Crypto Is Dead, Long Live Crypto: A Love Letter

Transcript

yeah hi yo um so does anybody know any connection between all these people Ralph Markle Perry Metzger Nick Zabo and helfini any guesses anybody want to yell out uh cryptography yes anybody else knows security yeah you could say that basically early Bitcoin people the people whose work basically but there is a prehistory to bitcoin that led to bitcoin and that is very interesting uh so these all people were obsessed with defeating death so they were part of this kind of a group

online uh called extropeans whose main mission was is there an echo happening my voice so their whole mission was basically to defeat death and by that what they meant was always to like engineer systems biological systems otherwise which does not Decay and die and that is very crucial to the whole uh Bitcoin thing because as part of that they they were the first people who came upon what we have the Alcor Foundation the whole like life extension longevity and all those people these are the same people this is why Hal who is dead but long live hell because hell is frozen which is very

interesting in terms of crypto because there's an idea in crypto that you can't kill crypto like no matter what Regulators do no matter the markets have a downturn no matter somebody scams like hbf or whoever it'll keep coming back this is idea that predates crypto that we need to build a system that no matter what anybody does cannot be killed at all and that is very interesting why can I not do the next okay that is pretty interesting backdrop so the extrupians basically started asking this question from back in the day from the 1940s actually which is what is life and the idea of extravianism comes from this text by Erwin Schrodinger the quantum physicist

whose main idea was that in any system especially closed system the entropy of it constant increases so entropy can be thought of as something like the sense of disorderedness so in plain speak it would be like it is easier to say break something than to make something because a system if you leave it like if you leave these chairs by itself it'll eventually Decay and Destroy and like you know become so the not to have that we have to constantly work at it but the living organism human beings change plans whatever we don't automatically Decay and die instantly we live through a couple of years and die so the idea Schrodinger's idea of life was the question of what is life because

life is basically a force that is fighting against entropy the natural tendency for things in the universe like DK and die and one of the early examples of that are automatons clocks because clocks are one of those the first devices that we humans made that goes on forever that you don't need to like it doesn't stop after like a few minutes it goes on for years and days as long as the spring goes on so this idea of automatons was crucial to the extropeianism because the idea was that what if we can have Systems computer systems that go on forever where you cannot destroy it like goes on like a clock so with extropeianism what you get is when they wanted to talk about

eternal life like Immortal Life where basically uh one of the ways to extend life would be in either augment the body with electronic things or upload the Consciousness or eat healthy or one of the very longevity things but the problem they had is outside of the human body is even if people lived forever we need to have property that is also Eternal so for example if I have Euros or dollars in my pocket and if I live for 2000 years I cannot use the same money because all money and everything is based on the legitimacy of countries all nation states and nation states are not there forever and so this is why one of the ideas that initially they pioneered in the extreme Forum way before crypto and all that was

immutability which is they needed a system where you could have a store of value which can never be undone which can never be removed which can never be tampered so what that means is if I have 1 million euros in this new system that can never be undone then I can if I'm frozen for example like hell after 1 000 years if I'm woken up the money is still there but in every other way that was not possible because you don't know what will happen 1000 years so this is my immutability in many ways was a kind of a technical way of arguing for immortality without sounding you know mystical or woohoo so this is why Fiat money is definitely not Immortal so

their argument was because the legitimacy of weird money depends on nation states so if Nations States so for example we have money from you know 3000 years ago but that's not valid anymore because those states that validated those money are not there anymore so this is why Fiat money is not Immortal similarly centralization is never Immortal because if you strike at the center of a centralized Network the network dies so we need to have a system they realize which is not centralized so anytime like in the case of Bitcoin if a most nodes go down as long as there is still enough notes going on technically even a seeing a lot going on with the highest difficulty the network still goes on so

it is something that you can't kill crypto so so what you get as a result of that the extravian movement and this is why crypto was a result of the extruption movement was death to nation states because they are not immoral dead to Fiat they are not Immortal debt to centralization they're not Immortal debt to intermediation generally model so anything that is not Immortal or that is getting in the way of having Eternal property needs to go and this is why the same people as I said like Nick Zab or Anthony all the pioneers of Bitcoin we're all chatting in this extrupian forum and this is where they were discussing how they could come up with this kind of a new kind of electronic money or something like that and as a result you got Bitcoin this is by the

same people smart contracts and everything was pioneered in extropean forum and the cryptography Forum also the sub Forum was initially started as a extropean sub Forum so but how do you do that how do you get this kind of a magical thing that never dies so you could argue it's I mean there's a there's a tag behind it the rhetoric that was there in the extraving Forum was some kind of alchemy so basically if you could turn ones and zeros in digital gold and this is why the rhetoric of digital gold is so strong in Bitcoin because that's the idea even the idea that turning wasteful computation proof of work into something very useful something that backs the security of the network so immortality in terms of

machines and systems became an idea that machine A system that can fight against its own debt which is the idea of autonomous systems shut down proof systems and this opposition with attack vectors that was like there was no Community before extropeans that were so obsessed with making systems that would go on forever and ever and ever and this is why if you've been in any crypto startup or product or anything you see half the time we discuss about attack vectors like there should be nothing left possible that somebody could attack why because it needs to be mortal so this is very Elemental because even if you think in terms of health in his life it's very like the culmination of Bitcoin and half in his end of life is very similar because he died in the

Alcove he's Frozen provided that in like hundreds of thousands of years the ALS syndrome which he died of the disease they will find a cure but if they find the Cure they will wake him up and then get the Bitcoins that whose private keys he has in his mind use it to fund the Alcor all thousand years of keeping him alive so what happens is this the idea of Bitcoin living forever is intrinsically connected in this case to half any but also other people's life forever because before Bitcoin they were really obsessed with the idea and the extravians that how can we have something where say my body is uploaded my mind is uploaded in the computer but what if somebody

turns off the computer what is this power cut and die I'm not alive to do anything but the real is with this idea of Bitcoin if I have certain things that people who need that money like the servers or providers and all that they need the money which I have whose private keys will I have in my mind so that would mean that you keep the system alive forever and ever and ever so this was a very clever trick to achieve immortality of sorts or at least have a way to do that so this is very crypto in many ways you will see forces us to have a kind of a debt of Concepts that were used before because so this is what I call Fiat Concepts like even the idea of death which comes from like pre like all

sort of uh history we have always thought death is normal I mean there's no way about it but the extrupians were one of the like people like in modern times the first people who took this so-called spiritual release and idea of immortality and you know what we can't even challenge this idea that has been given to us for all of eternity which is of course you die they're like maybe that's not always have to be inevitable so they decided that we could have a kind of a death of all feared Concepts like not just death which is the beginning but even the idea of identity and this is why in crypto you have weird sense of identity with Anonymous identities and everything and one of even if it died of like some of the terms I put there these

are some ways which have in the last 10 15 years crypto has made us question like anybody who has encountered or worked with Taos they know the whole idea of quality Corporation what is an institution who is the person becomes completely trippy to the point that we are forced to have this Fiat concept the concepts that came before crypto institutions persons users like we're forced to abandon these ideas like even the idea of user in a regular Tech application a user is somebody who does the username password they use the system they don't say but in crypto in some platforms at least you can use your coins to vote for us and decide for things you can participate so you're no longer just a user which is also a term

for addict and same thing for example for like the whole question about crypto being like is it a security is it a commodity usually it's much more clear but in crypto it's really difficult to characterize and we know the history where ACC is completely clueless every day they are trying to figure out it is a security is it a commodity it is what it is they don't know and that's good reason because that's the thing that so much kind of a lack of intellectual uh understanding by SEC or Regulators whoever it's just this these crypto brings us a reality which is so alien that we cannot use our old Fiat Concepts and and and this is why the cryptos crypto like crypto means literally

hidden what's hidden inside crypto is this feared remnants like things like these ideas of identity users like as if the identity and the actual human being has to be one-on-one mapping which is not the case you can have like I mean the very idea from the beginning that you must not use the same key twice probably key twice you could you should keep reading that means what like you will have multiple so-called identities but they are not real identities because they are just like key signing pairs so even the idea of identity even the idea of views or the type of Institutions everything is up for grabs now and this is where it's a real problem in crypto like crypto is dead unless they Fiat we have thinking in crypto like thinking in terms of

users and and institutions and like all ways that we are used to thinking when we build technology when we build applications has to go and this is why crypto forces us to radically invent in completely radical alien views of the world which is like would make no sense in a pre-crypto or other than crypto kind of world and so this is why my really My Hope Is that we stop using pre-crypto Concepts like for example we hear all the time people use um like the philosophies from like 600 years ago like the idea of social contract things like that and they don't always exactly fit in crypto because it is really weird the way we come together

the way we do consensus and all that and so this is why this is the point against philosophical complacency and this is why the one of the key tasks in crypto that we need to bring it to the next stage if we don't want it to die is to do philosophy every single step of the way we should not be complacent with the terms that we have been that we have gotten from like thousands of years because just don't work I mean I know we do have so much work happening every day in Tech innovation in New Economic Innovation even legal Innovation but rarely uses rigorous philosophy like where people are like you know what the basic concepts that we are used to like what is an institution what is the net what is the state and you know biology

talked about Network State opt for grabs we can't use those terms anymore as if they mean the same thing and I don't know what those means but that's the task of philosophy to figure this out and this is why you know this is the real question that I have like who is doing this scary new philosophy like ask crypto like philosophy as crypto philosophy in crypto like are we really inventing New Concepts are we listening to crypto when crypto is telling us clearly the ideas of the like one easy example is the commodity versus like security what is ease and what is all these things like are we coming up with the third category fourth category I don't know like completely new ideas that even like if you think of like Mev it's forcing us to

think of what it means to have an exploit what it means to have an hack what it means to have you know like all these things are for grams which you cannot use anymore and this is why we need to eliminate all hidden feared assumptions in crypto when we build applications and so to to kind of recapping what we talked about resurrecting and that crypto is sorry what happened here don't know how do I okay I I'll scroll through sorry okay yeah so to recap crypto is dead but then I mean like there's a sense of like

Resurrection fundamental to crypto because that was the beginning of the extropean Forum that can be of systems which can be resistant to its own death not by not dying but like being able to resurrect this is why in crypto even if nodes go down as long as some nodes are up it'll come up so this Obsession that crypto is dead which means Long Live crypto which means that we need to let all the fear things die in crypto which is Long Live and prosper now I will actually read a love letter so it'll be super cringe okay The Tao of ethereum is not the Eternal down but if you struggle Against The Tao of ethereum you will struggle against yourself but if you are dancing then you

could gracefully move around Four's worth of fighting The Tao of ethereum is a wonderful world and land for abstractions but no abstraction can escape the Tao no matter how useful emphasized or ubiquitous but any abstraction in the Tao can become much less useful emphasize and ubiquitous The Tao of ethereum is more like the Dao of a cyberpunk metropolis in cyberspace the Tower of ethereum is less like the Tao of a simple or an Ideal Tech object the Tower of ethereum was born out of the Tao of Bitcoin was born out of the dial of blockchain not Bitcoin was born out of the Dao of cryptography and distributed systems of the Tao of

Economics was born of the Tao of law of morality of struggle okay the Tower of ethereum is the Tao of Cypher spunks conducting experiments with urgency and high stakes is the Tao of cyberpunks operating outside the conceptual perceptual grasp of the adversaries and peers The Tao ethereum is the Tao of punks holding on to faith that eventually their struggled will not be in vain The Tao of ethereum that we all are going to make it you know the Tao of ethereum is the Tao of punks reimagining the foundations of law of Economics of

governance at least The Tao of ethereum is the Tao of punks being taken advantage of by organized crime multinational corporations is BF and government agencies Regulators the Dao of ethereum is the Tao of punks creating vacuums for other punks to film indeed Bitcoin was born of a vacuum created by the Global Financial system it's a story of Resurrection because it everything was going to die and that was the Genesis block happened 2008 crisis and then out of the death Long Live Bitcoin indeed ethereum was born of a vacuum created by Bitcoin that he could not run

smart contracts ethereum too was born out of a vacuum created by ethereum ethereum 3 as an exercise out of the vacuum created by ethereum 2 and the three is more like a philosophy it's not really a such is the Tao of ethereum so there is this idea of the other day sitting there manual was asking me and I liked this idea he was asking me what is a love Punk and I like the idea because we're talking about punks here because Punk is somebody in English language who goes against the grain like who challenges conventions or things like that and that's what we need to do but how we do the punk like Cypher Punk being somebody uses like cyber stuff or

to do the punk thing the medium of the punk is the word that you had before so love Punk with somebody who does the Revolutionary Act of challenging convention through acts of love and that's what we need to do and that is philosophy 101 to like if you really listen to crypto if you really love crypto you would have to like like in everyday design exercises in crypto applications we cannot just be like be okay doing doing like you know okay we do a crypto economics we do all this stuff which is nice but we have to do truly we have to be a multi-discipliner truly multidisciplinary and by truly multiplicity means that not like having this is another myth that you have in in

crypto which is like I am not technical enough you hear that all the time in conferences and stuff like when people say oh I want to challenge how things are done but the technical people this is a myth you know why because like I have had lawyers tell me a lot like I'm the technical Anuja how can I intervene in crypto I'm like but do you think law has no techniques like like stem people have taken over the field so badly that they have convinced everybody that you guys have no other field has any techniques as if that is this is like bringing it every day which is not true like to do rigorous philosophy you have to like study deep and not just study a Wikipedia entry of social contract while you're on the theater and next day you

tweet about it because you just learned about this social sciences either you have to really do the rigorous work of doing that and that's what a love Punk is that's what what I'm suggesting like we have to like do prop philosophy and we do not let be bogged down by things like I am not technical enough those things have to die the Shiri I like dichotomies of like there is a Fiat world like you know only some people get to say what should be the way to design a Protocol no we should all come together and do philosophy together so that's that's the shortest of it but if anybody has any questions I'll be happy to [Applause] [Music]

just one thing I will add there are some fake multi-disciplinarity happens in crypto all the time where basically you will have teams where you know they will have you have seen those diagrams whereas like crypto economics at the middle and then there is law government is that and the other so what happens is ultimately is like the economics and the crypto like the stem people at this Center who are deciding how to have all the recipients come together which is just fake municipality because that's the thing that you cannot give disciplinary privilege of only people who studied the hard sciences and not people who study social sciences and that is really a tragedy in crypto so I hope you change that that kind of stuff so I think my time is over