Episode 259: 2022 End of Year Wrap with Co-Hosts

Transcript

welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] in this week's episode I wrap up the year with my amazing sometimes co-hosts tarun Guillermo Josh and Kobe for most of the episode we take a look back and try to remember what happened in this past year it's been a rocky rough ride and we try to highlight the things that stood out to us and where we seem to have landed listening back I do think we

missed a lot of key items so maybe if you want to tweet at us what you think we should have included look for the Tweet about this episode over on Twitter our Twitter is at zero knowledge FM and tell us what you would have added to your look back at the year oh also this is the final episode for the year I will be taking a few weeks off but expect us back mid-January with new episodes all about ZK cryptography research use cases and maybe we even Branch out a bit further to explore the intersection between ZK and other emerging Technologies but first we do our look back I do want to just share a quick note from one of our supporters of the ZK Summit 8 back in the fall polygon polygon continues to make leaps in zero knowledge their technical leads have made enduring

contributions to ZK technology including the circom language for generating ZK proofs as well as Innovations in recursive proving expect more in 2023 for the latest on polygon ZK Solutions visit polygon.technology blog now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by Mina protocol a new era of ZK power decentralized applications is coming and Mina is the place to build them the team is committed to delivering the most accessible ZK Tooling in the space Mina's ZK apps are written in typescript so you can use familiar tools like npm Visual Studio code prettier and eslint it's easy to get hands-on experience building zero knowledge applications on Mina without having to

learn a custom programming language you can follow the team on Twitter at Mina developers and share what ZK use cases you're most excited about so thanks again Mina protocol and now here's our episode foreign co-hosts of this show so we have Josh Cincinnati tarun sheetra Guillermo and Garris and Kobe Gerkin all here with me to talk about this past year and actually I hope with this episode that we could do a look back at the year a look at our current time and what's going on and to look to the Future it's like the Christmas carol of ZK podcasts and we'll see how far we get

um this is unlike other kinds of episodes that we've done the you know it's not super organized and we're just gonna kind of wing it we did something like this at the beginning of this year the one we did in Amsterdam when we drank a bottle of tequila and some of these other like makeshift wacky ones yeah even in prepping this one we as we started to go through the timeline of this year it's been kind of insane extremely depressing very that's one way of putting it so maybe to kick off why don't we start from January so it turns out almost nothing happened in January when we

looked into it January seems to have been quiet but on February 2nd we started off with the Wormhole hack how much was that again I don't remember do you remember 300 million I thought it was about 300 yeah but it was 300 million at Solana prices then uh and given that Solana is The Biggest Loser of all layer ones price wise um I'm sure if we discount it you know whenever people give you inflation-adjusted uh you know costs you also need deflation-adjusted costs and I think the deflation adjusted costs here means it's quite a bit lower bear Market adjusted costs yeah which is sort

of weird because it's like that hack happened and there are all these SPL assets that people thought oh no they're not backed by anything in Wormhole but it turns out a lot of them weren't backed by anything to begin with anyway uh going on later in February we had the 24th Russia invades the Ukraine setting off oh yeah that's right we all got everything got thrown up with that one it's funny because like February I like one of the other things that happened maybe this is more show relevant but tarun you and I interviewed sriram which I feel like set off a Cadence of episodes of like sriram and all of his

collaborators that kind of lasted well well the thing is we I think we the the direction we went was we went to his advisor then to his advisor's advisor yeah or no actually we went to his advisor's advisor then down right we found the bridge yeah we're missing part four anything else like okay so I'll say sort of on our front in March we did ZK hack mini in a job fair but like that's q1 do any of you have any other Recollections from q1 of this year the fun launched so it was official okay uh when I first started oh that's cool that's that's a happy note it's a mostly happy note yeah yeah I think it's a happy note that the fun launch for

sure I mean I mean I think I think the key to evaluating any uh investment vehicle in in and around cryptocurrencies in 2022 is to ask whether you avoid any of you avoided all the minds in the Minefield and yeah I think you did do that so so yeah you it's it's not Roi it's like did you avoid any negative multiples I guess uh yeah but let's just say we didn't avoid all of them but it's yeah foreign okay moving on in the year so now we're entering Q2 and this is where I have to say it gets very exciting well April we did the ZK Summit seven that was really fun Amsterdam Dev connect

people got together super fun yeah well actually wait going back to q1 did anyone go to East Denver I didn't so for me it didn't register you did okay was it fun it was cold okay um I I will say my hot take about eat Thunder which is there's absolutely no reason to host a conference that has more people attending it than your largest stadium uh in a city that is like freezing in February uh outside of historical Vestige that a bunch of early ethereum people were there so they still hosted there but it's actually like one of the worst cities that you could ever host

this event in like people were standing outside for like five blocks of the concert conference venue it was like a disaster it was like one of the worst organized events I've ever been to and then you go to Amsterdam it's amazing it's like it's like it was like night and day event horrible Denver was yeah and Amsterdam wasn't like it never felt too crazy crowded at least from my perspective like I never really waited I don't remember like lines and our event was really smooth it was like actually decentralized in Amsterdam like there's many different venues where it's like they like put everything into this one Stadium in Denver and like the line it made no sense okay I think my concern about Amsterdam uh yeah I bet I bet the conference was great I just worry that

I'd be dragged out into an unmarked van by the Dutch people yeah and not charged with any crime but detained first this all happened before people realized that yeah we didn't know that was the thing that could happen then oh how innocent we were um okay so we had had Bridge number one fall although you know revamp Wormhole then it was Ronan axi because I feel like this is a bit of a theme of the first six months eight months of the year it's just like every few months there'd be this big bridge hack yeah yeah it seems like maybe the first part of the year was like technical hacks and the last part of the year was

economic yeah X other other pillars falling oh I guess here's another random update for Q2 which is not so sad it's uh it's the first time you and I have met in person Anna yeah it was in Amsterdam totally there you go that's a cute one there you go one positive note and a sea of negativity yeah and that was actually like May and Q2 was my first like post pandemic actual travel which was very happy for me but it was and it was to New York and I got to actually got to see tarun yo we got yeah yeah we got coffee I saw James and then I went we actually like a bunch of a bunch of crypto people went to a really nice dinner while Tara was melting down which was actually actually a thing to

recap actually is when we go through each of these events when you reach an event that's large enough you have to say where you were oh [ __ ] it happens in June doesn't it isn't the full crash is it ends with may I was at that dinner in May when like it was getting super depegged I believe okay yeah I was at a Mezcal area in Mexico City when that happened and everyone I was like half the people out there was recruited people half of people were to Illuminati Shaman type people and uh you could just see you could see the table like how half the people were just like the world is great the other half the people were like where's the bottle of

mezcal that's funny the Luna for me like Luna I don't remember clearly I didn't remember the date I mean I do remember I remember the impact of it but I wouldn't know the moment that I heard about it although there are other events from this year where I could Peg like exactly where I was yeah I don't know I was I remember like frantically I think writing a class and then having to somehow incorporate stable coins into it because like everything had gone to [ __ ] I've not been teaching a class right at that time so I just remember being like oh crap and I have to make slides about this like stupid crash just like damn it like more work anyway sorry I like the way you just put that by the

way that there was these like technical hacks before so it really was like the multi-chain and bridging this became like a very question people started to question like you know are we pushing this stuff out too quickly how do you actually make sure that they're safe starting with Luna there's a Cascade of other things happening right it's Luna's June like end of May I guess 3ac mid-july in July yeah there is another Bridge hack Nomad on August 2nd and it's followed by like on August 8th and this obviously hit our ecosystem the most but tornado happens right so that's six days later which to me is that's wild one reason to

hate hate uh FTX and SPF is uh all the TV shows and movies are gonna ignore all the stuff we've talked about so far and just focus on uh Focus yeah on Sam yeah yeah which is like a kind of a boring scam I mean I I think at the the rest of uh tornado developer is much more interesting it's not a scam but it's interesting it's much more impactful for us you know so it's a governmental scam depending on how you see it yeah but you know but actually I guess going back to that that was like a very short amount

of time I didn't even realize how close that it was yeah you know I I remember I got like a haircut around that time and my uh my hair salon so I've gone to for like 12 years was like wow you got some real pandemic grades I was like yo it's been a year since since I was like in that mode like what are you talking about like I I now when I look back on it that was like right around back in tornado okay so this is August post tornado I mean in the ZK space at least it's sent I mean I think it was so impactful the ripples of that just like how each team had to find their position on this on like do they lean into compliance do

they lean away from compliance like where you know where are they gonna position themselves around it in the ZK space that's definitely like a pivotal moment still ongoing like they did release what is it the FAQs a few months later that clarified a few things but I don't think we've really seen anyone try to use like so basically one of the things that happened with tornado and by the way we're gonna we're gonna speak in this I should have maybe said this earlier but in this episode we're going to speak like you know we're not maybe going to give all the background but I will say for tornado there are like a few episodes that I did looking at the different aspects and when the when the thing first came out there was so much kind of confusion and almost like overreaction on the part of other

projects or like emphasis structure projects like companies where they started to Blacklist things or censor like they were basically like anything touching this in any way could potentially land on a blacklist so or block list so there's all sorts of um immediate reactions and then after this point there was an FAQ released where we actually learned a little bit more detail but even in that I think there's still so much lack of clarity because it's not really been tested right like we don't I don't know if there's stories of people who've actually gone and tried to petition to get their funds out do you know anything about that actually Josh have you heard about that uh other than that you know concerted effort by coin Center and a couple of folks to bring about that

lawsuit which is not not really like a petition to get funds out I haven't heard of anyone trying to like go that go that route yeah because in the FAQ they do they did apparently say there is a path to do that but like yeah I don't know if anyone's done it yeah actually gone maybe a question if they did would they they be public about it yeah true true yeah given that they're privacy oriented what's also crazy about it it's like this Confluence of strange events because that happened right before the merge right after the merge I'm trying to before it was like right before four yeah a month a month before right and it emerges this amazing you know incredible like achievement event in our industry and he goes like really remarkable right

but then it opened up the Avenue for the you know ofac level censoring by validators that it's like oh great or sorry block producers um uh and it's like great lovely we kind of like spent it didn't feel like a speed run but it felt like the merge was you know we're like really charging ahead with it and then first challenge up is great now we have like some actual like effective nation state level censoring potential right um you know it hasn't actually affected things to um too Gravely yet because it isn't really that that widespread although just going back tornado happens in the beginning of

August what it revealed and now I'm realizing something like September and October a lot of the narrative at least it started with like will validator censor and then it was sort of this realization that actually you know at the Mev level there are these kind of points where censorship can happen in almost an easier way and that reveal was kind of fascinating like that I I don't think we could have necessarily predicted that that's where it would fall but maybe it's kind of good that we see it at this moment like it's still very fluid there's things we can do to mitigate it yeah yeah and I think I think one one thing that happened was that a lot of people started to think

about the technical solution like the cryptography that would solve it and I don't think the solution is cryptography here it's just going to delay the the end so a lot of confusion around that as well on like how to solve for the Mev problem or so um yeah for example I feel like you're going to ruin when I say Mev problems but like oh what is she saying here it's not a problem though yeah um so no like um that you you would be including transactions that are encrypted in the blogs without seeing them and then you would be forced to to process them like with the threshold encryption kind of stuff

but I'm I I don't know I'm not sure that I'm convinced that that's a solution do you think it's just too far off like no I don't think it's uh technical it's that big of a technical challenge it's definitely doable it's more that okay so you're including an encrypted transaction that you can say oh I didn't know what I had there but after a block you do know and like you kind of still participate in it so it's not entirely clear what it means so well just to play obviously very biased Devil's Advocate on that um like I I think one could make the devil has bias Rocky really

uh but but I think one can make the case that if you're if you're running you know infrastructure where you're running that infrastructure to participate in an ecosystem and purely legitimate means but the way that that infrastructure functions requires you to participate in a way where you propagate transactions that you know nothing about or include transactions that you know nothing about and you know whatever blocks you're producing I mean I think there's a legal defense but there's there's also just like a practical defense of like I'm just running this so I can push my super legitimate you know trading transactions I have a full record I can give you this view key Etc and you can see that and it you're right that ultimately you still have to rely on people feeling like safe

enough and running that infrastructure right um and that's like on the social layer rather than like the technological layer but I don't know yeah I think actually that I need to be the Devil's Advocate I think that's the devil right so um I I think actually that what what would happen here is that you know someone could say and again like I'm not saying this is what I think but like someone could say that if you participate in that ecosystem you should have convinced that ecosystem to censor it on the protocol level or whatever you know yeah yeah I could see someone I don't know making that argument going back to that tarun and Gamo I mean you guys were doing a ton of work and

you're still doing a lot of work on them on the Mev front but did you like did you already know all this stuff were you already like because you were so much deeper in it like for me at least like tornado happens and all of a sudden I'm like oh wow that's what they're doing and that's what's possible ah I think that's more a problem of like the proof of stake security model honestly than anything else you know to Kobe's point right like even if it's encrypted the next block you know who did it part of the reason is in proof of stake you effectively have to register your addresses on each Epoch and so you kind of know who the people are who are who are going to be possible possibly selected within an Epoch you know and that's one of the biggest ways the proof

of stake security model is significantly weaker than proof of work where like this notion of like adaptivity like people can join and leave whenever and like you can't really keep track of who's registered to be in the lottery to win the next block there's been a ton of work on cryptographic solutions to try to make the two equal the one I like to show a lot but like I think is like it's very far from being implemented is is Nikola Greco's um single secret leader election like basically that would give you a way of like having the leader election be not known so you couldn't couldn't do this uh post-hoc type of analysis but we're just not it's like a beautiful paper it's just that like somehow you know we're just like not there at like the implementation level yet I mean there are some toy versions

of this but my point is like nothing that's going to be like in production like running on stuff is there yeah yeah but but the Mev part is separate then that this that's what I did right all right yeah at high level I think it's less like there is something to be said about Emmy Venus because like and then you know whatever in minor Circle value like miners actually do actively include like specific transactions and like some more generic way that isn't just like pick the highest bidding ones but but fundamentally it's more of a problem of like you know you know ahead of time that you're going to be picked at some point so like you better better have a good answer uh before you get there right which is uh I guess in this case of compliant uh but that might not be

the the good answer here merge happened after tornado that's so weird yeah I think it did happen completely thought yeah wow okay I had that internally flipped too for some reason yeah so it was it was on I remember because it was on the day of CK Summit September 15th that's right everyone was late for my event because they stayed up all night but then they came good okay so yeah the merge happens after and that's why maybe that conversation started more in September October I don't know and I feel like in my Twitter sphere as it was like the first one of the first things is kind of started getting discussed as like an important consideration or whatever and like a bunch of protocols were like

oh [ __ ] like is this is this us too you know or whatever and a bunch of people started like thinking about self-censoring before yeah uh doing kind of anything interesting yet okay did anything else happen in that quarter that you can remember so we're talking Q3 this recent this is but this is right before I'd say like one of the biggest ones I mean the three AC thing was like you know the stake teeth you know people realizing that a lot of the synthetic assets that they thought were one-to-one or not yeah again then but like ironically that was like the biggest drop for an East related asset and it was like eight percent and it's like every other staking derivative in the world like

looks like the Zimbabwean currency like in some ways so like it actually you know get gifts they need some credit it did pretty well okay so now I guess we'll roll into November or October November when when was when was the time where all the ZK VMS battled who was the first oh wait that was that was in July if you remember this I mean I wasn't there but like during the ECC week in Paris there was like all the zke EVMS announced on the same week um oh yeah I forgot about Paris Paris actually happened that Paris happened yeah this is this is semi-chronological

folks did anything interesting come out of that conference yeah I guess are any of them and excuse my ignorance here but are any of them actually equivalent to the evm or were they just announcing paths toward evm equivalency well they're each different some are like actually evm compatible on the op code level and some are not there's arguments between them which is the more ZK evm of them but um I think if is your question how far along are they yeah like were these were these announcements were people just sort of bum rushing announcements because they saw

like someone announcing first despite like what you know whatever stage they were they were in um and like how far along are these actually Concepts yeah I think aren't they from what I understood that announcement week was an announcement week it was like road maps it was not okay we have it and it's ready and it's ready to use yeah it's more like you can try it now and feel the user experience but okay it's not feature complete yeah that's kind of oh really wait even in July Kobe would you have said that they were usable do you remember when 2019 was announcement of announcement season like every [ __ ] crypto project would like make an announced announcement about an

announcement they're gonna make in 2022 they just made future announcements without revealing this is the equivalent of that oh my god oh I hadn't realized that Kobe I thought I actually thought it was more of a announcements that they were going to do stuff yeah yeah most of them announced that there will be something to do soon okay yeah but not not long after you could have tried it but yeah most of them were announcement of okay we exist and we're the first so okay so now let's like I'm trying to figure out what happened did anything happen in October really eh I feel like it was a chill month relatively like maybe it was October Celsius because Celsius also

yeah so like imploded but I can't remember if it was September or October so I think we googled it was like July or something yeah do you remember Celsius Celsius was like pretty close to I thought it was closer to three arrows they're very similar timing we could just look it up actually although usually trying to rely on memory is just an interesting exercise and crap you know there's some that I have a good Baseline for because they just like affected stuff I was doing like literally at that time and then their stuff was just like yeah I mean they're gonna happen at some point when you're

going through like a series of unfortunate events happening in a row time doesn't really like obey special relativity anymore it's like it's time dilating it's time Contracting or slower right yeah it's like exactly you just like lose causality too it's like very bad I don't have the cancer math for that truthfully so I think okay I think Celsius happens somewhere between June and August I don't have an exact date because oh man yeah there's at least the quick survey I just made what was oh gosh I feel like in September October like FTX was bailing out so-called bailing out block fights robbing customer funds

right yeah that's what I mean like bailing out some customers with other customers money yeah right that is what I mean and it's funny because like it's FTX was like I felt it was on the other side of this industry from what I do it was like stadiums and models and like sports people I mean sorry that's just the marketing part of it but it was just like you know exchange and exchange and derivatives and like Market making and like these big Financial things that like I don't spend time with that often and I don't know it seems like a different part and yet that impact it's impacted everybody like

it's swept across all of us even if you were far away from it yeah so where were you when you found out that this was happening because I can tell you could yeah can you tell me what the day was it was November 8th that like it was clearly screwed up like November 7th had question mark like maybe something's happening because they were started tweeting mean things publicly to each other F uh SPF and CZ it's easy yeah and I know it was the eighth because we did a ZK event in London and Kobe was actually in London so Kofi and I got to

meet in person for the first time in three years yeah oh last month that was so cool yeah this was like good timing to fly to meet the like to visit the geometry offices and like to meet all the team like right at the time of but you landed on the day that that happened and then we had this party and it was a really nice party and obviously it's more ZK people and but the topic was yeah like holy well like do you see what's happening over there right Josh where were you I was I think I was like literally exactly where I am now but getting to Twitter like in my home office just scrolling just thinking I was really thinking to

myself like no way there's no way I mean I always knew they were a little sketchy but there was no way that they were like flat out Ponzi fraudulent you know I just know I actually I couldn't imagine that we didn't even fully know that on the 8th no we just knew that they were in danger no um we sort of knew that I don't know but by the way you mean tarun I think the ftt ftt stuff was way more clear by that point because you could like see all the liquidations and like people people getting wrecked yeah like and the fact that I think it was like I remember I was going to Mexico for this like I I'm always in Mexico I know I was in Mexico every year or

something someone else pay me not to go to Mexico yeah holy [ __ ] dude that's where you're lost it was this particular this particular investor had this event and they may or may not have had some investment have TX and I remember like going there and everyone was very Shell Shocked wow and I was like that was like a very interesting way to do it because I'm like oh wow we're in this like a nice resort in Mexico but like also the world's exploding yeah um but I remember that TT stuff was definitely very clear but then that there was something very weird going on I mean the fact of the matter is for Alameda to have had what

was it like minus three billion ftt short but it's like kind of ridiculous which you know that I think obviously that's what triggered everything but like I think people realize that a some of the public borrowing numbers you could see suggested that like something was wrong or on FTX this platform as well as that balance sheet was just uh ridiculous and you know I've known Samson's before he got famous and you know he was always someone I personally didn't really trust that much so I I can I can say I I always I like kind of like Josh like yeah I always thought they're robbing grannies somehow yeah like front running everyone like whatever whatever Pension funds there I

didn't think they were like literally robbing grannies I thought they like actually used some skill in the middle but clearly it was like two that was too hard so they they went straight to the oh but it's like kind of this like really sad thing right of like if you go rob someone for a hundred dollars you go to jail but you robbed eight billion dollars and it's like chilling in the Bahamas well yeah playing now while you're doing uh you know no no no no even worse playing some shitty game that he bought with customers money storybook whatever and then Shilling it on the puff piece that he had commissioned the New York Times okay how come the mainstream media's kept kept praising those people that was

weird yeah it was weird it was really awesome I think they've gotten sort of wise to it but like that first week was ridiculous it was so strange depressing yeah um over a year ago when I first heard about SPF and this like effective altruism giving the money away I remember I asked you like so I had heard about it on a podcast and I was like oh is this relevant should we have him on and your answer was very good it was it was basically like you could have them on but you're never going to get a straight answer out of him like he's just gonna sell you something and given the type of show I think you want to have like I don't

think you're going to enjoy it I don't think it's gonna be like nice and so we never had them on I'm happy that you that you gave me that advice a fair warning from taruna is very valid usually yeah EAP EA people are very difficult to trust in in my experience wow yeah because they might take like a spider might approach that backstabbing you is actually a plus net util for some future trillions of unborn people somehow I think I think the problem is like there's this fundamental flaw with like long-termism mixed with this idea that you're like optimizing utility because like long-termism on paper sounds really good right it's

this idea that like you should like invest now and things that like last 10 000 years whether that's for like humans who live then or whatever the environment that's there but the problem is if you don't give a time scale and you you kind of take the like very simple philosophical tenets that like the philosophers who started this in Australia in the 1990s like Peter Singer I don't think any of them were so caught up in like the utility function thing as much as they were caught up in this idea of like very simple axioms like if you read the original singer papers on like say animal cruelty the number one thing he focuses on is okay let's if we take the following Axiom which I personally don't agree with but this is the one that kind of creates all EA in some ways

that like all pain is equal and all pain should be reduced which you know I I don't know why you necessarily agree with that but like if you agree with that then they have a bunch of like sort of deductions they're like okay that means you should like instead of buying a can of Coke I should go buy a mosquito net to like go help someone and who who's gonna die malaria now the problem is like there's no end point to that set of deductions and like reality is not infinitely liquid you can't keep doing this type of stuff forever or you can't keep like saying we're gonna like keep projecting out to Infinity before you look at like kind of the harm you cause in local space or local time and so I feel like what

happened was like the Oxford and Dustin Moskowitz grouping of like Dustin Moskowitz has won the Facebook co-founders who founded Asana who's like was the main funder of EA prior to this and then there's you know some professors Oxford like blooming high school they basically like were like doing the whole like hey you should just like work at some job that makes a lot of money and then donate all your money and they like kind of started that ethos and then then it started getting mixed in with long-termism and like the three of those things kind of without any bounds on what each of them were doing like kind of had became this chaotic system that you know led a lot of people who are probably [ __ ] to like suddenly be able to justify anything

that they wanted to do via using the tenets of these three philosophies and I think it's kind of just unfortunate for some facets of it like some facets of it actually don't seem so harmful but it's like it's sort of like a you know Stein's Paradox type of thing where it's like you have three things that are uncorrelated independent don't really matter but actually like somehow they conspire together to give you like a worse thing than than any of the three individually could give you wow uh and like that's sort of at least that's my personal retelling of this and of course SPF was like the the king of this type of thing and even in 2018 with his co-founder of Alameda who quit Rage Quit uh and was

like Hey like you shouldn't make him the head to the Center for Effective altruism around the board like they kind of ignored it so like I hope they die a merciless death as an organization metallic say something though word like SBF is a dude who did something super bad but does that mean that everything that he did needs to also be labeled as bad or was there anything good I think the organizational malfeasance or the Center for Effective altruism is quite large like to the point that you might as well restart and it gets back to the fact that there's multiple things that interacted here that on the surface individually with some constraints and Bounds are individually fine

from like improving the social welfare of humanity but combined clearly can be used to be justify any Machiavellian thing that's possible I think like sure don't throw the baby out the bathwater but like examine whether whether you had a mutant baby and the Mutant baby like grew into like this like monster who pillaged the village and I think that that part is like hard for like vitalik's view of this I think is he was sort of close to that community so it's like he probably does feel like their aspects are good and like sure I I I maybe there were some but I think like the net harm is so much higher that you should really reevaluate what components you're adding together

there particularly if you try to instead mash up one of those core tenants with another of the whole cryptocurrency industry which is like decentralization and individual sovereignty and choice like frankly at like that level you should be maybe more focused on uh putting your resources to work for like local problems that you think could be better served rather than like try to take on you know oh I'm gonna need a couple billion dollars for XYZ to fix this massive structural Injustice when it turns out that's just like a faint for corruption on a massive scale but I don't know that gets maybe a little too philosophical I I mean in general if we

look at the 2010s and like include the last two years clearly the making the world a better place thing has been the greatest way to like yeah assuage people of any bad action you do yeah whether it's in tech companies whether it's in FTX I mean FTX is a much worse case in a lot of ways but like it's not so different right it's like the same ethos just expanded it's really hard to call it effective when you look at it like that it's ineffective altruism I mean why why is like Kevin O'Leary that like annoying Shark Tank guy getting 15 million dollars like out effective like shouldn't you bought

mosquito Nets with that like you could like go through the list of all the people who were paid off and it was like where are the mosquito Nets hey I mean if it potentially increases your like future reach or something and then afterwards the mosquito Nets in 5 000 years we bought by the the pr you bought right now right exactly yeah the profit immensely is what you're saying is like the in a lot of ways the fallacy is like local actions can all add up to the right like Global action even if like on average a little screwed up and it turns out that that's not true right like things that seem locally correct if you just like do them a lot uh turned out to actually give you like very bad results and limits um I think that the way you said it is

is very cute actually which is a reality is not infinitely liquid I think is the is the is the greatest like through and quote that like of this maybe not this entire season but it's pretty close I just I just think like people don't think about discounting the future right like yeah yeah but that's fundamental problems clearly like it's not even they discounted it they like valued it so much more that like they kind of destroyed the current state I mean it's it's also the whole thing of like here's the other shitty way of stating it which is if you have a like a a series that's convergent but not absolutely convergent you can rearrange the terms to make it any number you want right that's that's the classic case so so that you could take the steps in any any thing you want

to actually get the result you want uh and that's how effective altruism looks like effective machiavellianism exactly so like like fundamentally like you can you can any conclusion you want you just rearrange the steps in the right order and now you congratulations you know that's like a shitty model of it but that's the that's the high level idea it's like local properties don't are not always don't always neatly translate to like these like Global ones well well we we learned that they don't like reading books according to that Sequoia piece so I I I I I I guess if you don't read books you're not going to know the difference in different types of convergence rates I guess I do have a hot take which is I don't love reading books but uh I guess I do have I do read textbooks I don't

know you do read some yeah you're not also not go you're not like zero bragging on the internet that you don't read books and that yeah that everything should be written in a six paragraph tweet thread yeah that's fair I mean that was such an embarrassing article like I I like there's nothing I can say about that that was just like you know there was this whole thing I remember in the last five years about how like a tech companies and Venture investors need to like own their own narrative and like you can't trust the media ironically I definitely try I've never mistrusted the media more than after this ftxing but oh yeah ignoring that this whole thing like oh like we're gonna be a venture fund and like run our own Media Company uh and you know like a 16g started this magazine which I think shut down like

recently and this idea that like somehow it wouldn't turn into like the marketing section of like an old school magazine was sort of misguided and like I'm sure a lot of them realize like the liability from running these media companies is is like infinitely higher than the the value from generated from them especially when people just constantly can point to them and say I can't believe you thought that about this thing you invested yeah going back to the press part like it did seem almost like he had they had put enough out there they had enough press and PR people behind the scenes who had made you know relationships with the Press so

it was like as it crashed those relationships were still intact and these articles were still really positive and they had said all the right things right I learned I learned a word which I had not I tweeted it but like I'd never heard it before the shivalith am I saying that right yeah yeah awesome work That's a classic uh if you're one of the rationalist circles I think is the do they use they're post rats I guess which I don't know why but I've never heard that word and I was like whoa and then it was like he was so it was so performative and they had done it with that completely like inside knowing like this is a performance and then they did it anyway and then you see it worked to a level until it crashed so like the

Press tour that he's basically been doing on Twitter spaces I don't know if that's a great thing for him but does anyone understand why like I I just like don't really see the point of doing this like isn't the main the main thing is to put himself in a position like he wants to be seen as incompetent and not malicious so it's like to go out and to get public opinion to believe incompetence like constantly was like I just didn't know no I made it that's the theory I've heard and then it's a little bit less shitty for him and cool like there's so much recorded evidence of them bragging about their risk management skill and their liquidation engine which clearly failed in Congress yeah yeah yeah they literally said this in a [ __ ] cftc

I don't know it's just like then again the New York Times still writes dog [ __ ] about this like embarrassing dogs it's like I never watched Fox Business News in my life or read anything from until now because that is the newly mainstream media in the US that's actually covering the the facts as opposed to like oh isn't it cute that he's playing a video game during all these interviews whoa yeah it's real like accelerated gel Man Amnesia I think for so many if people are unfamiliar with that term I guess listeners you know it's this uh I think it was popularized by Michael Crichton uh yeah that's right he because there's this physicist Gelman I guess that uh

taught Michael Creighton that like any time you you read the newspaper back in his day and you read something about some new physics Discovery and your theoretical physicist you're like this is so absurdly off base this is wrong I can't believe it and then you flip the page over and without any sense of incredulity you read the international news section and accept it as fact and and this experience this phenomenon is now I think what so many people in crypto have an experienced it before are like speedrunning it as a result of seeing all of this crazy malfeasance and then having that disconnect with what's happening elsewhere in the media you know um it's not great not a great feeling Murray Gelman is actually more famous

for his other invention which is a quirk but I just thought oh yes yeah that prize-winning physicist yeah and then used to run the the Santa Fe Institute and stuff like that so he's he has a lot more that he's famous for than this unfortunately perhaps I think in the popular culture I think this one is uh this one wins uh sad so oddly this the FTX SPF crash Roux of November did seem to like push tornado for art like even in the ZK space it sort of pushed like it pushed it back into our psyche we're not like so I've been hosting a legal group where we were talking about

like right when tornado happened we brought kind of brought it back to life bringing together a lot of General counsels to talk about the tornado issue and then in the last meeting we had uh you know people were like well right now everything has shifted Focus also on the hill towards what happened with FTX it's just changed everything and so it's yeah it's been kind of fascinating how impactful that was just across the board I I sort of want to continue with our with our past present future idea for this episode I think this brings us pretty much to the present I'm just curious how are you all doing how are you feeling um I guess good I don't know it's like it's been an insane year in a lot of

ways but like overall it's been pretty good I guess Sharon and I are working on some like kind of ridiculous insane paper which is made me pretty excited lately I I would I I would I would shill it as this is probably the best idea Guillermo's had in his life it is like far too kind but uh you know thank you uh or uh or not not thank you depending on how I battle you think my other ideas are I guess maybe you think all my other ideas are really [ __ ] so I don't know unfair um but yeah no it's been good um I think for the most part for you know certainly about as good as the year could have gone but for you this is your first non-academic job this is right yeah yeah weirdly I mean to be in the

workforce and participating in the in the labor economy ah yes you know here in the coal mines like you know mining difficult you know I don't know I mean it's fine actually I do the same [ __ ] that I was doing as a PhD student essentially I like to call myself the glorified paper editor of uh of uh BCC so but but for the most part it's been good I mean I haven't really like if it feels like it just kind of shifted to I have more conversations with real people uh but I still write papers um which for better or worse uh I think it's bad for the outside world to to come in contact with like weird academics but um no it's been good I think but you're feeling good you have some new work can you give us some hint for what this is

oh I think saroon has a has a good set of descriptions for it maybe I don't know I'll uh do you want to do it say it you know we we've had all these like vignettes about Nev over the last year of like sort of some theoretical properties you can prove about them you know and there's sort of always been this question at least the cryptographers of like hey does there exist some sort of fair solution Fair ordering solution now one problem is fair ordering never accounts for sort of at least the way it's defined in say like either the arbitrum paper or Dahlia Maltese paper Etc there's a notion of like fairness that doesn't take into account economic fairness so like sure

your your transactions might get some guarantee about being in a certain order but I can still sandwich you and it doesn't like it may not have actually lowered the economic impact at all and it costs more because it increased the latency of the network or it made it harder to submit transactions so there's sort of this like mathematical divide between kind of some of the papers we've worked on which are like trying to quantify the economic impact of someone reordering your transactions or removing your sensoring your transactions or adding new transactions and the sort of distributed systems papers that sort of make a definition of what fairness is without regards to the economics but they can't say anything about how much

more expensive that such a process is than what you have now and uh I think we have a way of doing that and showing that I think a lot of the fair ordering stuff has a lot may not work as well as advertised so wait it's a negative paper not the positive one it's negative about Fair ordering yeah but I mean it's positive about like understanding like what things you can do and can't do to reduce and like versus like just being like Oh like yeah we're gonna add in all this cryptography to and guarantee certain slight properties about the orderings it doesn't necessarily like reduce the economic impact and some of the

questions like what are the things that reduce the economic impact and hopefully this gives some guidance and time right so so the the high level like idea is um unless you think about the mechanism that you know you're actually like ordering for there's always going to be kind of like bad scenarios that could screw you over and that's the main point that's that's the main point that essentially we're showing in this paper is like other than like unless you pay a very large cost for doing something essentially for like roughly like averaging out all the possible like possibilities you're kind of screwed there's always like something someone can do to like sandwich you or like add orders in the middle and has a very weird and deep connections to like a bunch of like crazy theory that like

seems totally useless uh and maybe it mostly is but it actually turns out to give you the right description here for some reason or another that was like very magical and uh yeah cool so we'll have to look out for it I want to ask Kobe where are you at today so yeah I I think like things are going well having fun with in Geometry we have I'm working with good people um smart and good which is a good combination um and you know cryptography is is always useful like it's not that if if the market crashes then you know maybe

there is less activity on defy sometimes but cryptography is something that you do and it is going to be effective years into the future so I think we have we've been working on really cool stuff and I think I I just checked something I noticed that one one thing that we published was on November 7 like when that was happening and it still got a bunch of traction like it still got traction despite being right yeah because people once still want to do cryptography even when things go wrong so yeah cryptography the only real long-termism I have I have been feeling like doing ZK

hack over the last month because like we're recording this right before our last session it's been really nice it's like it really felt like away from the storm and this like cozy Community that's just really keen on learning and doesn't care about the stuff out there that much it was nice to do cool math so that's when I do cool math okay Josh where are you at where are we at that the real question is actually like where are we at as an industry so I think yeah yeah well actually so I can answer I can answer both personally and Industry why maybe I'll try sure uh well actually two personal notes I was very happy about in general in this year one is uh while I was in New York James

alphalit tarun's eyewear uh proprietor which is where I got these sweet glasses from so I was very good glasses on this called the listeners can't here can't see that but they can't see it but that's part of the mystery so yeah that's part of the fun I think it is it is um so that's like good news number one the other thing that's that's uh exciting for me personally um and then I'll go to personal industry but um my wife and I are expecting baby number three crazy yeah that is it that is done um

the the now the more relevant one to you know your actual to your listeners um I think like so I am finally getting back and the ring as as you all know but like as as others know and I penumbra's already been chilled so many times in this podcast that I won't reshill it uh so I will there's a full episode everybody listen to it um but yeah I'm starting you know get to start a new organization that's contributing Upstream to a number called radiant Commons and I get to you know build an organization like I did uh with the Z cash foundation so it's really exciting for me personally be doing that but I also think and this I think really actually like uh flows into why why this is a great moment for us as an industry

despite all of the negative news or maybe even because of it um so the tornado catch stuff I think actually in my experience has been it's really emboldened privacy Advocates it's like demonstrated how much more important it is for us to be pushing the envelope on that and that's certainly been I think the view of uh penumbra supporters and people that are interested in that protocol but I think even more broadly than that right and part of that story I think is also the idea that like we can build protocols and Primitives that prevent an FTX style collapse right that for building protocols that give people fully auditable uh you know cryptographically auditable measures

about the state of markets without having to rely on centralized providers and their trust me bro uh approach to uh collateralization like that's great um yeah and I think that that's really where uh like where I think a lot of a lot of people in the industry are very excited about the next couple of years despite the bear Market is like all right we had our like fun yield farming defy summer thing a couple years ago and now we're actually going to like kind of go back to Roots about to Our Roots about how we can actually like demonstrate that these systems are measurably better than the horseshit that has been viewed as like the you know crypto to uh you know all these

other people right um so that that actually excites me great deal cool I like that something I just want to note because I know we actually have to wrap up in like three minutes because Guillermo you have to leave but we didn't get to the future without me it's totally fine well no but here here's an idea what if we reconvene in the new year to talk about the look forward we might also have like have we might have had a little bit of time off which might not like hopefully Genesis doesn't explode by that that's all I got to say Genesis oh yeah but Genesis hopefully we walk into Christmas with like

we made it it might not be sure just FYI this air is on the 21st so yeah we still have a week before anyway tarun we didn't really get to you I do want to ask how are you today what is the state of things as it stands today and then yeah we'll we'll finish this episode in a way part two in the future I feel like there are all these memes in 2018 when I was like first really like full-time paying attention to crypto that had all these people who are like there was these like 3D memes of like these these like molten blue alien things holding bags and they were like walking over lava and like they were melting and they were like it

was supposed to be like bag holders melting like not making it across the pit and at the end there were like the three survivors and the three survivors were like Bitcoin eth um I forget what the third one was like tether or something uh it's a feel like I feel like I've made it to the Survivor thing provided nothing else blows up but also yeah just like definitely motivated by the uh research progress lately I feel like I feel like it was a lot it was actually quite hard to work get a lot done between three arrows and FTX but it's like once the big one blew up it was like all right I can finally like because like otherwise you're kind of like what's gonna blow up next what and like like it kind of influenced how well

you could like think freely yeah at least for me you do have one on your mind though now hey yeah but these ones at this point I'm like whatever I I can't do anything cool thank you to all four of you for joining and uh thank you also for being my sometimes co-host over the year it's been so fun doing interviews with all of you it was it's super fun yeah okay so we're gonna reconvene beginning to make one prediction oh okay make one prediction which is next year the ZK podcast is going to have a lot of episodes on ZK and its intersection with machine learning oh yeah oh and maybe I thought

it was MVP yeah I'm disappointed never mind no I think I think like 2023 bear Market will be the time we we talk a lot about that that's my guess I think that's definitely possible what a year Wild yeah really hey we're all live yeah yeah and not and not doing Twitter spaces every five minutes [Laughter] although thank you for joining the one I did a little while ago true and I appreciate it oh yeah well that that's different than these uh these ridiculous oh yeah these like I feel like 20s or 30s like show trials but like in Reverse like an inverse show trial I really want to do a parody space where

like I'm role playing SPF and someone is pretending to be an interviewer I feel like that would actually be a lot of fun I think James should interview you that would be great actually I'll text James that would be really fun I've been trying to get someone to do that because I just feel like this is ridiculous like we need to stop giving him air time you do good Impressions too but SPF Impressions just involve a lot of like um um well and then I need a mechanical keyboard no no you need a mechanic there you have to like do that every once in a while mechanical keyboard oh yeah yeah true and like repeating the question under my breath saying I'm still putting the pieces together yeah out of that just over and over and over again

yeah before I sign off I just want to let you know that I'm going to be taking a little break we won't have episodes coming out for the next three weeks and we'll be returning mid-January probably with the looking forward at 2023 episode so looking forward to seeing everyone there I also want to say a big thank you to the podcast team Henrik Tanya and Rachel and to our listeners thanks for listening [Music]