EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To Programmer Capitalism

18 Jan 2016 · 1:20:11

Vinay Gupta, then working between ConsenSys and the Ethereum Foundation, joins Epicenter to argue that smart contracts could move society from lawyer capitalism toward programmer capitalism. He expects a wave of money into blockchains in 2016, recalls his disaster relief work on the Hexayurt shelter, and describes blockchains as an accountability technology first, from refugees documenting their journeys to trials of universal basic income. He traces the cypherpunks from public key cryptography to Snowden and argues that states do not treat Bitcoin as a threat, a view one host disputes. He closes by imagining software settling most routine disputes, while warning of a surveillance-heavy downside.

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[Music] this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by high. me protect yourself against hackers and Safeguard your identity online with a first class VPN go to high. me/ epicenter and sign up for a free account [Music] today welcome to EP Center Bitcoin to show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization of the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is Brian fa and cran and I'm M Roy today we have a special guest with us uh he's called Vin Gupta many of you might already know him he has previously been

a cifer punk um a global resilience Guru a release coordinator for ethereum and he's now associated with consensus we'll be talking about all of these top topics uh identity how to how to fund public infrastructure and other other themes but first let's have an introduction from the man himself Vin Gupta so hi guys uh so right now I'm split between the uh consensus group and the ethereum foundation uh mostly working with consensus and uh I'm really kind of in the middle of doing the 2016 kind of planning an analysis just trying to figure out what's going to be important this year here and what role I have to play in that cool can you give us uh what are

your most important interesting predictions for this year well so I think that up until now the entire field has been largely limited by available money you know you know it's been quite hard to raise funds for projects uh there's been a lot of curiosity from funders but not very much action and I think the R3 has kind of tipped the entire ecosystem into a different game here like it's legitimized this oce the blockchains are a technology that is critically important to Banking and at that point the money is seriously beginning to flow into the field so I think that this is the year where we're going to go from it being you know scarce money and abundant talent to it being abundant uh money and scarce talent and I don't think any of us really know how to operate in that

environment we're so used to having to bang on the doors that now that the doors I think are largely Auto openening uh I think we're going to have a fair amount of chaos so what I'm trying to do is look at what happened in the do world over the past 10 or 15 years to try and figure out how our field is going to change and what we have to do to adapt to the new operating environment where we're going from being Scrappy Outsiders to being the new mainstream so so you're predicting a DOT a do blockchain bubble oh it's already started I mean the uh my estimate is that we're going to see a billion dollars come into the ethereum ecosystem in 2016 alone and the General estimates for the amount of money going into the entire blockchain

ecosystem including Bitcoin is only order of 10 billion I think 10 billion this year is what we're going to see yeah 10 billion this year so so for example JP Morgan uh recently released a a report suggesting that they were going to put 9 billion actually I think it might be leaked rather than released but they were going to put 9 billion into the high-tech ecosystem including drones and blockchains government of Singapore has a$7 billion smart cities program uh and is seriously interested in blockchain stuff there's just a really really really broad-based push from larer entities to get this technology into their systems no I I totally agree with that and I'm certainly very optimistic and

bullish on the prospects as well but that is definitely a different level of uh oh yeah yeah we'll see if that happens that that would certainly be interesting to see what happens then because you're certainly right right there's a there's a a certain lack of talent and and a lot of immaturity too so if you start having compiling that like immaturity of the tech and the knowledge how to use it and all so if you combine that with insane inflows of money I agree You' probably end up with all kinds of uh interesting weird and slightly nonsensical projects well it one of the things that really strikes me about this is it's very very hard to pick winners right so

I I saw you know this investor Paul Graham runs an outf called y combinator so Graham describes what he thought when he was offered the opportunity to invest in Facebook which was that it was a tool for people who had no money to do something not very important uh and it was you know obviously not going to go anywhere right you know it's a way for college students to waste time on the internet that that is just why would anybody invest in that kind of thing lots of people looked at Airbnb and said people are not going to rent each other's living rooms to each other that's crazy that's never going to happen you know how do we tell what's going to be important and what isn't ahead of time ye yeah absolutely so before we keep going with that let's take a step back and focus a little bit on you on your background so one of

these uh labels or that are applied to you at you plat things you call yourself as as a resilience Guru can you tell people what what is resilience what do you mean with that well so my background is disaster relief I mean I have many backgrounds I've done lots of things over the years but um I spent many years on a disaster relief technology called the hexa uh which is um do you know Burning Man have you been to burning man I have been to burning man it's actually funny CU I have been to Burning Man and I was I was listening to your interview on with London real which was fantastic by the way uh and I heard you say mention that you invented the hex and I have I

was in a burning man in 2012 and I remember like Googling about it in preparation and reading about the hexa so I was like oh wow that was you so yeah I I I know what you're talking about there but perhaps for those who don't know yeah what is the hexa Y uh well so I'm going to show you a picture right here if I can get this down thing to open uh I guess that'll work so let's see how's that for a high-tech solution huh so there you could see on the screen uh this silver building sitting in the middle of the desert uh apologies for it kind of wobbling a little there we go so the point of that building is that the

wall is a whole sheet of 4x8 just as it comes off the track and the roof pieces are triangles which are half a sheet of 4x8 cut on the diagonal zip boom there's your triangle and the reason for doing that is it means you could take an industrial supply chain which generates plywood or OSB or polyiso insulation or whatever it happens to be and you can take the stream of that material add a table saw and maybe a couple drills to the end of that process and have an emergency housing solution so it's a really really really simple way of generating enormous quantities of Housing and given that we've got s 60 million refugees in an ongoing Refugee crisis in Europe it seems like the kind of situation where being able to generate huge amounts of

housing really cheaply might be a good idea uh and that's the the first part of a much broader system so the second part if I can just bring this up uh apologies for the somewhat uh low Tech AV solution so the second part is thing called the dart board of death can you see this here the dart board of death and uh it's a planning tool called simple critical infrastructure maps and it's a way of figuring out if you're going to deploy 60,000 hexs in the middle of a desert field desert plane what do you need to provide people as well as the basic physical structure so that they can live you need maybe some solar panels or Communications you need

toilets you need water filters but most of all what you need is a comprehensive map of human needs so that you know whether you've covered everything on uh the required list or not and it's actually quite hard to come up with a fully objective fully comprehensive list of human needs that will apply in all places at all times um but that's what the resilience map system does uh and I did this stuff uh I worked a bit with the Red Cross I worked a bit with the UN I worked a bit with the American Department of Defense I worked a bit with diffed in the UK um I worked a lot with the team that went onto to do the Ikea shelter the one that they're deploying in Syria uh and Jordan I think right now um and so that's what I did for a really long time and they use them

in enormous numbers of Burning Man they just download the plans from the internet and build them there's probably a couple million dollars worth of them built every year so uh what kind of disaster scenarios are you most concerned about personally well so for me the big thing is climate change the expectation is that we're going to see something on the region of 150 million people displaced and the existing humanitarian systems are completely unable to cope with 150 million people who have no place to go back to so we've got pretty good solutions for doing temporary shelters but we don't have good solutions for long-term or permanent displacement and most of the people that are displaced by climate are going to be permanently displaced because their homes are gone and their Farmland is

covered in salt water or the cities are just covered in mold they're never going to be inhabitable again so um so that's a lot of people like 150 million people displaced is a is a big big amount cuz I mean what's what's that like that's uh that might be like you know a few like one or two percentage of the world's population so we talking a very big number that's right that's right okay and uh and you personally see this kind of scenario occurring over the time Horizon like what kind of time Horizon we've already got 60 million refugees as it stands um so that number is only going to go up until we find some better solution for dealing with them look do cryptocurrencies have a role to play in

a scenario like that like like if you have 60 million refugees already and you could go up to 150 million let's say with climate change what role does cryptocurrency Tech have there um well so cryptocurrency Tech itself is a small part of a much wider set of things you could do um so the technologies that give you the assurance that the Bitcoin won't be double spent can also give you things like passports they could give you uh non-repudiable medical records they could give you you know all kinds of tight uh control of information and that's really really important to refugees so imagine that you are a refugee and you document every step of

your journey on a blockchain right you've got an app on your phone you take some pictures of where you are you know the pictures get uploaded into ipfs the hashes get uploaded into the Bitcoin or the ethereum blockchain and every day you take a couple of pictures to document your conditions and document what's happening to you if you've got a 100 million people's worth of that stuff as a kind of public log of what's happening it becomes very hard to deny the scale of the problem it becomes very hard to offer substandard services if something goes wrong and these people are for example left to freeze to death as happened in the Pakistan earthquakes um it becomes really obvious that you have people recording their damn deaths on camera in a blockchain you know and this forces accountability on the International Community um in addition if you've got

the ability to isue Identity credentials maybe you can get people across borders and then finally you've got the ability to actually give people money using a blockchain um but you know fundamentally I think that there's a big question about accountability and I think that this is fundamentally about blockchains as an accountability technology first and as a currency technology second so is your interest in blockchains Bitcoin ethereum is that sort of an outgrowth of your interest in resilience and disaster or or do you view it as more of a separate thing that has some areas of intersection well I mean the fundamental reason I'm in this stuff is because I was a cipher Bank in the '90s so you know in I don't know 96 or 97 I

helped people write some software for getting human rights abuse dat out of China uh I was very heavily involved in sort of magic internet money in 99 and 2000 when the technology Choice was a thing called eold uh I wrote a prototype for an append only general leder based cryptographic stock market with Bearer shares in 2000 so I was quite into this stuff um when I saw Bitcoin come over the horizon I completely ignored it because it I knew it was just a currency and what I'd seen from the eold example was that things which were just currencies didn't produce any social change it was better money but it was just better money if you wanted to produce interesting social change uh what was really required was um smart contracts so when ethereum came over the

horizon it was like ah smart contractor back right that's worth going for a luk for around uh so you know I came over to the ethereum space and sure enough it was smart contracts and once you have Smart contracts you could build an entirely new work world the smart contract is a hugely powerful construct uh ex explain to us like so explain to us why a smart contract is powerful okay so um there's a whole bunch of different reasons why support contracts are powerful but what they boil down to is this right now software exists inside of a given organization or inside of a given individual's property even if it's running in the cloud it's running in a piece of the cloud that you rent and therefore it's your

Cloud the result is that the software always has the agency of the person that is paying for the software to exist and I mean agency in a kind of technical economic sense it's my software it's your software it's their software and as a result to a large degree software doesn't change the trust architecture that exists in the world my software is not that different from my staff or my book or my you know industrial machine whatever ever it happens to be once you get a smart contract you have software which isn't yours or mine exists in the space between us so the software is in some sense relational it doesn't exist inside of the nodes it exists inside of the network and that's interesting because

it generates new architectures of trust and new architectures of trust you know the last time somebody invented a really fundamentally new trust architecture the output was capitalism you know the joint stock Corporation was a new way of handling trust limited liability was a new way of handling trust and what came out of that was enormous change I mean really really enormous change so I think that smart contracts probably won't have quite as much impact as the invention of capitalism but they could very very easily be the next stage of capitalism's development okay that's interesting so so actually that's one of the topics I wrote down I wanted to talk about was the sort of impact of all of this on capitalism so which was sort of towards the end but let's talk about it right now so do you view smart contracts as

and blockchains as as the next stage of capitalism or is there also the the potential to have something that's you know truly different and and econom forms of economic interaction that aren't well very well described by the word capitalism so bucker for describes what we have now uh and what we call capitalism is law cap lawyer capitalism and lawyer capitalism basically the transactions are contractual the contracts grow and grow and grow and grow and grow because that's just the nature of reality that things grain complexity over time and as a result over time more and more and more the value in the system becomes owned by lawyers um one of the critical examples

of that is that the US government is almost entirely made of lawyers you know there are almost no engineers in Congress of the Senate it's lawyers lawyers lawyers and more lawyers so F says that law cap is inherently sort of parasitic piratical inefficient and it has a whole bunch of fundamental problems because the most powerful class of people within lawyer based capitalism are also the people that have the most gain from being complex and inefficient and this results in ineffective economic choices um the notion that you could go to kind of tech cap right a technical capitalism where the vast majority of the hard decisions are made by software and codified bodies of software take the role that's currently made by law I think is pretty

credible right I think that you know say 15 years from now you know by the time you guys are basically my age I think it's entirely credible that you could have a situation where you have you know hundreds of thousands of lines of software tens of millions of lines of software that embodies things like a a uniform commercial code which could be used for Tak making 70 80 90% of disputes and making an automated resolution on them so you have a set of trusted third parties or more likely insured and escro bonded third parties that input the information into the systems about what happened and then the software makes a resolution based on previous case law and the rules that were programmed into it everybody can see the software

therefore everybody knows the outcome of the decision before they actually act and as a result you wind up with this very broad clear Lane in which very ordinary transactions never wind up in court because everybody checks a transaction against the legal software before they acted as a result their actions are always legal and I think that that kind of stuff could grow out of the smart contract ecosystem really easily you know it's kind of like precognitive compliance you check against the compliance Suite before you act in the same way that you check against the test Suite before you upload a new piece of software to your servers and if it sounds kind of crazy now how crazy would it have sounded that we would have something like Amazon Prime now in 1995 when we were just you know before we' invented

e-commerce so I agree I I think that's a very plausible Vision there that but essentially where you're going there is that whole set of economic interactions they they're maybe manual now and mediated by courts of Law and lawyers a lot right they ENT ually become automated and they also move a little bit at least or probably varies a lot uh depending on the situation and the environment but they move a bit out of the out of the grip of the sort of existing legal framework right well I mean international business is not going to continue to be tied up inside of nation state courts

forever that that can't happen absolutely yeah but if you if you take a a step back and look at this is from a little bit more of a macro perspective what is the end result of that does that mean we just have the the sort of capitalism today where you have an enormous power for example of the the wealthy and those uh you know big corporations is that is that going even more like that because you have the the power of the state is being eroded and so you have uh let's say inequality um increases even more in a world like that because there's less uh ability to reinforce for example redistribution or uh will you also have let's say alternative models where people use things like ethereum

cryptocurrencies uh daos to have completely novel models of interaction and community and economic collaboration okay so um this is where we get to a really really complex problem so different societies vote for different kinds of wealth distributions inside of democracies the Scandinavian societies vote for a more equal wealth distribution and they get it American society votes for a much less equal distribution and they get it you go to South America they vote for really unequal wealth distributions and they get those uh it's my opinion that in almost all societies the um Democratic mass of people could vote for more equality if

they actually wanted it and in most cases what happens is they actually don't want that much more equality right what they want is more opportunity and generally speaking the voters are substantially to the right of the governments right so the political party system and fouryear electoral represent representative electoral democracy and all the rest of that kind of stuff seem to have a stabilizing impact on populations that if they were basically left to make their own laws would I think be vastly more libertarian vastly less caring vastly more selfish than they are now so for example I think that it's pretty clear that after the collapse of the Soviet Union things like the welfare state as a concept are largely being eaten away not by capitalism but because

the voters just don't care enough to maintain the damn things so my feeling is that we're in a position where the world is growing increasingly competitive and increasingly selfish and I think that the way that we choose to deploy these technologies will mirror those values you're not going to see a fundamental change in how we do things in terms of you know sharing or welfare states or um you know those kind of concerns we're not going to see a more equal Society until people use their Democratic power to create one because if they're not willing to vote for more equality they're certainly going to deploy Technologies to give it to them I think the basic truth is that people right now just generally speaking don't care and we still have to build an efficient world and an effective world with people

that are really fundamentally kind of uncaring about each other we have to make it work in spite of human nature not because of human nature yeah that's an interesting point of view I prob probably disagree with you on on some levels here I mean I think especially the idea that people have that much ability to you know make real choices I think if if you look at like for example the United States it seems to me that the political system is so corrupt and captured by uh you know large industrial interests and Lobby groups and stuff that the ability for I mean you would need an enormous amount of consensus among the population and sort of uh collaboration and movement to

to Really fundamentally change something there but I I agree with you on the longer run uh but I mean that that that is democracy right democracy is that you don't change the rules of society until um more than half of the people who vote want that change so the kind of enormous Co you know collaboration that you're talking about to get change to happen that's what democracy looks like it requires enormous pressure from you know maybe 25 or 30% of your population to get change to happen that's the Democratic process if you've got a situation where smaller numbers of people could cause radical change you have a very poor representative democracy well I I don't know if I would

agree with that I mean I think the you can have a system where there's there's it's so difficult for to have a the opinions from the voters sort of to flow up that in the end the the entities and the parties that sort of control the executive process you know they can have just enormous amount of latitude that largely remains unaffected by anything else that happens in the areas where the voters care they have no trouble at all controlling their political parties right American voters really care about drunk gun control they have no problem at all making sure that the parties keep them in uh keep gun control

where they want it the proun people have a party that is always going to be proun and it fully represents that view the antigun people have a party that's fully anti-un and fully represents that view same thing on abortion rights right in the areas where the voters really care the parties completely comply and will not move for anything but you could also say that the two issues you brought up there gun control and abortion rights are things that really don't matter that much right if if you in terms of the actual power structures today there are like sideshows that nobody really cares about well they sure as hell matter to the voters well and enormously powerful and enormously powerful people I mean think of the size of the anti-gun Lobby in

America or the size of the anti-abortion lobby in America these are huge organizations the National Rifle Association has something like 4 million members that's roughly 1% of all Americans maybe 2% it's an immense organization I don't know how big the total Collective of all the radical anti-abortion activists is but it's probably a similar size you know these are really really big pressure groups they're vastly bigger than the pressure groups around things like access to health care they're vastly bigger than the pressure groups around things like environment the bottom line is that what you're dealing with here is enormous public apathy about the issues that are important to us but are completely unimportant to them yeah I I wonder if you're right I

think there's some other things going on as well well for example if you you know they've done experiments where they ask people uh ask for example Americans you know what do you estimate is the current wealth distribution you know how much uh of the wealth or income you know is earned by the top 1% top 10% you know so they asked that question and they ask what would you like it to be and the thing is that what people estimate is completely wrong and what they would like it to be that's like Americans tends to line with like the actual tribution in Scandinavia or something like that so there is a yeah yeah I I I know the I read an article or two about the stuff you're talking about yes it's absolutely true that if you show

Americans you know you know wealth distribution graphs they're shocked by how much money is concentrated to the top right but if you tell them we're going to take everybody who's poorer than you and we're going to give them some of your money they freak out right but then for 99% of people you would ask you wouldn't actually take their money but you take the money of those extremely rich right so they well okay so if you're talking about reallocating wealth inside of dominant Imperial Powers that's not any in any way creating social justice right if you're stealing from the world at gunpoint which is basically the business model of Empire you know a prince is nothing but a stationary Bandit and um if you're stealing from people at

gunpoint as a way of fuel in your economy even if inside of your country the economy is very egalitarian and fair outside of your economy you're still basically raping pillage Vikings so every time that the Americans start a war to try and bring the price of oil down every time that the Americans invade a bunch of South American countries so they can you know facilitate easier access to either cocaine or bananas right all of those kind of processes if you look at the other end of where America's wealth is created it's created inside of authoritarian socialism in China it's created inside of you know vicious feudalism in Africa so if you're going to have a society which is genuinely fairer you've got to remember that the global 1% line is $35,000 a year if you're making $35,000

a year you are the 1% globally so if wealth is going to be reallocated in a fair form it's going to make almost all of the you know European and American middle class is radically poer and they're going to fight that to the death let's take a short break to talk about hi. me look when you're choosing a VPN provider you want to make sure that your privacy is protected you know if a government agency tries to force the VPN provider to hand over some of your traffic or B or or browsing information will they be able to do that and is your payment information attached to the account these are all things that you want to consider when choosing a VPN provider with hi high. me all that's taken care of for starters they're based in Malaysia and Malaysian laws don't

require them to keep any logs in fact high. me has no logs of your traffic or browsing uh history so even if a government agency was trying to force them to hand over some information they would be straight out of luck because hide.me has nothing to give them in addition to that they use a third party party payment provider uh which uh doesn't give them any of your payment information so they have they have no way to link an account to like a credit card or a PayPal account account so even if you're paying with PayPal or credit card there's no way for high. me to know which account paid for what and of course if you're paying with Bitcoin then you're completely transparent uh so what we suggest is if you're creating an account with high. me if you want that extra level of privacy just make a fake Gmail address and use that to sign in so

that way you're completely Anonymous you can give hi toy a try with their free plan their free plan includes two gigabyt of data at unthrottled bandwidth you can use any of their free exit noes which are in Amsterdam in Singapore and in Montreal and you can sign up for that at height. me/ epicenter now if you use rurl and if you decide to go premium down the line it's going to get you 35% off and the Premium plan gives you a lot it gives you unlimited data you can use it as much as you want you can connect up to five devices so your whole household fits on the plan and you can use any of their exit nodes all over the world and they've got like 30 of them them and of course you can pay with

Bitcoin so give it a try we would like to thank k. me for their support of eps and Bitcoin so um so like like Universal basic income uh do you think blockchains could enable enable that and how ah so I did a talk about this uh for state of the net in uh oh where the heck was it uh Milan right state of the net Milan there's I did a half hour maybe an hour talking Universal basic income and blockchains um pretty easy to find uh maybe I'll send you guys URL or something so my basic thinking is that it's very very easy to do Universal basic income on blockchains and blockchains are a really good medium for experimenting with

universal basic income because you can record and watch all the spending to know exactly how the universal basic income was spent and as a result it becomes really really a lot easier to justify whether these programs are working or not so I I'm quite in favor of blockchains as a prototyping technology for you know these kind of radical um changes in uh social policy you know whether it's Universal basic income whether it's some kind of tax credit for people who have three children in countries with a low birth rate uh whether it's a change in retirement age if you're going to have a change in social policy that you could conceivably document on blockchains I think there are really good reasons for doing it because it

allows everybody that's either for or against the change to look at the same and non-editable data set to make their arguments about the effectiveness of the policy so I'm definitely for that so for for instance like Universal basic income for might have a shape like you have a small island let's imagine a small island with two 200,000 people and they essentially done a block chain and the issuance schedule like like like Bitcoin has an issuance schedule where new Bitcoins are issued to the miners that solve the blocks in this in this imaginary uh blockchain in order in addition to new coins being issued to the validators or miners you have coins being issued every year to each citizen

on the island yes sure sure like is that a good imagination of universal basic income that sounds very much like a Aurora coin which was a project floated for Iceland Iceland's about 300,000 people in the idos are going to have some kind of system H tied to the Icelandic national ID number so in Iceland they have a national ID number called a keneta uh and everybody's kenal is visible in a basically like a phone boot context so they're never used for identifying people in any kind of private situation um but they're used for things like library cards and it's it's a really smart system it's actually quite it's quite intell ENT um because they're so public uh the assumption is not that your canala identifies you you know you

they're never used for verifying an identity because anybody can look them up openly but they are used for convenience it's a really smart system um so yes if a country like Iceland implemented something like a r coin that had broad popular sport and it worked no reason it couldn't be tried and you could document the success or the failure of the project as it went whether it would work in terms of making a better Society I'm not at all sure because there are two problems the first is uh you redist you know redistributing wealth has a very bad history so you start with universal basic income the landlords increase the red by 20% to soak up all the money that comes in society continues exactly as it was and all that you've done is subsidize the

land fors we don't know whether that will happen in practice but it certainly could happen in theory another problem is the universal basic can distributes wealth but not power so you're not going to necessarily wind up with a better fairer or a more Equitable Society because if you redistribute wealth but you don't redistribute power all that will happen is that people continue people with power will continue to change the rules of the game to benefit themselves so I think the universal basic income is probably coming it seems like an inevitable next step in social policy but I have a feeling that it's going to create a bunch of new problems and maybe that's just the nature of progress fix some problems create others so um like like that's an interesting perspective that it doesn't

change the nature of power and I'd actually like to merge that with your with your earlier point about the system that we are in being lawyer capitalism so the way the way I read I read your comment is um that today due to the due to the fundamental nature of Contracting in in in capitalism what ends up happening is there's a lot of administrative cost in order to make these contracts and uh have them maintained and then uh and then have them like have the dispute settled now because of this High administrative costs the class of lawyers becomes very powerful in a society and because power concentrates in these class of lawyers and they end

up having having political positions they tend to make the rules of society even more complex they make to they tend to make the contracts even more complex because that is how their their class makes uh makes the living in the first place so it's kind of a Kind kind of a circle where you are a lawyer you be you you you become a politician you have the power to make laws and you make ever more complex laws because that's how people in your class are going to benefit and slowly the complex it of our social structure becomes way more than it needs to be yes do you know the the old joke about the Indian bureaucrats no I don't so the joke is that if you're a bureaucrat in India you know you're the head of a department

when you have a a child you make a new form at the in your department and over the next 25 years the form gradually becomes more complex and it grows some additional forms and then you get some processing and then you get some regulation and uh then you get you know some oversight and by the time that you're done the form over 25 years grows into a department and then when your kid gen graduates from law school you install them as the head of the department and this is the kind of you know organic biological growth of the complexity of the Indian bureaucracy yeah yeah and it's kind of a joke but it's also kind of not yeah no I like for for our listeners like I'm I I I grew up in India and my father was in the Indian government and this is

actually true it's like uh bureaucracy runs in families uh you know yeah absolutely you know my grandfather was in the government my father was I turned out to be the black sheep that's in Bitcoin doing the opposite thing yeah yeah you say you say that now but eventually the government will adopt Bitcoin and then you'll become part of the government okay okay and Cara right so uh so so what you're essentially saying is like when smart contracts we have we have an uh alternative to lawyer capitalism where you in theory you could have contracts that while they may be rigid like the cost of um cost of maintaining them the

implementing them maintaining them and settling disputes is much lower than the than the system with lawyers and this can actually make Society more efficient because it uh it kind of gives you an alternative sort of structure to the lawyer capitalism yes exactly right so you know the 780 90% of commercial disputes that could potentially be settled with a pretty simple system where you take the body of law you write it up as a smart smart contracts and then you have professionals that input reliable data into those systems and if they're found out to be lying or they uh they they turn out to be wrong you have an insurance system that

basically uh covers the claims that result from those erors right so you still have some humans in the loop because the humans have to decide what the facts of the case were but once you decide the facts of the case the Machinery makes the decisions and I think we could probably resolve huge percentages of the current systems uh lawsuits in those kind of conditions it's going to take a long time to write the software but if you think of the complexity of something like a self-driving car I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think of a self uh a self overseeing contract and this is this is definitely futurism but you know think of all the airline tickets all of the package deliveries all of the you know purchase orders all the rest of this kind of

stuff that are huge parts of society which is just the same handle being turned over and over and over and over and over again you know Venture Capital deals you know come with a bunch of contracts which are enormously complicated but if you had a bunch of smart contracts where you basically just punched in a bunch of parameters you know what's the equity split who are the owners you know who's meant to be in charge then you know if there's a later lawsuit the vast majority of that stuff would just get sorted out by software and I think that's entirely reasonable over time it could take 10 or 15 years but over time I think the repetitive parts of the law will will be automated I I think the it's interesting I I've talked with some people also about uh smart contracts exactly in that way and of course the effects from an

economic perspective is that when we look at what happened with automation you know at one point there was all the blue collar jobs got automated and this is a lot of these sort of not super creative White Collar you know middle class office shops having the exact same thing to that yes class War I would also like to tie in like two or three more threads from from your life into into this discussion right so to kind of make this whole point very uh very real in in front of us like you've been a cifer punk and uh in in the show you said that you were involved with the digital like the digital gold U movement in in the early 2000s mhm and uh and you you you had the feeling that they

created better money but they didn't have the potential for a better Society because they didn't have the technology of smart contracts uh yes my basic questions are like who is the CER Punk fundamentally what did they want and why did they fail ah well this is a very interesting question right so this goes all the way back to gchq in the 19 7s gchq is the English equivalent of the NSA government communication headquarters and they invent public hey cryptography at gchq a good few years before it's reinvented inside of the public domain um there's a really good write up about that kicking around called something like the alternate history of

cryptography so once you've got public key cryptography you have the ability to generate secure Communications between people that have never met each other and digital signatures and digital signatures give you the potential for very high levels of trust again between people that have never met and never will so in the early 1990s Phil Zimmerman implements these you know algorithms inside of pgp pretty good privacy and then there's a wave of sort of you know this kind of speculative technological futurism where a bunch of Engineers and a bunch of business people and a bunch of Science Fiction writers a bunch of journalists sit around and talk about the future relative to some new technology so right now that conversation is happening

around life extension it's happening around automation drones right a little bit around Bitcoin um so out of those conversations comes this realization that the natural shape of a society which has public key cryptography as a fundamental part of it is radically different from the shape of society we have today it's as different from the society we have today as capitalism was from feudalism or industrialism was from farming right so the people that Embrace that as a perspective become Cipher panks they become people who say look relative to the modern technology base a completely different Society is possible and that completely different society would be better than the one that we

have now for the following reasons and off they go and they make that case and the result of that kind of whole process that whole push is this model that fundamentally this kind of encryption is a human right and access to that kind of encryption is fundamental to human Freedom which puts the cipher punks in direct conflict with the state because the state is basically the American government it's like no no no no no no no these are Munitions you don't need to own public cryptography anymore than you need to own a personal landmine don't do it so the process of that struggle realigns the Cyber punks uh uh sorry the cyppher punks realigns them into a uh more strongly anti-government

movement than they had been initially and that struggle for legitimacy goes on for several years until the entire thing basically washes out after 911 so 911 happens and the cipher Bank movement really hugely loses momentum because the National Security State basically is going crazy it's like a bull in a china shop and nobody really feels that that stuff is kind of relevant anymore at that point except Julian Assange so there's a long kind of Dead period where not much happens then you get Assange and then you get Snowden and Snowden is basically the the point where the cipher bankk movement finally bit the government in a way that mattered because Snowden takes an enormous of repository documents out of the NSA and

publishes them and it becomes completely pure to anybody that's paying attention that the American government has slipped into being something along the lines of a police state or a Fascism and we're in the very very early process uh the very early parts of the process to repair that M now that snowden's made it visible to the political Elites in America that they are being spied on eventually they will find a way to stop it and then we'll have a kind of new vision of America emerge so uh so now now now now let's let's let's get let's put this conversation in some perspective um most of our listeners and including us are people who have not lived the cipher Punk movement and for us public key public key private

cryptography is kind of a granted we don't we don't really know the history you you uh they went through tell us like in in your in your answer there was a statement that like public key cryptography is such a fundamental invention that if you take it to its conclusion that society would be so radically different from the current one that uh the that difference is the same as the difference between industrial society and Agricultural Society tell us why this is such a fundamental invention okay so um that's a really tricky question it's really really subtle we take a crack at it so throughout human history the only way to prove to somebody that you knew a secret was to

tell them what the secret was and that's been the status of information as it flowed through human societies since the adventure of dirt right it's it's an Ancient Ancient truth that if I know a secret my the only way for me to communicate that secret to you is to tell you the secret and once in a while people have figured out ways around that property that gave them a little bit of an advantage and they've used those so a good example of this is that around the time of the early days of the Scientific Revolution um scientists used to make predictions that they thought were too ridiculous to really publicly claim but if somebody else thought the idea and it turned out to be true or they could prove it later on they wanted to establish when they had had the idea so they used to publish strings of

letters and the strings of letters it would be like a13 b11 c41 d11 you know uh e19 and what it would refer to is a sentence and you were counting the number of times a given letter appeared in the sentence and later dat you could publish the sentence and the sentence would correspond exactly to the letter count that had been published and this was like a very perimed form of a hash function right and scientists were using that stuff as a way of establishing seniority of claim on radical ideas that they didn't really dare publish until they had strong evidence but it was a way of dating your hunches essentially um you know similar kinds of things happen around commercial use of ciphers um you know the Roth STS of a

private community communication Network which I seem to remember was largely par carrier pigeons with I can't remember they use codes or not very the Templars had codes so there's always been a use of those Technologies inside of the Frameworks right the system of the world has always used cryptography where it's been available they've always used you know things like hash functions and primitive forms once you come along and you build systems like that that are essentially perfect hugely hugely powerful things begin to happen um you know if I could send a completely secret message to anybody in the world and it's impossible for anybody to break that and read the message things like Espionage become trivial anybody inside

of a government can send an encrypted message to somebody with a bunch of government secrets in it and the government will have no way of knowing what was inside the message so you can't prove the Espionage occurred sounds completely crazy more or less what happens every time somebody leaks something from inside of government these days um you also get a whole bunch of abilities to turn things like free speech into what you talk performative speech act so if I speak I am spending this Bitcoin and put a digital signature on it that speech is actually the spending of the Bitcoin so you wind up in a position where the economy becomes completely unified with the culture because spending is trans speaking and speaking is transacting God only knows what that turns into in the long run but when you take the things like the absolute right

Free Speech which is commonly entrained in the American model then what comes out of the fact that spending is speech is this notion of unlimited opportunities to spend in ways people consider radical because you're still protected by your free speech rights everything you look at if you look at it in the right way that could conceivably touch cryptography even at a theoretical level is currently turning itself inside that the whole thing is in freef Fall okay very interesting now the the thing that mayor was referring to right it's it's a talk of you so we'll link to that as well that you gave a def con about sort of Cipher punks and and why the their Vision didn't really pan out and wasn't so successful now you gave a few reasons in

there and there's one that the public infrastructure problem predominantly that's one that's one and I would like to talk about that but there was also another one that I thought was would be very interesting to talk about which uh you called meta structures uh we we can start with either one So Meta structures is white word for companies corporations governments guilds and all the rest of this kind of stuff and the tools that the cyer punks generated were point-to-point communication tools encrypted messaging whether it was email or chat was the core thing that cyer punks produced um for example https you know the the secure standard used for doing things like credit card payments or login online https was a cypherpunk technology um so while you're in a

position where you're deploying the crypto in a way that is largely about point-to-point communication you can't have a situation where you've got a s 25 person group that votes on something and it's all secure so you can't have say a company board do a bunch of deliberation on uh s set decisions they want to make you can't you know you can't go through and you know have a voting or a Democratic process or a jury process and then somehow have that represented to the world in a cryptographically secure way there's just no really good way of doing it inside of those models once you bring along new technology like smart contracts that allows you to do that kind of thing you get hugely greater expressive power so the same set of algorithms generate a vastly new set of social

possibilities so the cipher Punk tooling that we had before ethereum really didn't support group formation very well it didn't support running organizations it didn't support things like jury trials it was really really limited to people basically writing each other secure letters and once you open up beyond that all kinds of other things become possible how does that relate to what we are seeing today with the for example the debate about the block size in Bitcoin do you think that really sort of maybe Bitcoin is one of the last technologies that successful on on a sort of huge scale sort of Cypher PR Technologies as successful that hasn't explicitly built in some sort of you know formal governance structure that allows decision making on a protocol

level to happen so bein's problem was that you know if people thought that well people thought Satoshi clearly thought that Bitcoin was illegal right he seems to have function on the assumption that he was going to get nuked by the feds for having WR written this piece of software so he didn't really want to be in the public eye and therefore he built no governance structure the notion was that it was essentially leaderless resistance and I think that Satoshi would probably have been horrified by the idea that the federal government would Embrace Bitcoin to the extent that it has uh never mind Wall Street you I don't think s would be pleased about that at all um but given that you know these Technologies are being rapidly embraced by governments and by companies there's a pretty good

chance that actually you know the Machinery is not going to try and Destroy these Technologies and that means you could build governance structur that are really public and open and transparent the way the Charities are and still build cryptographic um I don't know what you'd call them cryptographic social transformation tools because it seems like what's happening is that the state has simply stopped thinking of this kind of cryptography is a threat at which point there's no reason to be underground but couldn't you have have a a governance structure where you do have transparency in all of those things but you also have uh the participants you know you have the anonymity of the participants so can't you have both yeah oh you could

there's oh there's no doubt that you could build that right no doubt at all but at this point in history it seems like there's not much of a reason to right you know there hasn't actually been any kind of really really heavy state level retaliation or retribution against say Bitcoin users or even Bitcoin devs for the most part you know the governments are basically looking at these as being a new generation of database technology that they can integrate and assimilate so the Revolutionary claim that this technology was going to hugely impact the function of the state and it was going to be this you know kind of endpoint tax starvation disintermediation Tim May Cipher Nomicon kind of a trip which was a huge part of the claim made in the 1990s that doesn't seem to be what's happening

the state just seems to be adapting and maybe we shouldn't be surprised by that but my point would probably be well a few things so number one is they didn't have to right because Bitcoin is still like completely irrelevant if you look at it from a larger economic perspective right so they they were they could enforce a lot of things on level of exchanges and wallets and and they never had to go to the protocol level but if you did have let's say Bitcoin became very big and then those developers had that crucial role and let's say they said oh we're going to do you know zero cash or something like that it's going to be like a part of Bitcoin I mean I cannot imagine that you would not have an enormous amount of pressure on those people and I think if

that was you know if there the control structure of a project like that was public uh you know I mean I think the government we would see a completely different government response than we have seen so far maybe they just use the software for running the black budget you think the US government uses Bitcoin to run black budgets no no but they certainly could right I mean you think that having this kind of you know Anonymous secret transactional infrastructure would be in some way a threat to the government but if that was a threat to the government why does the government fund Tor remember Tor is a US government funded project and it has been since before the beginning so if they were afraid of these kind of Technologies there's no reason to fund T the official reason that the US government says that

it funds Tor is to provide cover traffic for the US Navy's Communications at se right I just don't think the government really is threatened by these Technologies they don't respond like they're being threatened they seem to be quite eager for this stuff to mature so they can use it for Stuff think of how much more convenient the Reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan would have been if they'd had Bitcoin no need to ship enormous you know crates of cash billion dollars strapped or an enormous wooden plank you know wrapped in cingi and dropped off a plane to some local War award you just sent the guy Bitcoin there's almost nothing that the government cannot find use for at given time so I think that

we're in a position where what's happening is that we're seeing social change because new technologies arrived and the state is adapting to the social change in the same way that the state usually it up to the social change yeah it's I I I think again I I view it a little bit differently I mean I think there's there's a variety of ways to use that technology right so I mean in a way blockchains are agnostic right they don't have inherent value you can use it for all kinds of things and there's certainly things where governments can use that technology and do things that are perfectly reasonable uh and attractive to government and then you know they will do that they will use it right but at the same time if you have something like Bitcoin for example or ethereum as well right you can also see a lot of uses that they cannot

control and I I would think that those instances of those uses of Technologies are not things that governments will like to see because it is in the end it is a a loss of a loss of power right if Government doesn't like to see that stuff why did they fund Tor Tor is a te technology for this so-called culture of anonymity and all the rest of that stuff and the government has put millions and millions of dollars into tour how do you explain that I mean so number one I would say it very much seems to be the case right that the NSA or some of government agencies do have the capability to De anonymize T so if you look at it from

that perspective maybe it's not such a bad tool right you have all these people who think they need to hide things from the government like self-identify themselves by using Torah and then the only people who can uh find you know track them down is like the US government right so that's one thing I would so so you basically think that Torah is an enormous honey poot run by the US government is that what you're saying I mean I suspect it has become that at least I'm not saying it was planned to go that way but from my superficial impression of the project it seems to have sort of evolved into that h i mean that is a very uh controversial statement I know a lot of to tour developers you know uh on Twitter seem to be you know rejecting

that position very very strongly over and over again as loudly as they can um I guess we wait and see what happens right maybe some future leer will reveal what the real status of Torah is um but if the government doesn't find tor to be fundamentally a threat I don't see any reason why they would find Bitcoin to be fundamentally a threat right I think that the evidence is that they're fairly neutral towards these Technologies today's magic word is hexer h e x a Yu r t head over to let talk bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magicw and claim your part of the listener reward [Music]

so so V uh you you are a global resilience Guru and your kind of one of your big interests is to think about how can things go wrong so what you're essentially saying is uh the scenario that the American government the Chinese government and the Russians will partner together to clamp down on cryptocurrency is is not an not an interesting threat to worry about no I just I don't I don't see any real incentive for them to do it you know I just don't see any evidence that they're heading in that direction I think if anything what you're going to see is massive use of these currencies by the intelligence Community to hide their operations use of these currencies to you know manage know chunks of stuff with the black budget

um you know I just don't perceive this stuff to be a threat to state power in the way that people seem to think it is and but by the way the reason that I don't think it's a threat to state power is because the state doesn't react to it as if it was remotely worried there isn't even the slightest trace of anxiety on the behavior of the US government towards these things right you want to see something the US government has anxiety about look at the way that they basically smashed occupy with a big hammer right that's what it looks like when the US government doesn't like you it's people kicking down your door and pepper spraying your dog and that's just not happening inside of the Bitcoin Community people aren't being arrested they're not being investigated up being hassled the state

is completely complacent and either that's the worst mistake in human history or actually they've looked at it and decided that it just doesn't matter that much and and what about the other movement so so like like you talked about how we had lawyer capitalism and I'm going to term the smart contract bureaucracy that is coming hopefully as programmer capitalism so what you're saying is you're moving from lawyer capitalism to programmer capitalism right do you think the state would be worried about that no I think the state will simply be run by programmers right I mean look if Steve Jobs had lived what do you think the ODS are that Steve Jobs would have joined the you know 2016 presidential race probably running as a

republican right 0% I'm Steve no I really think that jobs was so pissed off about the government preventing Apple from offering strong encryption on their phone I think there's a real chance jobs would have decided that he was going to run for government you know go in there and try and fix the problem from the inside just imagine it for a moment right so if jobs run for president you know you're already using my telephone you're going to get a message from me about my presidential campaign on your iPhone every morning whether you like it or not right I'm going to come up with a bunch of super smart guy Silicon Valley policies for fixing America they're going to have some elements from the right and some elements from the left

they're going to be use Smart use of technology to fix real problems you have we're going to take all of this great thinking we did that produce the devices that are educating your children and facilitating the smooth function of your life and we're going to automate the federal government right okay so jobs is dead it's not going to be jobs um uh what about the guy that used to run ghoul Eric Schmidt right 2020 election what about Elon Musk gets the Rockets going pretty well decides that the weak Link in his plan for saving the world is actually the US government thinks that it might be possible to fix it from the inside it's only a matter of time until somebody from Silicon Valley with enough power and enough reputation enough money decides that the right place to steer the world from is not an office but the

White House it's only a matter of time that's actually exciting yeah I mean personally I think the US government is is such terrible state that is can only almost only get better and uh I mean your choice at this point is a military coup or a takeover by Silicon Valley I think you'd rather have a take over by Silicon Valley right but I think the interesting thing there if you looked at Obama and you know when he came with all these plans he had and then if you look objectively at what he's done he's done nothing none of the things he said he's basically been he's basically been the black think he's been the black Ronald Reagan yeah you could say that right uh so you can ask like why was that right so there's only two explanations really

right one either he was completely dishonest about it right so he was he was literally lying and like saying things to get elected but he didn't actually mean them or is he is he a politician is he a politician were his lips [Music] moving right but do you I I mean lying to an which is almost like mindblowing about everything like his or he came in there he had maybe he lied a little bit he had his yeah is he a politician and were his lips [Laughter] moving right politicians are professional Liars so we know for sure he was

lying at least about some things politicians go and say whatever will get them elected for the well but there's different exent extends here I of course agree that all politicians lie probably quite a lot right but it's about is it just distorting the truth or is it literally saying the exact opposite of what you actually want to do um okay so what's the second part the well the second explanation of course is that he was probably lying like all politicians lie with a lot of things but that overall you know a lot of his intention things he was saying was also you know genuine intentions and to do that but then he came into office and he literally could not do any of those maybe he even in in as much as right the

Republicans wind up controlling both Congress and Senate which leaves the president with very little ability to make law and if you can't get them to vote for your laws you don't have that much power to steer the country the American government is meant to be a government of laws not of men the president is not meant to have more power than Congress and the Senate so if the Congress and the Senate are Republican and the president is Democrat it's a bad time to be president because the power is with the lawmakers not with the executive branch right but the Congress and uh Senate weren't Republican the whole time here is President no they weren't Republican the whole time but they were Republican in the second term which was Republicans typically do all the radical stuff okay before like okay so that's uh

I I think I think we have reach an impa so the last question um and by the way I'm not discounting the power of the black State here right military industrial complex and all the rest of that stuff is absolutely there and it's absolutely real and it's enormously powerful but the US population is largely served pretty well by the military-industrial complex which is why they don't use their power to throw them over the military industrial complex is a pretty good representation of what average American wants that's the problem if they didn't want it there would be huge mass demonstrations about the Injustice of American society all the time Sanders would have like 90% of the vote and the Democratic machinery would just shove

these guys right over the problem is the military industrial complex is giving most Americans most of what they want most of the time which is a chance opportunity and a ton of National Security power that's why they don't change it that's something to think about the military industrial complex is a representation of what the average American wants y okay before before we close out cuz cuz we have already reached uh the the end like the end of our like standard interview okay like one question uh what does give us a vision for programmer capitalism what does it look like what what's different from lawyer what's different in programmer capitalism from lawyer capitalism

okay so let me frame this a right look at the good side then look at the bad side or maybe look at the bad side of the good side so the bad side of programmer capitalism would be the programmer industrial complex which is basically robotic war machines robot traffic Ward at a massive surveillance state that you know gives you a machine that you carry around at all times that constantly spies on you would report everything you do to the government that's how s terrible doesn't it yeah that sounds terrible right you pay for your own surveillance device and all the information in your phone goes to the government already right we're already seeing

programmer capitalism it's called the NSA right yeah so the bad side of this is that you get increasing power going to the technical branches of the state so the NSA becomes a larger and larger thing the US military becomes increasingly robotic you send the robots out to fight your Wars you know third world peasant Uprising where they're threatening to cut off the banana Supply is met by Ed 209 from RoboCop dropped from the sky in enormous numbers and they basically just keep shooting until there's no more Rio signatures then you send down the robots to go and harvest the bananas right you know the term Banana Republic it actually came from American invasions organized by banana companies mhm look it up look up the history of

ban Republic the history is mindblowing so that is the kind of nightmare scenario of this kind of robot driven technocratic imperialism and it's clear that the American Military is pushing for that as hard as they could possibly go everybody agrees that putting American soldiers into the path of angry Brown men with guns is a losing proposition every time they try it they come back with a bunch of dead white boys and no real progress in their foreign policy objectives right just doesn't work to have very expensive very precious American soldiers who are very expensive to recruit and very expensive to train fighting peasants who are making you know $150 an hour and are you know using a 30-year-old AK-47 it just doesn't work

um that's the downside the upside is a society in which everything that the government does is transparent and accountable and systems are provably fair because the software makes the decision so the law that's made by Congress or the Senate is encoded as software the software then makes the actual decisions the vast majority of the time so are you eligible for healthc care is decided by a piece of software that takes 15 seconds to give you an answer and if the answer is no it tells you exactly why the answer is no and if there's a factual error in that you take it to a human being that is certified as being able to restate the facts for the computer they restate the facts in an accurate form and you get your healthc care coverage right so you could build stable

predictable transparent bureaucracies that manage the shared assets of society in a completely predictable way the tax code could become a piece of software with minimal human interpretation right your Tax Advisor basically takes the facts writes the facts down swears the facts are true if the facts aren't true they're going to face an enormous fine which will be covered by their insurance and if they're proven to have lied intentionally they're going to go to jail so you put all of the emphasis on accurate inputs into software that then makes decisions in a completely transparent way and I think that you could see something come out of that that is hugely more efficient than the current government is and is provably fair because it operates on you know clearly stated truth rather than an

ambiguous human judgment um would a system like that be better for all things that the state does definitely not but I think that there's a 60 70 80% middle of the road just shuffling thing that the state does that could potentially go away pretty comprehensively and I think that that's really worth doing two extremes cool cool Brian I think that's close out that's a that's a good note to to end on we have some some exciting Visions about the future of of course I I if you do if you do have this Robo Banana Republic thing and and that is driven by by the industrial military complex it does sort of seem to imply that that's what the American people want no uh well and look in 2004 the

American people voted for Bush again that undoubtedly everybody knew right yeah they're not that unhappy right the American people on average are not that unhappy about the status quo there are a small number of very intelligent very well educated science fiction reading predominantly white males who are of the opinion that they're being completely screwed by the system right and that demographic ranges from the guys that are out there in Oregon occupying some you know natural Wild Life preserve or whatever it is the Bandy Ranch guys right the way across through the kind of new Left Right the way out through the back end of you know extreme politics anarchism the cipher

punks all the rest of that stuff right but actually you know the feeling that something has gone wrong and it's the government's fault is pervasive right across the societal class which is losing power and that societal class is losing power to minorities and it's losing power to women and it's losing power to the people in the other end of the supply chain in China the core thing which motivates the vast majority of political resistance to the state is you know basically people that were privileged slowly losing economic advantage to classes that were previously less privileged or dirt poor nobody wants a fairer world except for the very very poorest half of humanity and the poorest half of humanity are largely peasant

Farmers living on a single acre of agricultural land that they inherited from their great great great great great grandparents and which their grandchildren will live and die on in all probability that's 50% of humanity right people say they want a fairer world what they generally mean is they want to be richer the fairer world is a world that starts with improving the lives of the peasants in the very very poorest areas because they are the people that need the help most and we have to work up from there by layers the political access that we're operating on is largely a fantasy right we we've got this kind of colonial World model that we inherited from generation to generation after generation of imperialist Wars largely propagated by Europeans and Americans against the rest of the world and what's

happening is as the colonial era ends because the rest of the world now has manufacturing capacity it now has independent political thought it's really beginning to catch up the bubble of privilege that colonialism created for people is collapsing and the people that are hit hardest are the people that were profiting the most from colonialism and that's the white males so the anger that the white males feel towards the government is that the government is no longer making them rich and different people Express that pain in different ways depending on where they come from in the political Spectrum so so once you start separating the loss of privilege from fairness a fair you know a fairer world is a world in which the poor do much better and the rich do much worse and most of the time people aren't campaigning for that

because they don't identify themselves as being the rich and they definitely don't want to think about how much poverty there is and once you get clear about that you see the real revolutionary possibility of blockchains which is they could provide statistical evidence of how the world really works and then we could use that statistical evidence to Force real change where it really matters and it's up to us as a society to decide where that really is first the facts then the decisions that's what I wanted to say all right well V thanks so much I think we can we can wrap up with that so thanks so much for coming on I mean I think you're you're super elaborate and eloquent in expressing very interesting and unusual and sometimes viewpoints that one disagrees with but I think that makes for the most interesting discussions

um so of course we will link to uh to a lot of your resources so we'll link to your resilience website uh some of the St work you've done with hexag and also some of your other talks you've done which are very interesting so thanks so much vene for coming on Splendid really good to talk and um yeah really a pleasure thank you and thanks to listener for listening so we are part of the let's talk Bitcoin Network so you can find lots of other shows as well well on leso bitcoin.com and we put out new episodes of Ender Bitcoin every Monday you can get them you know with your favorite podcast application whether it's on iOS or Android and of course you can watch the videos also on youtube.com/ appcenter BTC and if you are if you want to you can leave us an

iTunes review or review anywhere you send us an email and then we will send you one of those t-shirts so we'll still doing that we've sent out lots of t-shirts all over the place and yeah so if you want one then just do that so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week [Music] [Music]