Bridge Atlas - Episode 2: Paradigms | Nils Gilman and Josh Stark

Transcript

[music] Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Bridge Atlas series. I'm Christine Kim, the host of the series. And in today's episode, we are going to be discussing Ethereum through the lens of hardness and planetary thinking. If this is your very first time listening to a Bridge Atlas episode, I do encourage all of our listeners to please go back and listen to the very first episode in the series that goes over kind of the theme of the series and will give you more context for future Bridge Atlas episodes. Um, but for this episode, um, I'm very excited because I am going to be introducing our guests

now for the episode for our discussion on hardness and planetary thinking. For this episode, I am joined by Niels Gilman, the executive editor of the Burgarin Press and the deputy editor of NMA Magazine. Hi Niels. >> Hello. >> Thanks for being here. And we are also joined by Josh Stark, the who is part of the management committee at the Ethereum Foundation. Hi Josh. >> Hey Christine. Very happy to be here. >> Yes. And for some of our listeners who have been following along with summer of protocols, some of our listeners should already know you guys because you've done guest talks for summer of protocols. And um

for any of our listeners who however did not see those talks, those talks will be linked into the show notes of today's episode. And these are actually the individuals that came up with the terms that we're going to be talking about planetary thinking and and hardness. Um, so it it's kind of exciting. We have the two experts on hardness and and uh planetary thinking in the room with us. Um, so as an icebreaker though, I thought it would be really good for both Niels and Josh to for you guys to just give our listeners some context on your background and also on these terms that we're going to be discussing quite heavily in in today's episode. So Niels, do you want to go first? give a bit of

an introduction of who you are, your background, and planetary um planetary thinking. >> Sure. Thanks, Christine. I'm I'm super happy to be here and really look forward to this conversation, Josh. Um so, I'm uh I was trained as a historian. Um I got my PhD from Berkeley in American history. And a lot of my thinking about planetary stuff actually comes out of that work really 30 years ago now. Um where I was interested, this was the heyday of globalization in the 1990s. And I was writing actually about a previous um I was studying and researching a previous era of sort of big terminology which was modernization and modernization theory. And the move from modernization to globalization to planetary is kind of one of the themes

that I want to talk about today at some you get into that in some detail. But I think the trajectory that got me to planetary thinking in the last five years, I think there's, you know, there's a 20-year gap between that and I think it's important to sort of track some milestones along the way. One is that um you know when I finished my PhD, I did not go into academia. I went into tech and I spent the first six and a half years of my career working at enterprise software companies in the valley. Um and that gave me a lot I mean I didn't know very much about technology before I did that. That apprenticeship, if you want to call it that, really got me a lot deeper into thinking about the ways in which the systems of globalization are really underpinned by these really important technological

substrates and that the development of those technologies actually as much as anything people think about in politics or in the realm of ideas is what really drives change over time. Um, and from there I've had a couple of other stops in my career. I spent seven years doing consulting. A lot of it was with intelligence agencies thinking about really long range future stuff and thinking about not sort of tactical things concerning the war on terror for example but thinking about things like what does the rise of China mean for the world for the United States what does climate change mean as a security problem over time and questions of that sort um and those kind of confluence of concerns about the sort of role of big ideas the role of technology and the sort of thinking about the plan the global challenges is really what led me

to thinking about planetary stuff in the last five years uh when I've been at the Begrron Institute which is a a research and think tank based in Los Angeles. Um and basically just to give we'll get into it in a lot more detail but just to give the one sentence um summary on it planetary thinking is about thinking about the flows of things that go around the world that are not things that humans are intentionally moving around the world. Right? So globalization is about the flows of things that we move intentionally. Money, goods, services, ideas, bits, bites, those are all the things that we talk about when we talk about globalization. the planetaries, all the other things that are flowing around the world that are being affected by humans but aren't necessarily things aren't things that humans are intentionally moving around. So those could be things like you know the carbon

cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the space junk, the oceanic plastics, etc., etc. All of those kinds of things um are planetary phenomena as opposed to global phenomena which are human-based things. Um and those planetary phenomena lack any systems today that are effectively governing them. We've got a lot of systems to govern the flows of global goods and services and things like that, but we have very few effective systems today to manage planetary challenges. So that's that's the story in a nutshell. >> Well, perhaps one of the systems that we'll talk about um later in this episode will be Ethereum. I'm very excited to talk a little bit on u how the Ethereum protocol might play a role in in this area and field of study. Um

but before we get into that uh Josh can you share um also more about your background your e area of expertise and also the definition that you have brought to this term hardness in studying protocols >> Christine and thanks Nels for the introduction um so I'm Josh I've worked in the Ethereum system for a long time now um a very long time ago I was a lawyer um so I went to law school uh and worked for a year at a you know big firm in downtown Toronto where I live. Um, and didn't love it. Left and found my way into this uh, wacky world. Um, and I think that background as a lawyer has definitely influenced how I've thought about and uh, reasoned about crypto and

blockchains and Ethereum over time. Um, you know, the idea of smart contracts made complete sense to me immediately that like of course you should be able to do complex conditional logic in code if you can have, you know, identities and assets in in a single platform. Um over the years I've done a few different things. Uh I co-ounded a company called ETH global that runs large Ethereum hackathons around the world. Uh in 2017 also a company called L4 that was doing very early uh L2 R&D. Um before rollups before plasma there was the idea of state channels and we would do all Ethereum applications in those. Uh it was a stop on the way of the R&D journey to where we are today but was not the beall endall solution. Uh, and then I started working at the EF in late 2020

where I've been part of the leadership or management team ever since. Um, so to jump into the hardness piece, I mean, you know, my my day job isn't uh, you know, kind of writing and thinking about these things, but like throughout this journey, there's always been something that bothered me about the way that we talked and thought about blockchains. And it's not really how we talk and think about blockchains, but it's how we think about uh uh other things that are similar to blockchains in some way. So you know the the basic story is that blockchains come on the scene and suddenly they can do things like really in practice that previously really only institutions could do right in most people's experience with money uh today is in the form of fiat currency and you

know what what makes that money real is the existence of a set of institutions that you know give it durability you know give it reliability you know make it possible for people to use it and suddenly we have a a network piece of software that can do something that in practice people are already using like money. Uh the other thing that we can suddenly do are contracts, right? Um, it really, you know, started to become true in the, you know, mid2010s that you could do basically a complex financial contract of some kind on Ethereum that previously like the only way anyone ever did that was using institutions, using law and and legal contracts, which at the end of the day like only matter or

exist if there's a set of institutions behind them that give them, you know, real durability, real form, real function. So if those things are true, then there must be something that blockchains and institutions have in common. You know, these aren't like opposite systems that have nothing to do with each other. Um, and often we talk that way because we would say that one is centralized and the other is decentralized and so they're opposites. But even though they're using different means, there's clearly something they have in common. But we had no name for that. We have no word for that. Um so that like that is what I'm trying to get at with this idea of hardness. And to give a quick definition uh the way I talk about it is that hardness is the like the capability of a system to make

a specific outcome very likely to be true in the future usually for the purpose of some kind of social coordination. So let me give you some examples using that terminology. Um, I'm confident in the specific outcome that, you know, the assets currently held in my Ethereum wallet will still be there a year or two or five from now. As long as I don't, you know, lose the keys, they'll still be there. And the reasons that that claim is very likely to be true have to do with what Ethereum is. That, you know, there are certain cryptographic guarantees that are offered um that mean that no one can, you know, take my private key from me easily. uh there's a set of economic incentives built into the protocol that create strong assurances that the system will keep running into the future. Uh

you know, Ethereum is a source of hardness that gives hardness to the claim, the the outcome, the expectation that my money will still be there. Um an institutional example would be that I'm also confident that the money that I hold in my, you know, retirement savings account um at a Canadian bank uh will still be there in 5 years. And the reason that outcome is likely to be true is again it's about a set of institutions that there's a legal system that governs my relationship with the bank. The bank itself is an institution that has you know certain safeguards and is likely to be there and ultimately those assets are covered by the CDI CDIC in Canada which is analogous to the FDIC in the US where the federal government you know guarantees some amount of your assets are always insured. These are two

different sources of hardness and they're very different in how they're constructed, but ultimately the thing that they're doing is very very similar. Um >> Josh Josh, can I ask you a question about hardness which I by the way let me just say right up front when I when I saw your lecture on this um it's rare for me to like get introduced to totally new concept and I'm like whoa then you see it everywhere. So I think it's a great concept. One thing I think would be really helpful especially since you're I didn't actually know that your background was as a lawyer or as a trained as a lawyer. What's the difference? So lawyers talk a lot about um rely reliability or relying on people, right? That's like a term of art in in the law is that if I rely on you, you know, reliance, how is how is

hardness different from reliance or reliability? [laughter] >> You're pushing me back into my law school days here. I'll have to quickly remember [laughter] >> um I mean the basic idea as I recall it and you know this is not legal advice talk to a real lawyer but you know reliance in a contract is the idea that um you know if you have a relationship with somebody and you are in reliance on them meaning like it's clear from your behavior and your communication that there's you know there's an expectation that you will really deliver these goods because I need them to build my building then that can you know uh that is a factor in a court deciding Is there a contract and what's the nature of that contract? So, it's kind of a a position of through the behavior of people, you

know, is one acting in reliance on another. So, the way I'd contrast that with hardness is that um you know, reliance and similar ideas maybe of of trust are uh they're about the the mental states of people and they're about the behavior of people and how we like kind of uh perceive or or expect things to go. Maybe that's the behavior of a person. Maybe it's something else. But they're really about like almost an internal mental state or a social relationship. Hardness is trying to get away from that in a way and like fill a different uh niche in our language. It's a property that a system has, right?

Like Ethereum has hardness whether or not anyone ever uses it, right? It might be true or it might be not. The system really will keep running. Um, you know, a legal institution can have hardness whether or not I believe it does. You know, if I'm someone that's like deeply skeptical of all governance systems and I would never, you know, sign a contract with somebody, I might have that belief. I might not act in reliance on them. I might not trust the government, but it might be independently true that this system as a whole really is very likely to, you know, behave in a certain way and have a certain level of reliability.

So that's that's how I would compare those two ideas. >> I have another question about hardness. I think that hardness really gets to this At the crux of hardness is trust. Like how confident can you be that these institutions in your life that seem immovable are really going to stay in the future? And the context like the global context in which we're having this conversation. There's just like a massive erosion of trust in our world for institutions like universities, democracy as a whole, governments and it seems so wild to me. science. And it seems so wild to me that we could even

fathom such a new technology like Ethereum could possibly have more hardness than these institutions, these other man-made institutions that we thought was going to be hard, but is is breaking down as we speak. Um, I I'd love your guys's take on I guess like the factors that are contributing to the erosion of trust that we see in our world and are those factors also the same factors that are eventually that are that Ethereum is susceptible to to being eroded there Ethereum's hardness being eroded over time. Um maybe Niels do you want to start us off on like the biggest contributing factors of erosion

of trust in our day? Um because at that I I I worry about that and also in the context of like how much can we trust in this protocol this very new protocol technically speaking of of Ethereum. >> Yeah. We'll get we'll get into we'll get into the the trust for Ethereum in a minute. But I think you know just to preview something I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more in a minute. I think one of the reason why there's been a lot of interest and attraction to Ethereum is that, you know, it's a it's a beacon of hope for an alternative model of trust building and trust management in a context where traditional institutions are in severe decline and decay. But to just talk about historically how we got to that

point, I mean just let's talk about some data. If you go to Pew, Pew has been Pew Research, the uh the polling outfit. They've been doing polls on standard questions since the late 1960s, early 1970s on trust in a whole variety of institutions in the United States. I don't know whether they do it in other countries, but like there's similar data for other countries. Um in almost every single institution in American life, there's been a very steady secular decline in how much trust people have in those institutions. you know, big businesses, uh, you know, local government, state government, federal government, the judiciary, um, uh, you know, the churches, the universities, science. Um, and so it's

been a really steady process of decline in in trust. Uh, and there are inflection points that I think are important. Um, there actually was a huge decline in trust in the US military in the 1970s. Um, and then it bounced back quite a lot. Um actually it's interesting that in the US the two institutions that are according to this data that have not experienced they've exper experienced some decline in trust but not nearly as much as other institutions are the military and small businesses. Almost every other institution they're pulling on has been just straight downhill lines. Um and I think it's interesting to ask why are those two institutions exempt not exempt but like relatively immunized from the decline in trust. I I have a hypothesis

about this that I don't know how to test, let alone prove, but I think it's something about accountability. Um, >> so I think that there's a sense that the elites who run many of the institutions in our lives, um, the churches, the government, the universities, the big corporations are essentially immunized from any consequences from bad actions. um the exception, but not if you're a small business person and not if you're in the military. I mean, top military leaders get fired on a regular basis. Trump's been firing lots of them. Obama fired lots of them, right? Like people get fired because they fail at their task at the top level. So the elites that are in charge of these institutions are

accountable. And also obviously, you know, if you're a soldier or in the Navy or whatever, you're you're you're at personal risk. I mean, you're taking on real risks that generates respect that people have and that redowns to the trust people have in the institutions. People are putting their lives on the line for these institutions. I mean, I I don't know the data, but I bet people still trust firemen a lot, right? For the same kinds of reasons. People are putting, you know, putting their lives on the line for these for the for the for the mission of the organization. um for all these other institutions there's a real sense that the elites are in many cases self-deing but in almost all cases when they screw up they don't personally face any consequences and I think that has led to a huge decline in trust and

so I think one of the reasons why and Josh maybe I don't know if you'll agree with this but like um my sense is that one of the reasons why people are attracted to things like blockchain based services is they're like we don't have to rely on like self-deing elites in order for these systems to work. Like these systems, you know, have a a backing of code that people can't undermine. That's of course not totally true, but like um at least in principle, their design is set up to be relatively uncorruptible. Um, and I think that that's one reason why many people are attracted to them is they're alienated from the from the legacy institutions and they look to things like Ethereum as providing a more

um reliable in the colloquial sense sense of trust. I don't know if you agree with that, Josh, but like that's kind of my take on it. [snorts] >> Yeah. Yeah, I think I do. Like I think you know that has always been at the core of the the story that began with Bitcoin of what this ecosystem is trying to do. um you know like can we create systems that aren't vulnerable to to capture to corruption to corrosion that rely as little as possible on any you know specific institution that we're never putting all of our eggs in one basket um I think that you know that is always going to be at the soul of what crypto is about and what Ethereum is about um and I think you know succeeding in that vision is still something that

you know uh we're all working on like in the case of Bitcoin you know there's a very contentious debate going on right now around, you know, what the the people that maintain Bitcoin core, the like the primary or only Bitcoin client should do. Um, within the Ethereum ecosystem. Obviously, there's many client teams that, you know, don't always agree with each other. Uh, the EF has its own role in, you know, helping kind of steward and coordinate the ecosystem. And it's on the minds of all these people and organizations, you know, how do we make sure that the system doesn't depend on us so that the the bus factor is low? you know, if if a person goes away or an institution goes away or a company goes away, it must be true that Ethereum will continue um despite all that. So, I definitely agree

that's part of the appeal. I think the distinction I'd make is that I mean, coming back to also your initial question, Christine, um I I don't think I'm an expert by any means in you know, sentiment on institutions globally. Um but I'd make a distinction between um where people are losing confidence institutions because they're losing confidence in maybe like moral legitimacy or you know can this institution uh function well and make good decisions. You know, I think that's part of the story you have around universities where as part of the culture war, different people are losing confidence in just like is this a morally just institution that I should, you know, give legitimacy and treat as like a a neutral educational institution in our society. And I think that's

different than the more narrow thing of losing confidence in just like the hardness of the institution, right? Like when you think about a justice system for example, you might lose confidence that like the judges will apply the law fairly or make good decisions. But then you also might just wonder well like if I sign a contract today, you know, will I even be able to enforce it? Like is the basic durability that I expect from the legal system going to be there or not? And with a justice system, those things are very intertwined because, you know, the purpose of this thing is both to make, you know, pseudooral legal judgments and also to be able to reliably do that into the future so that we can, you know, actually have these systems. So I think there are they are different things but maybe the point

with Ethereum is that it's it's maybe a bad thing and when we're thinking about how to build our civilization that you know if a culture war happens and people stop politically agreeing with an institution that that also means we lose a source of hardness that governs really basic stuff like financial contracts like kind of part of the beauty of you know doing this with blockchains with Ethereum is that you know um Ethereum isn't going to I don't know. It's it's not an institution, you know, it's it's not like a a building with a bunch of people in it that might hire the wrong people. It's a network. It's a piece of software. And so it's still going to adjudicate the code of the smart contract regardless of, you know, who

works on what client or or what have you. And so it's less likely that confidence in Ethereum's hardness um would be uh debilitated or impacted by more like culture, social level stuff. That's a really interesting nuance that you point out, Josh, because as we were talking about trust, not hardness. We mentioned a couple of ideas around evaluating trust and measuring the erosion of trust. Niels, you mentioned accountability. Josh, you mentioned the bus factor in in your sense of the nuanced definition of hardness, which doesn't necessarily tie to, I guess, like the

moral beliefs or alignment of values. Are there specific evaluations of hardness that differs from trust? Um I know Josh I want you to mention a little bit about this like trust experience index that you had mentioned um in protocol studies there's also uh different measures and frameworks like the Kafka index dimensions of sufficiency to try and evaluate like the hardness of a protocol and I'm wondering if there's if there's more effective or less effective ways that you I think uh

really get at the heart of like seeing if Ethereum really is hard over time or if there's like changes in the level of hardness that might be different from measuring trust in Ethereum just like general social trust. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think they are they are different things. Um I guess to give the the Zuma big picture here. So Christine's referencing another essay I wrote called um introducing trust experience or something like that. And the idea of trust experience is that like it is an analog to UX. So you know a user experience is about like how does a person interact with this thing? You know what is their experience using it?

Can they you know interact with the interface to achieve their objectives or not and how does that work? Uh trust experience is the idea of like what is the relationship someone has to like coming to the point of of trusting something like when someone is let's say like walking up to a bridge and they're thinking do I trust that bridge to get me across this chasm or not? You know they're looking at various things. They might see if other people have walked across it recently. They might kind of lean down and expect like are the ropes frayed or not. Uh maybe they're an engineer and they have specific spec knowledge or not. Um that is the trust experience of that bridge. And there's similarly a trust experience for choosing to interact with your legal system uh or choosing to interact with a smart contract. So trust experience and

hardness to me are kind of two opposite ends of a spectrum. One is again about this mental state of like how do people relate to systems that may or may not be trustworthy. And then hardness is like a property of a system that it has or doesn't that you know make it a candidate for trustworthiness or not. So there's kind of two different ends of it. And so how you measure them are very different. On the trust experience side of things, you might look at um you know I guess by measurement I mean like how do you quantify um how people do this or what is the level of trust and again it's about psychological factors or who they look to for examples or what knowledge they bring to the table. And on the uh hardness side I think that is trickier. I'm not sure that there is one

quantifiable metric for hardness. Um you know people will measure the decentralization of blockchains in some kind of basic naive ways of like how many nodes are there or across how many entities is the stake spread or you know what are the financial penalties for different things. Um, we could also look at, you know, within that system, uh, you know, what are the asurances you have about specific smart contracts? What are the asurances you have about the cryptographic primitives that are being used in these systems? Are they quantum secure or not? You know, there's there's a lot of surface area to look at when you think about like is Ethereum hard or not. I think it's analogous to how we talk about security. There's probably like a I forget the exact wording, but there's an adage in, you

know, computer security that's something like, you know, there's no such thing as just security. there is security against specific threats and so you can evaluate you know empirically and quantifiably maybe whether something is secure against a specific threat model or threat actor um but it's very difficult to say in the abstract is something secure against every possible threat actor or threat model and I think hardness is kind of similar you really do need to think about your use case and what like attacks or like failures you're worried about and then evaluate that specifically >> I just can I just build on that because I think that it's interesting to use that um the the trust versus hardness to think about legacy institutions too, right? So Christine, you brought up um

universities, right? Universities are actually incredibly hard institutions in Josh's terms. I mean, if you look at like, you know, various people have put together lists of the oldest institutions in the world. there's a Catholic church, but like if you look at the like 500 oldest institutions in the world and there's always a question of whether like the thing that we're looking at in 2025 is actually the same thing as was there in 1600 but you know Oxford you know a huge percentage of these things are universities like Oxford and Harvard and Cambridge and Bolognia and of course they're they're they're performing very different functions now than they did two 200 years ago let alone 600 years ago right but they are they are hard in the sense that they continue to do many

of the same things. They have students. They produce degrees. People come there when they're in their late teens, right? There's there's a kind of a a rhythm that they've managed to sustain over time. Obviously, in each one of those cases, there's been years when they shut down because there was a war or a plague or whatever, but they've they've resuscitated themselves. What I think we're seeing right now is not that these institutions are losing hardness, specifically universities. I think what they're doing is they're massively losing trust. I'm I'm totally confident that there's going to be, you know, something with red bricks and IVs that's handing out degrees in Cambridge, Massachusetts that's called Harvard University in 20 years and 50 years and assuming it's not underwater in a

hundred years. Um, I'm not that confident that people are people have lost a lot of trust in that as an institution. Like there's a huge amount of respect that has disappeared from Harvard as an institution. used to be, you know, going to Harvard was like the defining thing that made you an elite in America, right? Um, and I think that has imploded catastrophically because of the things that both of you were referencing. And so I think that you can have a trust loss while maintaining institutional hardness. And and so I think it's it is a really useful distinction that you're making there, Josh.

>> Yeah, it it really is. I mean one last question regarding this and then I want to shift the second half of our conversation to talking more about some of the planetary challenges that we have and and blockchains in the context of it which is definitely related to what we've been talking about. But if an institution stays hard, if a protocol stays hard through the decades and through the centuries, but trust erodess, does hardness matter?

[laughter] [snorts] >> I I think that's exactly the right question. Um I uh a thing I I feel like I say all the time is that you know it is not enough for Ethereum to be decentralized and secure and have these good properties. The world has to know about it. Um you know people can only use something that they can understand. And that was part, you know, that's part of my motivation for, you know, writing these ideas down is that I don't know how effective it's been, but um, you know, I think we we need ways of bridging that gap of of showing people that, you know, crypto and blockchains and Ethereum are not something that's, you know, wacky and terrifying and strange and alien. It's actually it's it's it's an engine produc producing one of the oldest things that we have as as

humans. like a the root bedrock of civilization is the ability to coordinate and trust each other and this is a way of doing this with different properties and at a different scale and uh to do different things but it's it's not alien it's it's not it's not strange it is it is something very very fundamental uh and I think the more that people can get that idea um the more it is easy to look at these systems and think about how you can trust them and in what circumstances and and actually use them. So yeah, it's not enough um if a tree falls in the forest, etc., etc.

Like we really do need to tell the world about the the awesome thing that our community has built uh and help them understand it. >> Yeah, you know, just responding to that, Josh, I um I'm not part of the blockchain community really at all. Um and so I'm observer. I'm a friendly observer from outside, but like I've I know only enough to be dangerous about this topic. But it seems to me that there's two big challenges that um the change well [laughter] two that I see from a person who sits outside of it is the first one is that like it's still really technically hard for people who aren't like really technically deep to understand exactly

how it works. And I think that that creates for for non-technical people it's a leap of faith to a large extent. >> Yeah. And that particularly so like if we could if somehow there could be a way to make it like way you know the the UX you know could become super duper easy in the way that like I don't know the first internet browsers made accessing the internet like way way easier right or the iPhone made mobility you know mobile internet way way easier to deal with I think I think you know we await that moment in the blockchain world and I hope it arrives. Um, and the second problem is in the meanwhile there's a whole bunch of grifters and scammers that have attached themselves to the world, right? And not not

Ethereum, but like you know and and that and that means that like unfortunately there's been this crowding in of you know people who just use it to scam basically and like you know or to you know do illicit transactions or whatever it is. I'm thinking more about the cryptocurrency end of things than you know the smart contract end of things necessarily but like that's where that's where the public imagination about these technologies unfortunately has been colonized. Now, of course, a lot of people are like, "Oh my god, it's my it's my get-richqu scheme opportunity, right?" But I don't think that's a great space for sustaining long-term commitment to it, unfortunately. And I say this I don't say this as a criticism. I say this more as an analysis. I don't know how you'd react

to any of that. >> Oh, yeah. I I mean, I completely agree. Like I think we should be realistic about the the situation that we're in as an ecosystem right now. And you know the way that like I think about these things and the way I talk about them and you know what excites me and still makes me passionate about this space is you know pretty pretty opposite to what a lot of people you know outside looking in see as what this is. Um and you know there's lots of reasons for that. You know it's a permission system so anyone can lay claim to it. It's a it's a system where there's a lot of financial applications which means that you know it's a space for extremely financialized motives. Um you know there's been a various kind of legal and regulatory gaps that have

allowed you know bad actors to flourish. Like there's all sorts of contributing factors I can name but it doesn't change [clears throat] the fact that there is that big reputational deficit. Um I do believe it it can change. Um you know I think one I don't have the the stats in front of me but you know if you look at a graph of like smart contract hacks uh in DeFi and the Ethereum ecosystem um it's really come down right there there absolutely was a period of time a few years ago where these things happened every few months um but you know there really have been improvements in the you know smart contract standards the security practices that firms use you know the developer experience that makes it easy to do these things securely. It really has gotten better and smart contract security is much less of an

issue right now than it was a few years ago. >> Totally. >> But there's still massive improvements being made in, you know, helping people through their wallets avoid uh, you know, scams, just having the basic education of knowing what to do. There's, you know, an almost infinite amount of work to be done. Um, one thing I often think about is that, uh, you know, you're the historian, so you can tell me this comparison is way off base, but uh, there was a time when California was a space of, you know, never do wells and a lot of, you know, scams and crime and get-richqu schemes from the gold rush to everything else. And certainly as a as a community, it didn't have the best reputation. It was a place you went to get rich quick, uh, maybe fail, maybe leave. Um but over time you know that

kind of wild west did turn into an economy that you know did change and is now like a a home of like a lot of uh vibrant uh you know economic political social everything else. So I guess my hope for Ethereum is to be a little bit like California a bit wild in its early days but gets the act together and becomes you know one of the largest economies on earth and a place that people from all over the world uh can come to. I love the outside perspective um mills. I think that is really at the crux of what bridge Atlas is about. Um and not just outside perspectives on Ethereum, but turning the tables of Ethereum

perspectives on some outside or seemingly outside issues. Um, so I think we should talk a little bit about some of the planetary challenges that our world is facing and discuss how potentially Ethereum is um can can be used um or its place of relevance at all. Uh, one of the planetary challenges that I read up on and that you have been talking quite a bit about Nils, is this idea that the diplomatic machinery um, overseeing these technological breakthroughs, especially the ones around AI, which I'm hoping in the series we'll also be able to talk more

deeply on AI. Um, that some of this diplomatic machinery is just not enough to keep up with these advancements. um can you give us kind of like the give us the intro to this planetary challenge and then we can start discussion and go from there. >> Right. So let's how do I cut into this? Um I I guess the best way to maybe think about this is that you know diplomacy uh as it's traditionally understood is basically the way different national governments talk to each other, right? Um and it used to be that you know there's foreign minister and they he talks to the foreign minister in another country and that's how that's how diplomacy happens right and you know when that breaks down you end up at a war and so you don't want that um and

traditional diplomacy as it evolved historically basically in Europe um in the you know early modern era as nation states arose um was um you know the the protocol language was French and what you were expected to know was the general history of border disputes and um you know you know the flows of people and the religious disputes in different kinds of countries and you know those kinds of general knowledges were what diplomats were trained to do. um up up through the into the 1980s, if you weren't fluent in French, you could not be a diplomat in the in the world,

right? Um the United Nations ended up using mainly English. And this was a huge fight. And the only reason why it won is because we put it in the US and because the UN was set up after the US won the war and the French were kind of I mean they also were on the winning side, but they were not in a real position to dominate that, right? like f you know that was but that was the kind of training that diplomats had and then you know starting in the 1970s which is when the term globalization really begins to emerge to describe the integration of you know economies across borders.

People realize that actually our diplomats need to understand different things, right? They need to like actually understand trade flows. They need to understand some have have some basic economic knowledge. They need to understand how, you know, international finance settlement works, how do international bond markets work. Like if you actually want to understand how countries are relating to each other in an era of globalization, you have to have some basics of economics and finance. And so that becomes starting in the 70s and really gets fully institutionalized in the 80s a core part of the training of diplomats. So like if you go to any foreign service school anywhere in the world today you're expected to like have some basic knowledge and when I say basic you're expected to take a couple of classes you know you don't necessarily need to know how to do like complicated you know

either spreadsheets or regression analyses of various things but you got to be fluent in the language of international financial flows. Um I believe that we're now emerging in an era where something similar is about to happen with respect to these planetary challenges. If you're not, if you don't know something about carbon accounting, if you don't know something about, you know, what the, you know, what what's going on with the governance of outer space in terms of where all the satellites are going and what the how the debris is being monitored and handled. If you don't know something about the technology, and we'll get into this more, that's being used to actually assess what's going on in the oceans, in the atmospheres, in the at the poles. If you don't know some if you don't have some basic scientific and technical knowledge about the way those things

work, you're going to be essentially illiterate for dealing with the biggest challenges that I think we're going to face throughout the rest of this century. And so I you know one of the initiatives I've been working on is to actually I've been working with some of the foreign service schools here in the United States and also some of them in Europe to like you know actually start to think about like what would a curriculum look like that would give that kind of knowledge um both at the technical level and understanding actually the systems and this gets this will get us to the Ethereum question like what are actually the systems that we are building that allow us to know about what's happening with you know the perturbation of these planetary flows.

So that's that's the basic issue. >> The time is now. We're going to talk about the systems now. Josh, that this is the moment. [laughter] Um what are your views on either this particular planetary challenge around the diplomatic machinery um that needs to be updated or you know planetary challenges like it where Ethereum as a global technology could be you know the adjudicator potentially of these horizontal and vertical global conflicts.

>> Yeah. I mean I will say again like I don't I certainly don't feel like I'm an expert in you know your domain nil. So I think my ideas are probably uh naive at the very least. Um but there is some you know there are there is interesting work being done here and there are some like big vision possibilities maybe that that are interesting. Um I mean one thing that uh where we've seen uh crypto intersect with these bigger challenges is um around I guess like you know giving people tools to coordinate um in you know environments that are you know maybe authoritarian or there like other limitations on you know how they can uh participate in governance. Um there's a this great project called Rarero in the

Ethereum ecosystem and they've built something called this is called freedom tool and it's been deployed in in Russia, Iran and Georgia. Um, and it's basically a system that uses um, zero knowledge proofs so that basically anyone can take their national ID and prove to this system that yes, they really are a Russian citizen or an Iranian citizen and then without revealing any information about who they are, their identity, they can prove that and vote in a in an online poll. And it's been used by opposition activists to, you know, be able to kind of provably say to the world, you know, we pulled 200,000 people in Moscow and, you know, here's what they think. And, you know, it's been used to, uh, kind of contest legitimacy of of elections. So,

I think there's something there in terms of giving people tools that, you know, uh, have once been limited to national borders, um, but with a little more durability, right? Like an online poll is one thing, but an online poll secured by Ethereum or a zero knowledge proof proves that these are not bots. These are real citizens with real opinions. I think that's something different and novel. And if you want to extend that idea further, um something I've uh said before and I'll say again is I think the first time that a billion humans ever vote on something, whether it's consequential or not, it'll happen through Ethereum. Um you know, the the current record is 600 and some million in the most recent Indian election. Um but you know a billion people AC all around the world I think the only way

you could legitimately do that and provably do that is the combination of zero knowledge proofs to prove uh identity and uniqueness um and you know Ethereum to bring all the boats together. So I think you know imagine a world where we can regularly you know pull the entire global citizenry on important issues that seems like it could be a really powerful starting point or primitive that is used for some of these planetary institutions that that you're interested in setting up. >> Yeah. I mean I I I think let me just extend that a little bit. So in my in the world of planetary thinking, there's a big debate um about people who are more on the end of like

what we need to do is build institutions. A lot of those people are kind of committed to legacy institutions at the United Nations that I think are not going to possibly work. You know, my my proposals have been more about building new kinds of institutions. But then there's another whole poll which of of the debate which I think is really important to emphasize. Um and I kind of try to straddle both end of these because I think it's a both and which is how much is technology and technological systems actually going to be the de facto way in which global you know planetary systems get governed right so you know just an example that I think is really interesting on this and I'll get to an Ethereum point in a moment but like people have set up um sensor arrays in the St. Lawrence Seaway, you probably

know about this, Josh, but also in the Santa Barbara Channel in California that are detecting where there are whales um in these channels. And you know, whales running into ships cause a lot of damage to ships often are fatal to the whales. These are really bad things. They're now set sending down sensor arrays in these channels that are whale heavy and ship heavy. And the sensors go directly to the guidance systems of the ships, right? I mean there's there's an intermediate layer you know um transmitted through satellites but like basically they immediately tell the ships this is where the whales are and redirect the ships automatically right so the ships are automatically being redirected based on data that's being harvested from planetary creatures like whales in this case and there's a

million other examples of things like that where it's essentially almost a cybernetic system that's being set up right now and it's very clear to me that many many many planetary challenges are going to be primarily dealt with not through institutions, you know, with marble columns and people making decisions, but more through automated systems that are able to, you know, directly impact the inter the the interface layer between the the potentially human perturbation systems and the underlying systems that we want to like preserve or listen to in some way or another. So, I think that's a huge debate is about where do you put your emphasis? Is it more on the technology end or is it more on the human institutions end? And my my answer is a totally of both and personally, but

there's a lot of people who debate are in this world who are way more on one end of that than the other. Um I I I I try to track to the middle of that. I think in that context, the use of Ethereum, um there's a million things that can be useful for this. Some of the ones are are the I I love the examples you gave Josh of like allowing more people who maybe are currently excluded from having a voice in various kinds of you know decisions to be able to express their voice despite being institutionally suppressed essentially. great example. But there's also a ton of other things where, you know, one project I've been tangentially involved in is a project to actually attach value to guerrillas in um in Rwanda

so that they actually have value themselves that they then can through, you know, through Ethereum actually pay game wardens to protect that, right? So they actually become monetized. they're able to essentially issue payments and this creates a financial incentive for people not to poach them but actually to preserve them and to create ecoturism around them that will actually make their lives better and more sustainable. So there's all sorts of ways in which you could you know use the chain to like actually create a more multiecies integration that I think is incredibly valuable.

I have a question for you Josh uh regarding Ethereum in the context of this discussion. I see one challenge as and I'm going to practice some of my protocol study terms here. Um I see so planetary thinking I see as this very meta highle kind of very it's almost hard to really like talk about it in specifics and then some of these planetary challenges as like the middle meo layer of like okay well like practically what are some of the challenges that we can really like wrap our heads around and Ethereum being kind of the micro like technical detail that like only in execution is it just

like a matter of like okay like do we use how do we practically do this and like should we use Ethereum or another chain or it just it seems like it's hard sometimes in conversations of like what really um some of these bigger highle topics to talk and bring up Ethereum because Ethereum feels like such a small minor like technical detail in the grand scheme of of really and it really kind of like adds as an afterthought when you're actually doing the implementation or execution of a solution. Um, can you talk Josh about the work of the institutional secretariat at the Ethereum Foundation trying to elevate like Ethereum researchers or developers and bring Ethereum into conversations at

a higher level? Um, I feel like, yeah, it it too often maybe crypto and blockchain is very much thought of as kind of like these these like implementation details that, you know, don't really have a place in these like larger conversations. Um, so I'd like to hear your >> Yeah. Yeah. work. >> Yeah, I can talk about that. I have another thought too. Um, yeah. I mean implementation detail or sometimes even worse like a a solution in search of a problem you know where like back to the very early crypto days where people just like well we just we'll just put a blockchain on it and a blockchain will magically solve all the difficult intransigent problems of this thing and I think today we're at a more mature point where people understand a lot

better what this actually offers um yeah I can say a bit about this is a a new team at the EF the institution secretariat and basically the idea of the team is to um uh build like be a touch point and build relationships with uh certain kinds of institutions. So governments uh large multinational organizations you know this kind of captures a lot of our historic work with uh UNICEF and the UN. Um most recently uh you probably saw the news that the nation Bhutan is is building their national ID system on top of Ethereum and that was also the product of you know kind of a long series of engagements and education uh with institutions in Bhutan. Um and that's the basic idea. Can I get can I pause you for one second? I feel like Bhutan

does not get enough love. I mean, obviously it's a small country, but those guys are so interesting on so many different levels and they're so innovative. I mean, the gross national happiness thing hasn't really taken off, but like like it's just such a great I love what they do there. I've never been there. >> They're trying things. >> Yeah, they're trying. >> Isn't their history extremely rot though with like a lot of civil conflict, authoritarian regimes? I don't really know that much about the history of Baton. I mean, it might be. I mean, most places are, right? So, it probably is.

>> You would be the expert in the room, D, honestly. [laughter] >> But that's so cool, Josh. I didn't know that. That's awesome. >> Yeah, it's it's a very cool project. And, you know, it's still early days, but these are the kind of things that build on themselves over many years. Um, so that's the idea of the team, and it's a little more targeted. You know, it's really looking for specific opportunities to to make a big difference. Um you know there's many touch points of course in the broader Ethereum ecosystem that many governments organizations institutions are talking to. Um I think the sorry the the broader question was about you know maybe how um you know is a theory just an implementation detail and maybe one like kind of pivot I can add to this is that I think there's also you know there's a

there's a kind of diplomacy that happens within the Ethereum ecosystem that is interesting on its own sake and I think will grow and become more important and and maybe also influence other forms of diplomacy right I mean the most basic level of this is you know relation ationships between different chain ecosystems. You know, like a big, you know, topic and debate in the Ethereum ecosystem is what should the relationship be between Ethereum L1 and different chains that are, you know, maybe rollups, other forms of L2s or just other chains that, you know, have a bridge and a relationship with this ecosystem. um there's a kind of you know diplomacy and exchange that happens there as you know people are trying to

figure out what their priorities are and how to balance maybe financial incentives and the values of their ecosystem and the value of their community. Um that's a very live thing that's happening right now. Um both within the ecosystem and then how those chain ecosystems relate to each other. And it's you know it's it's different in many ways because again there's you know not always just one organization like a like a a state department or something. There might be many. Um the uh kind of the the ground that we're working on and what people are trying to prioritize is very different than other kinds of organizations. But if you kind of scale this out to a world where there might be, you know, thousands of rollups and where they have different relationships

to Ethereum L1 and some of those rollups are, you know, built and maintained by large financial institutions or even governments, um, that starts to become a new space or a new domain for what is, you know, maybe effectively some kind of diplomacy in terms of what are these relations relationships going to look like and, you know, how do we keep this overall system interoperable. So I think that's like an emerging thing that we are seeing the beginning of today uh that will only kind of grow in scope and scale and importance over the next five ten years. >> Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, just building on that point, I think another area, one of the things that Ethereum could be really crucial for enabling is essentially um negotiations that happen out you know, I

don't want to say outside of because that sounds like it's hostile in some cases it might be, but like beyond governmental organizations, right? I mean, I think there's all sorts of opportunities that are emerging and we're already seeing of like, you know, subnational diplomacies between cities, right? Uh or corporations working with governments, local governments or national governments or just corporations making decisions together. Um and a lot of times if we break, you know, one of one of the other things that's happening that I think is interesting, Josh, in this context is, you know, we're seeing the emergence of kind of hemispheric stacks that are increasingly separate from one another.

like there's a China stack, there's a US stack, maybe there's going to be a Europe stack or an India stack and like the interoperability between these things is already beginning to break down. I think you know Ethereum has a huge opportunity there. You know, your voting example was one of them, but like there's a whole bunch of other areas where they can create bridges between more and more closed off ecosystems. Um, and so I think there's a lot of opportunities there for you guys to be um, the enabler of um, postnational diplomacy is the way I might describe it, right? Like it's like not necessarily centered on the nation state. It can be centered on a whole bunch of other different kinds of actors who want to do coordination and don't know how to do it and are maybe blocked

by nation states from doing it in one way or another or are just struggling with collective action problems. I think all of those are areas where I think you guys have huge opportunities. >> Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, one uh coming back to I think an an early theme of this conversation, you know, this is a world that's feeling more and more fragmented um more and more divisive and torn apart and and bulcanized. Uh and one thing that uh I love about Ethereum and like inspires me to keep working on it is that Ethereum is one of kind of the few trends that's going in the other direction. Uh that we are building this platform that has real durability, real real heft, real hardness that you know um uh people everywhere in the world are

building on you know both large Chinese multinationals build on Ethereum and large American corporates build on Ethereum. Um there's few other things maybe that you know have that kind of reach and scale and a very global nature. Um and then at the you know social level it's such a global community. Um you know working in the Ethereum ecosystem it never sleeps um because the people that I talk to and work with every day both inside the EF and outside are from all around the world. And you know there's there's few things you can do in the world that have such an international flavor as work in the Ethereum ecosystem. And I think that's, you know, a very underrated strength of the entire project.

>> I think that's a perfect um sentiment to end off our conversation. Thank you so much Josh and Niels for this discussion on hardness and planetary thinking. I thought it was really interesting. >> Thank you Christine. I had a great time and it was it was very fun. >> Super fun Josh. Awesome. Thank you Christine for setting this up of >> of course this is what bridge atlas this bridge atlas series is about building these bridges. Um thank you so much also to everybody who is listening to this episode. I hope that you will join me again for another bridge atlas episode.

Uh before we wrap up the episode I just want to have um share some three important housekeeping items for all of the listeners. Um, first, if you liked today's episode and this conversation and this discussion, be sure to give the episode a thumbs up on YouTube or wherever you're watching it and subscribe to the, uh, Summer of Protocols YouTube channel. Um, also if you want to stay engaged with what we were discussing, uh, talk about some of these discussions with other listeners, please join the summer of protocols discord channel where you will be able to, um, get access to all the other summer of protocol community and um, take part in the in the ongoing

conversation. And finally, um please check out all the the show notes um the show notes of today's episode which will have all the links to um both Josh and Nil's uh talks um past talks for summer of protocols. It'll also have um more information on protocol study that you can use to keep your um journey studying protocols going. So uh thank you again everyone for listening. Thank you, Josh and Niels. And I'll talk to everyone again on another Bridge Atlas [music] episode another time. Bye.

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