunity of talking to vitalik about his thoughts on

ultrasound money but we do it inside of the context of legitimacy stay tuned for the second half of this podcast don't go anywhere but first we have to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible metamask is your go-to wallet for the bankless journey if you're going bankless you need metamask period browser and mobile get them both this is your tool to unlock the world of defy here's my favorite part now you can swap tokens directly in metamask with a single swipe this has got to be the easiest way to trade ethereum tokens choose a token you own a token to exchange it with get your quotes if you like what you see you hit swap that's it what makes swap so useful is what happens behind the scenes it compares

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bit of eth bonus back to me at the same time you can open up a free account in under three minutes at gemiini.com go bank list and if you trade more than a hundred dollars within the first 30 days after sign up you'll be gifted a free 15 bitcoin bonus check them out at gemiini.com go bankless let's uh let's talk a bit more about crypto because i think what we're unlocking in this concept of legitimacy with the the post and the description thus far is i'm not going to say a theory to everything but it's an answer to most of many of the faqs that i hear when people first come into into crypto so let me give an example a couple we've covered um one is like why can't

ethereum just have issue an eip and uh fund its public goods that way and we can't because of legitimacy uh you gave another example of of you know why can't a bank for instance acquire a defy protocol well they can't we have the the steam versus justin sun example because the thing that they're acquiring is actually social consensus and they can't just buy legitimacy they almost have to earn it here's another question i think people ask when they get the space and this was a common question in 2013 2014 about why bitcoin is is valuable and some critics have said big said back then especially bitcoin will never be valuable because anybody can just create a fork right i

could create take my bitcoin and then say this is the legitimate bitcoin it's called bitcoin ryan and like that turned out to be completely not true um because of legitimacy would you agree with that definitely well so the interesting thing also is that like there's bitcoin maximalists who said that you know for bitcoin to maintain and its uh value like bitcoin has to be accepted as the only one because if people start accepting the legitimacy of other cryptocurrencies then like the ability of bitcoin to maintain any kind of special status just like disappears and people start acting like they're all the same in cryptocurrency as a sector hyperinflates and we discovered that that's completely

not true right like anyone can print a new cryptocurrency but printing a new cryptocurrency that has the legitimacy to gain value is something that actually is hard right and it's something that takes a lot of effort it's something like that not everyone can do and and it is very possible for you know bitcoin to have a lot of legitimacy bitcoin cash to have less legitimacy um bitcoin abc to have even less but still non-zero legitimacy and then you know bitcoin ryan would probably like i mean i'm sure if you mean it it will like get up to a few hundred thousand dollars but like you know even less more jvc like than uh bitcoin uh diamond or bitcoin abc basically right uh so like there being multiple

cryptocurrencies is something that has proven to be a yes stable equilibrium which is i think something that a lot of people like even especially very early in the crypto space did not expect i also think another example of this is um many of the uh ethereum killers that have come about talk about they they emphasize um their technology right more scalability this sort of thing and they don't emphasize legitimacy they don't emphasize social scalability and um you know they they think this is purely a technical battle but it's not it's a legitimacy battle it's a social coordination battle it's about who where the developers of the future feel comfortable like built which

platform they feel comfortable building on top of and where the users feel comfortable actually using without losing their property rights another example you gave an example in the post that i think is interesting which is why do defy apps it seems like prefer dye rather than tether legitimacy yeah yeah well the interesting thing i gave in that example right is that like traders are often perfectly fine with the other adapts are preferred strongly prefer die over tether and the reason is that legitimacy is fundamentally about coordination and traders don't really have to coordinate right they're just like trading and their main interaction with other traders is competitive and so

like for a trader like if you personally believe that like well you know maybe tether has some sketchiness inside of it but like meh whatever it's fine then like that's fine and you can just keep using tether but for if you're building an application then you need something that not just you can trust but that like you can easily convince other observers and even like fairly low information observers that you're building on top of something sound and so make something like die where it's a legitimacy model doesn't fundamentally rely on you know very socially unscalable assumptions about like how honorable bitfinex people are like there's something like it's just easier to get behind i think we can also extrapolate the

confusion perhaps behind nfts and why nfts have value and answer that question with legitimacy and a nice example that i like to use is the uh the creator of the nion cat gif uh he made this nian cat gif many many many years ago and then recently he remastered it so he made a brand new gif the brand new gif uh and then he sold that brand new gif for 300 eth and there's two two uh sources of legitimacy that i see coming into this gift one is continuity where even though it's a brand new gif it continues from the same meme of the nyan cat that has almost been around for a whole entire decade and

legitimacy as the artist who created the nft in the first place it was the original artist who remastered the nyan cat gif not some new unknown artist uh and and i think we can extrapolate this to most all nfts at large where it's not about the jpeg it's about the legitimacy uh and right and so vitalik how do you see legitimacy and nfts intersecting yeah i think that's definitely an excellent example right because like the question is like first of all you know an nft of a nyan cat is clearly more successful than the same author making an nft of some completely new turtle meme but second um a nyan cat meme made by the author of the the original nyan

cat name is more successful than just like some random person doing it right and so like there's a legitimacy in the meme there's legitimacy in the person and you know there's other kinds of legitimacy as well and they do sort of kind of add up and stack on top of each other now the reason why legitimacy is important in nft is is because if you look at the reasons why anyone would want an nft in the first place right like one of them is that you will uh you want uh you're more likely to buy an nft if you know that you can resell it later another one is you want an nft for social bragging rights um and all of these uh like basically all the motivations for why you could

conceivably want in nft are very closely bound up with the fact that other people also accept that this is a an nft that should be have a value right and so you know even if like you personally think that a um you know purple hexagon is something that's like really important to the world and it's something that should be worth billions like nobody else agrees that purple hexagons should be worth billions and so you know you're not gonna spend much money buying a purple hexagon nft because like you might get a bit of personal satisfaction but because nobody else cares about purple hexagons like your level of personal satisfaction will be limited and your ability to

resell it will also be extremely um limited and probably zero as well um and like we see these kind of like conformism patterns um occurring in markets um all the time right like for example one of the reasons why houses tends to be relatively standardized and uncreative is because when you buy a house like you wants to buy a house that you can sell easily and then the person you're selling to also wants a house that they know that they can sell easily and so if you buy a house that is uh just kid forms to the average person's expectations of a house that not only do you know that you can you can easily find someone who wants to live in it you

know that you can sell it to someone else because you can easily convince the person that you're selling too that they might later be able to sell to sell it along to someone else as well right and so like you can often like get these sort of effects that just like kind of prop up the value of some houses over others for a long time and these are just like these equal sort of second layer equilibria that just um you know exist on top like you know weird social forces and with nfts it's true as well right um and so with nft is like yeah if someone else made a nan catch uh nfc then it would be much easier harder for you to resell it and like you would just gain much less

social satisfaction having it and so you know just for all of the reasons is much less valuable and so what this means is that nfts are kind of heavily defined by legitimacy and if we can affect these conceptions of legitimacy then we could potentially kind of turn nfts in or or at least nudge nfts into something that's real really useful for just like funding or or funneling valuable resource or resources to things that are valuable for society right so like one example that i gave is if we create a conception that an nft is more legitimate if it's uh kind of connected to some non-profit organization and some

portion of the revenues go to that organization and if people accept that like nfts with this property are like more legitimate because they're like more scarce in some way than um nfcs that do not have this connection then that's like if that equilibrium exists then that's something that we'll just end up like funneling resources to more of these nonprofit organizations and like trying to actively participate in trying to create these equilibria is something that we should be like really i think focused on and like interested in trying to make happen but what you're saying i i've seen this in the analog space there's a brand called red i don't know if you've seen this but there was a period of time where like starbucks was branding their

coffee red and you'd see red everywhere and i believe that's a non-profits where some portion of the donation from that product went to aids and now i think it's covid19 but that's the kind of thing you're talking about where they branded all of these products and increased demand because now i buy my starbucks and i'm feeling like i'm actually giving back to something that i support something like that for nfts absolutely it feels like i'm reminded of like the uh event where when somebody buys a new boat they swing a bottle of champagne and it breaks it breaks upon the boat and it's like this christening event for this boat and it has nothing to do with legitimacy but with an nft uh when you are selling this nft and you're

committing some amount of funds to charity it feels like a christening event of this nft you use the term uh bless uh in in your article where you are blessing this nft bestowing it with legitimacy and what was interesting to me is not not a week after you uh published this article did the unit swap v3 x times y equals k nft come out and not only was a chunk of that revenue of that nft donated to to charity all of it was donated to charity do you think that that like if we if we want to give some perhaps some actionable advice to nft artists that it would actually be behoove them from a revenue maximalist perspective to donate some of their their nft sale

revenue to charities i think that's absolutely the case and i think it's even one of those things that could sort of like flow in one direction because if nobody else is making an nft going to charity and you make another sequel where some part goes to charity then you know just by that fact your nft is special and people are more likely to pay attention to it but then if lots of people are already making nfcs to go to charity then um you know that fact just like gains what the fact that an nfc is supposed to be blessed by some charity becomes like this part of its legitimacy um and just like by the by that pressure as well um you know it ends up being just like more effective to make an nfc or some portion

goes through a charity uh so this is something that like i'm hoping not just nfc artists think about but even like major nft platforms uh think about um like just incorporating like some notion of uh you know flagging nfts that go that have been blessed by a charity as being that and just making this very clear a virus like i think if this is something that can be coordinated among i think a relatively small number of actors in the ecosystem then the results could be really interesting so vitalik i think the bankless community would also love your thoughts on another subject that i feel like is actually very quite quite related to legitimacy and that's a topic that has been top of mind for the the last um

couple of months and that is the topic of ethan's ultrasound money so this is kind of a i i call it a narrative um that you know is uh that justin drake actually helped define it i think you had some role in actually uh naming this concept um as well but the the way it relates to legitimacy is i have uh sent that podcast to many bitcoiners uh i know and i've invited many who have been previously skeptical about ethereum and it's its future guarantees security guarantees monetary guarantees or otherwise to listen to it and ask for feedback and many don't listen to it of course many don't go down the journey but but

those who do generally have a consistent um piece of feedback and that is this the monetary policy is still illegitimate of ethereum because it's being changed right so the fact that it can be tweaked at this point is outside of sound money behavior uh as as kind of defined by by bitcoin can we talk about that for a minute i guess maybe the contract the context is ultrasound money but also like what do you think a legitimate issuance policy looks like for a cryptocurrency i think that's a definitely a great question and i think uh

you know the concept of legitimacy is definitely a really important to like this ultrasound question in like a bunch of really subtle ways right i think the thing the key thing that's uh important here is that there is a shift of legitimacy in thinking of if as um you know a type of money of any kind right like closer to the beginning of ethereum's history and he was more viewed as like basically that's a thing that you would use to pay for gas but not really something that um you know he would actually wants to use as an asset and

over time i think this is i think a push from the community much more than it is anything happening from you know the ethereum foundation or the core developers uh actually i think it's entirely approached from the yet community is that people just started like talking about um you know eath as an asset and like basically wanting to confer inherit legitimacy to eath as an asset more and more and i think the place where the ultrasound money kind of meme and it's been the discussion around how proof of stake and eap 1559 uh fit into that is that those things

like even now they signal a commitment to the fact that a large portion of the ethereum ecosystem like wants if to be um ultrasound money and like a community that wants youth to be or a community that wants an asset sorry um an asset having a community that wants it to be an ultrasound money is a good property for an ultrasound money to have right like an asset is more effective as an ultrasound money if it has a big portion of its community talking about how that asset is ultrasound money because that community talking about the

ultrasound money meme itself like basically makes it be part of the social contract it makes it more likely that things that are supportive of that asset becoming ultrasound money will be implemented and things that are opposed to that asset being ultrasound money will not be implemented right uh so i think uh just east gaining uh kind of legitimacy through this uh kind of like self-created ultrasound money concept is definitely a thing that is um happening now of course i mean legitimacy is always something that's so different in different communities and i think there definitely is a cultural

difference between the ethereum and bitcoin communities right because i think ethereum people are more accustomed to like valuing ethereum based on the its future whereas bitcoin people are much more accustomed to valuing bitcoin based on its presence right like if i've expressed this before as uh ethereum people think ethereum oh sorry bitcoin people think bitcoin is 80 complete ethereum people think ethereum is 40 complete um and like both sides are comfortable with that and think the other side is crazy for like taking the opposite choice right uh and and so like at least within the ethereum community like the fact that there is intent to do 50 59 and the proof of stake switch to bound issuance and all

of this stuff is already enough for them right like it's the intent and direction of the social contract that's even the most important thing whereas i imagine to the bitcoin audience like until it's implemented in code it doesn't count and maybe that's fine like uh i think i think they do they almost feel like vitalik until it's implemented coded and like 20 years have passed it's not fine yes i think yeah i think that's definitely true yeah like bitcoin people are definitely just like less comfortable with the concept of social contracts defining a direction instead of defining a permanent state and the ethereum social contract for at

least the first 10 years of its existence you know the last the last six and the next few as well like is one that defines the direction right this whole show contract has included proof of stake in charting from since before the ethereum blockchain launched uh and now over time i do think that the etherium social contract is going to switch to one that's more of maintenance um and that's just something that like has to happen over time because once we do have proof of stake like there isn't a proof of something that's even better than proof of stake that we want to switch to and once we have sharding well like if you want more scalability you just add more shards right like and so like there isn't um you know something

even better that you want to like make big fundamental economic upgrades to after those upgrades are done and like once you you once we have uh proof of sharding and proof of stake like we have well what i call uh functionality escape velocity right and so anything that you want on top you actually can implement with layer two protocols so there's less need to make further changes to layer one right so for those reasons i do think that the ethereum social contract is going to move toward a being a stabilizing one instead of being a directional one over time and once it does that then i expect like a lot of the bitcoin people that are more comfortable with a stabilizing social contract are just going to slowly

accept ethereum as being legitimate and i think like ethereum successfully completing its two biggest shifts so the eap 1559 and the introduction to a proof of stake and like possibly sharding as well like that's is the thing that's going to actually sort of do most of the work and uh convincing them basically it's funny to me because it seems to be the case that if given issuance policy is fixed and the security issues that result of that bitcoin is going to have to revert to its social contract to decide a direction in the future you know you talked about three possible paths for bitcoin increasing issuance um you know letting transactions essentially take a

long time to to process or reverting to some proof of stake proof of work you know so it's it's almost like it's all social consensus and social contract at the at the base layer anyway and there's no such thing as completely immutable like code that doesn't change yeah no it's definitely social contracts on the way down um and you can have different kinds of social contracts like you can have social contracts that like prescribe more rigidness like you could have a social contract that says um you know if a block cannot be verified by this zk snark verifier where the the github hash of the code is 0x5

a1c84c blah blah blah then it is not bitcoin or it is not whatever currency well like you could be really really strict and try to like define a piece of code as being the social contract and that's good for preventing change but then the problem is like well if the code even has a bug then um you know like just any kind of technical um unexpected situation is just gonna cause huge problems for your community and possibly even you know lead to a chain split and that's a cost you incur if you have an overly rigid social consensus but if you have a social contract that just says um you know we vaguely care about these values and we're just gonna do whatever we we need to do to

implement those values then that's something that's more adaptable to uh just changes in circumstances and changes in technology but that also is something that just gives participants in the ecosystem fewer guarantees and especially if participants in the ecosystem just like have different views about what it actually takes to realize those values right and so there is this trade-off like there is such a thing as social contracts being more rigid and social contracts being more loose and there's benefits from one and there's benefits from the other and i think in general like uh blockchain social contracts should be more loose when a blockchain is new and still rapidly growing and they should kind of just naturally allow themselves to evolve to

being more rigid over time as they walk in like discovers what it's for and that's perfectly fine in my uh episodes in my other podcast pov crypto with christian corollas uh we talked about uh this the subject of social contracts when he was very adamant that bitcoin is not ruled by social contract is ruled by math uh but we actually came to an agreement when we uh when when i proposed this alternative to him where i said um bitcoin social contract is to not have a social contract which kind of gets to what bitcoin wants to be which is ruled by math but still like you said it's social contracts all the way down social contracts are unavoidable the the best thing that you could do which kind of

goes back to how a zero is a good shelling point uh not the social contract do not have a social contract is the best way to not have a social contract but you still have a social contract right right right yeah that's a show clip [Laughter] yeah no it's that's definitely fascinating like i think you know we all agree that like at the end of the day there is a lot of like pretending going on like you know in reality when quantum computers come in they are going to take some very uh kind of directed emergency action to protect people's coins uh when if uh there's uh some 51 miner that just like starts spawn camping the chain they're

going to take a very directed action to change the proof of work algorithm and so there are these like things at the extremes that are obviously going to happen but like this there is this social contract of like well you know let's like not even talk about the extremes and let's sort of like maintain the mindset that these extremes do not exist and like for as long as that survives like that the idea is that this like increases the social pressure against like forcing a a a change by trying to claim that there's that there's some extreme that justifies it uh so it's interesting like it's definitely one way of uh designing a social system but i guess

we'll see how it goes vitalik i want to back up and zoom out a little bit a second ago you were talking about how the uh eth can be money uh if the community wants it to be money and i'm reminded of of actually asked you the same question back in tel aviv in early 2020 when you were at on a q a q a panel with joe lubin uh and you had said something along the lines of how like um the bitcoin could take the monetary use cases of blockchains and ethereum can take anything else and i raised my hand and i said well i'm part of this crew that really thinks that ether could be a really compelling money above and beyond uh beyond bitcoin and actually ryan was really the first person to just instantiate and it started just i'm pretty sure with the tweet ethan's money

and that meme just caught like wildfire and to me it became very very obvious that at least there's this core group of ethereum community members who believe ethan's money and that ethos money is legitimate and that was a year and a half ago and i think that the narrative around ethan's money as well as the fundamentals which is what backs up legitimacy has really matured and evolved since then and so now that we're at this like uh the early 21 2021 phase with eip1559 on the horizon and proof of stake merge around the corner do you think the world is ready to accept ether as a brand new macro store value asset alongside bitcoin in public

consciousness i would say it's definitely getting there again i think that like to get the acceptance really up there we do actually needs to finish eip 1559 and finish the merge and like get to the point where um you know the system after um all of the big changes is running and it's stable and people see that it's stable um but like it's not gonna i don't it's very hard for something to gain legitimacy while there's still this road map to like change everything um a few months into the future like i do think that we are already getting some of the benefits so like for example um you know people have been talking a lot about environmental issues of proof of

work right and like i mean i think that issue is really substantial and i think like it's there's actually a lot of different externalities that are pretty negative from a proof of work right like people focus on electricity and in some ways electricity is even one of the easiest ones to like argue against because like oh you know we have solar power no we have all of this power in far-off places where sometimes it just gets wasted already but like you have to remember that in addition to the electricity issues which uh there's also the hardware issues hardware is a huge portion of uh mining costs and last time i mean i get checked it was even something like two-thirds of them i'm not sure exactly

what the percentage is now but like hardware is ex very environmentally unfriendly to manufacturer there's also like displacement issues like work that's being done on producing these these things is being done instead of work that could be done by the computing industry to make things that benefit humanity more um you know gamers are having a hard time not getting a piece like or dealing with a reduced supply of uh pcs um and then you know with asics as well like if people weren't working on bitcoin a6 what other kind of basics would they would they be working on and proof of stake does actually solve these issues and so i do think that the uh ethereum is gaining some a kind

of like at least the beginnings of interest as some kind of alternative because people see that this is a shift that's coming and you know basically if you know it is a sort of do or die thing right like you know ethereum is going to either complete the switch or it's going to die trying um and that's uh so the fact that that roadmap exists and the fact that that road map is looking more and more credible now now that we have a running beacon chain now that we just finished the berlin hard fork and we're literally on the finish line to 1559 then after that we'll be on the finish line to the merge you know the fact that there's a hackathon

implementing the merge uh happening right now though like those things definitely are contributing and those effects will just like become slowly more and more real in people's minds over time as the event gets closer and then the event happening by itself will obviously be a really huge flip so that's going to be interesting to watch yeah people forget that legitimacy uh particularly for institutions like public blockchains and the store value assets that they might represent uh i mean this is going to take years to play out many many years and we are so early in this there is it's almost a sense of like there's no rush it would be unhealthy to me if the world suddenly adopt these things as

store value assets like overnight right this has to happen in a gradual way vitalik thank you so much for sharing all your thoughts on legitimacy i think this is going to be a fantastic mental model for people to try to understand what's going on in the space wanna end with this question it's 2021 we are in still the first half but getting close to the second half in the grand scheme of things how would you characterize this era of ethereum i think it's like the era where the ecosystem is like really growing up and starting to enter its phase of maturity and i think it's

happening in a lot of ways right like it's uh happening because uh the road the technical roadmap is uh finally at least seeing its first major pieces get finished it's happening because um scalability is uh finally looking months away from actually happening um it's um happening because we're actually seeing applications uh of uh like serious value and to not just the crypto community but to the mainstream starting to emerge uh the whole nft thing i think was uh actually really interesting for ethereum because it actually is the thing that sort of started giving ethereum some legitimacy in its own right right like before

uh the nft thing i think people mostly talked about ethereum in reference to talking about bitcoin right you know there's you know you have an article about bitcoin and then just mentioned you know oh there's also these other cryptocurrencies that exist and then there's this thing called ethereum and then there's you know this thing called cardano and then there's this thing called pickuptruck.oh and then you know you keep going but they're all the same thing they're all just these other pieces exactly um and the look with nft is like you know you actually have a reason to talk about ethereum without reference to um you know talking about its big brother um which is uh

interesting right so then even aside from nfts there's other things um happening as well right like there's just more people experimenting with eth as a payment mechanism like we saw the announcements from like i think it was paypal and some of these other uh you know big u.s companies they're not just accepting bitcoin they're accepting like bitcoin bitcoin cash ether and litecoin at the same time and like i i think that set of four is just fascinating because like legitimate like the sort of like hold over legitimacy by continuity that uh bitcoin cash and litecoin just like get that allows them to be accepted is just like so fascinating and interesting to

observe um but like seeing that starts to happen is uh really interesting and uh you know i expect that uh applications are gonna continue to mature once scalability is ready um then the applications are really going to go into overdrive and then once the eip1559 and proof-of-stake is complete including the merge being complete then um you know the ultra sounds money thing will instead of like just being a a technical goal actually becomes real and seeing that happen at the same time is just going to be really interesting for the ecosystem absolutely we are at an exciting

juncture for sure uh vitalik thank you so much for sharing this with us from a macro perspective it definitely feels like public blockchains ethereum crypto as an asset class is entering the world of legitimacy and this decade is going to be super exciting so thanks for hanging with us today thank you very much thank you david action items for the bankless community we've got some reading assignments make sure you check out vitalik's post the most important scarce resource is legitimacy that's where he goes through the details we talked about today also read one of his reddit threads this was a brain dump that he made on proof of stake versus proof of work i think after listening to the ultrasound money post a

lot of great comments from the community there too and then we've got almost like a vitalik bankless anthology brewing there are a few episodes where vitalik went through why proof of stake designing ethereum his reflections on 2020 and crypto and beyond we will include all of those resources for you in the show notes of course guys risks and disclaimers this is not financial advice is risky crypto is risky so is defy you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but thanks for joining us on the bankless journey hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain

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