Vitalik on Starting New Countries and Improving Yourself

Transcript

this is the first episode of the network State podcast I've been on many podcasts uh I guess they've had millions of views collectively and I've probably had millions of people asking me to whenever you can do your own podcast well we're doing it okay this podcast is about Network states of course but it's also about everything we're interested in from the positive vision of human Improvement to uh you know obviously cryptocurrency but also biotechnology drones nuclear power and all the policies we need to actually legalize all this amazing stuff um and I'm going to be talking to tech people I'm going to be talking to policy people I'm going to be talking to interesting people and giving my own commentary and hopefully injecting some

levity occasionally into the proceedings today I'm actually very happy to have our first guest here my friend vitalik butaran the founder of ethereum here to talk to us today about ethereum about Network States and starting new countries and also how to improve yourself as well as his uh particular life hack one weird trick that allowed them to learn Chinese and and how long was it vitalik it built like three years before I got comfortable enough to talk to people yeah there you go one weird trick to learn Chinese in three years of hard work so you'll talk you what he did all right thank you very much all right well uh we're underway um this is the first Network State podcast and uh obviously you know we've

talked a lot about a bunch of things like rather than doing you know tell us about yourself and background all this stuff I will assume that that's on tons of other podcasts I think what is maybe a little topical that we can just talk about is ethereum from concepts of the present day because we just had the merge and uh you know what is ethereum after the merge what's the future and uh you know then what happens after that why don't you tell us about that sure so the ethereum project started around the end of 2013. so what I had been doing before then was uh I basically finished a well not really finished but I was uh about five months into a Bitcoin trip around the world uh this is uh basically

something I had started in June of that year just uh visiting what was the Bitcoin community at time so like yeah I visited like the Libertarians in New Hampshire the left-leaning anarchists in Spain they uh you know more a kind of Normie uh Bitcoin community in uh Switzerland and people in Israel who are working on math and covered coins and zero knowledge proofs and mastercoin I had accumulated all of these different ideas and a lot of uh interesting just Recollections of various projects that people are working on and what was interesting in Israel in particular

right was uh there was this really high density of people who were excited about this problem of well what's next right so we have Bitcoin for uh payments what is blockchain for um you know Finance domain name systems and more General applications going to look like in general right and what would a protocol that could actually support those kinds of applications look like their first protocol that was trying to do anything vaguely in that range was covered coins right which basically just allowed you to access other kinds of

assets and and issue other kinds of assets make sure it's actually look at the right other kinds of assets on top of the Bitcoin blockchain yeah but then after this there was a mastercoin which was a financial protocol that supported a couple of applications that were called things like basically things that we would call D5 today so all the color code stuff is in it was pre-2013 when people still thought all that stuff could run on bitcoin and then um I, think, we, met, in, late, 2013, if, I recall right before you started yeah I met in San Francisco actually right after the center of the Israel right where I had started actually working on uh covered coins and mastercoin and uh

basically right after I had started asking myself the question like okay take these protocols as as they are what kinds of tweaks can you make to them to try to make them support more things without making the protocols even bigger right um so I think at the time I get coins and was uh using the service was army knife protocols and what I meant by that right was uh something like mastercoin it supported 10 different types of applications but it just had one transaction type for each application you know there was a transaction type for like registered domain there was a transaction type for open binary Financial contract there's uh you know a transaction type for make a bet on an

event with this third party um as the arbitrator I mean and I started with poking at these features and trying to safe like for example oh what happens if we collapse these three features into one feature that's like one feature and it's a little bit more complex but it supports those applications and it supports even more applications the rich statefulness exactly so rich statefulness actually actually came near the end right so at first I was just making these tiny tweaks then I realized well what if we made mastercoin that had a feature for generic two-party Financial contracts where you could specify a formula and then after that finally what happens if you go beyond two party and you say okay

well what does an end party contract look like and that's when we had or these big insights like well maybe it makes sense for a contract to actually be an account what if it makes sense to to make it possible to send coins directly to a contract so a contract is like an actual like virtual agents that you could interact with so you could call that you could that you know send coins to do all kinds of things with and that's where the ideas for ethereum started to emerge and at the beginning those ideas were phrased in the form of like well how do we modify some of these existing systems but then as the momentum around the project kind of grew as more and

more people started getting interested in the idea then it's kind of the ambition quickly grew and it quickly basically became a project to create a new and independent blockchain right so that's a end of how things started right and I had written this uh big document back in November of 2013 that I refined a bit since then well originally November the ethereum white paper right and uh I think maybe even when we met for the first time I might have tried showing it I'm not even I think there was V it was basically the big room where there was a bunch of people there and actually several companies came out of it actually including blockstream remember everybody came in that room and I said

who are the founders and everybody raised their hands and I was like okay this is gonna be this could be interesting um I remember they're like uh there were quite a few folks on the early ethereum there was that uh conference in San Francisco a few months later where um I, think, it, was, the, one, where, it, was, a coin Summit or something like that in 2014 is that right or at least 2014. it was like one of the first like sort of formal Bitcoin conference like things and I think around that time the whole thing was coming together and uh uh I mean I think the white paper was out by then or closed up I didn't recall exactly when it was public around that time I think it was out by then yeah and so that's a beginning right and how much of

that early road map you know the frontier Homestead Metropolis Randy how much of that did you guys in your view did you stick to what did you end up changing obviously you know getting to proof of stake was much harder than or took took a while but it's now out there so what what you know it's impossible to hit something on the first go and most people would be very happy to have you know with durian but what's your retro on the whole thing yeah I think uh what we ended up doing was uh basically in the spirit of the original Frontier Homestead Metropolis Serenity separation right so the those four words by the way they were from a blog post that was uh published on the ethereum

blog uh by I think it was vinay group to like back in early 2050 and a bit before ethereum launched right and basically the intended definitions of those four stages were that uh Frontier was the launch of the chain but when the channels launched it would be launched with like very explicit um mineral marketing and like understanding among everyone that this was still a beta chin and wild west exactly yeah Wild West lots of things could, change, um you, know, this, is different here you know the standard things that the bank West people say in every episode and then Homestead was would be a milestone of getting a little bit out of the woods of the Wild West

right so basically saying Michael you know the chains run for a while it's uh survived it looks fairly stable so it's okay to consider it a just slightly more mature chain but then obviously we still keep improving things Metropolis um actually this is the one difference so originally there was a goal that the ethereum foundation would create something called Mist which was the ethereum web browser right basically a web browser designed around the idea of building and you know using decentralized applications from inside of it and it was intended to contain things like an app store and I think there were even ideas there at the

beginning of having a Dell that would manage the App Store there would be yeah uh you know security oriented features that could only happen because of the browser they're just a lot of like really fascinated and advanced ideas and I think most of that ended up not happening right instead you know we have like browser wallets so things like uh you know metamask the brave wallet and uh I think more and more new ones starting to pop up lately the one thing that ended up not really happening I think Metropolis ended up being kind of well first of all split up into three stages right so uh there was a Byzantium Constantinople in Istanbul uh the The

Three Forks that happened between in 2018 and 2020 right and uh like Istanbul was the bigger one it added uh support for pairings the cryptographic operation that makes a lot of the zero knowledge proof protocols possible and and then some other features that were enabled by yeah the other two and then in 2020 uh eip1559 and that was something that was totally not predicted initially but it ended up actually being the first like really significant change to the ethereum protocol right basically the idea there was it's a reform to the fee market so to what what happens between

you sending a transaction and that transaction getting included in a blog uh and the process for like deciding which transactions get included how much do miners get paid for including those transactions what are the limits for how many transactions can get included all of those different variables and basically yeah it's uh look the kind of economy uh geek explanation is that it moves if you Market away from being a first price auction which is known to be inefficient and it moves it toward being a fixed price system um but one other way of thinking about it is it adds like some temporary slack to the

block space so if there's very temporary growth and demand uh one block can be a little bit bigger than x block can be a little bit smaller and what these things ensure is basically that if you look users don't have to make this really complicated calculation of am I going to pay a high a very high fee I get included immediately or am I going to pay a lower fee in like needlessly wait five or ten minutes and instead ap159 basically gave us is a fee Market where transactions would reliably get included in the next like one or two blocks right and then after that we had the merge which uh I haven't gotten to that quite yet but I'll kind of poke

into the the future of the past here briefly the emerge would obviously switch us to proof of stake but one of the interesting side effects was that it made block times more regular right instead of a poisson distribution where you had like a 1 12 of a chance of a block every second with a merge it's like a consistent Rhythm right walk 12 seconds walk 12 seconds block and that actually he meant that because of this extra regularity and block time blocks would happen like on average you actually have to wait uh two times less before uh seeing the next Vlog even though the average time between blocks is is exactly the same it's this really interesting

mathematical artifacts right and that kind of stacked on top of the fb1559 right because EP 1.59 reduced how long users have to wait before they get included and then the merge reduce that even further and so the both of those two things together like I think the effects of them both were just so visible the differences died in day right like sending a transaction and waiting for it to get included back in 2019 and like a very frustrating experience and today it's like click wait um check etherscan it's done click wait to check users get it's done right it's like very often a transaction gets included uh within only a few seconds like I think uh probably yeah you get a 50 chance after sending a transaction

that will get included in less than about seven seconds or so right the only reason why it's not six is just the probability that like whoever the next Vlog Creator is just happens to be doing uh something weird and you have to wait for the next one so ux improved um ethereum clients improved this is also a really important one right in 2016 there so everyone knows about about the Dao and I think you know the Dow is fascinating and the Dow was kind of fascinating for a protocol politics perspective because there are all of these debates about how you know is immutability like in unlimited strong role that you stick to in every situation like uh is it like a

kind of Fiat ustia period mundosa sort of thing that's a Latin phrase for like Let There Be Justice and uh let the world perish or might there be like extreme case levels on it and I know there was a debate of like would that end up setting a precedence and I think the answer to that actually ended up being much less than people thought right because a year later there was another dispute the EAP 999 where the parody team tried to unstuck their coins and like make a hard Fork to do that and the community just said like hell no like we yeah no we actually explicitly don't want to create a precedent and or we explicitly don't want the Dow to become a president and so they a kind of intactually what's in the other

direction and since that there haven't been really any attempts to violate immutability to anything like what to happen with the Dell but I want to just ask one question on eip1559 because I do remember this and I'm actually looking at it again and it looks like the big difference is before it was an auction which was in well first a first price auction as opposed to like a second price Victory auction is suboptimal but the second thing is it just introduces noise and unpredictability into everything because you have a fee market and so on and looks instead that you went to a protocol set base fee so that if you pay that base fee you're guaranteed of being included and so the unpredictability is somewhat decreased and I'm looking also at block times and

they've also flattened out and the variance has gone down since emerge it was a little bit more variance before the merge um is that correct or am I am I off based on that yep yep no both are very correct okay great and actually it's interesting because um I I you know I had known about EIP 1559 I hadn't like tracked it closely but it's interesting to see that that combination of things um is what has been responsible for kind of faster better and more predictable transaction fee inclusion on the Dow um do you want my perspective on the outside just watching the whole that thing I I didn't hear that go ahead yeah so first is during the Dow you were the and for those folks who don't know because this is now ancient history and crypto terms it's seven years ago it's

2016 when ethereum was I think Bitcoin was starting to hit congestion problems and a bunch of folks were checking out ethereum in early 2016 and it had gotten up to a billion in valuation I think thereabouts in early 2016. there's this project the Dow that was trying to do effectively uh an on-chain VC fund um but it was trying to be autonomous and so on even the name Dao was probably arguably Antiquated it would be really it's not really an autonomous community and uh it's uh or not autonomous organization and so from the outside what, happened, was, I, think, it, was like, 10 or something of all eth was in the Dow was, that, right, it, was, um actually, it, was 11 and a half million East which is uh a bit under 10 of the East that exists

today but it was I think 14 of the youth that existed back then okay so it's like a big chunk and so what happened was this uh you know Dao attacker uh read the code and figured out some way to sort of drain the the Dow contract but there was this thing where there were like a there's like a white hat approach which could keep going back and forth and keep like undoing his thing and that was just going back and forth and I think there's like a 30-day clock or something before you before it was like a final transaction or something like that was that is that right and then you were going to get in a patch before that 30-day clock went up to stop those funds from being moved somewhere am I remembering that correctly yep Ballpark and so the thing about that

was I remember from the outside watching that I was like you know now I have sympathy for Bernanke because there was a systemic risk to the whole system and this sort of intervention could save the system potentially but would it create moral hazard and so on and so forth or what have you and I I just understood in the same way that when you start a company you're a CEO and you understand what it is to be CEO or you you teach a class and your professor you understand what it is and you're like okay now I know what a smart-ass kids were were on the other side right being actually in the position of essentially Central Banker you're like okay I Now understand why you know they're there did you have those thoughts at that time where is that something you were thinking about I

don't think I I use the Bernanke as an analogy but like I guess just because um you know the those kinds of like monetary and finance issues are probably a little bit less of a primary category for me and then they are for a lot of the other earlier crypto people but definitely similar thoughts it's it's interesting because I mean ultimately the justification on it is that ethereum has succeeded and that there hasn't been despite significant pressure other sort of reversal things put into ethereum like of course there was that unfortunate hack of uh the parody wallet for example and then they were trying to get an EIP in there I believe to like move the funds or

whatever but so far while that's very unfortunate I don't think there has been another thing that's like that that is like allowing for community reversals of transactions so that means now we have stable governance I guess we're out of Homestead fully and you know was it formally in Homestead around the time of the Dow uh yes so hopes that happens in March 2016 and the Dow got hacked on I believe it was June 17 2016. yeah so it's still basically it's still basically beta so that's I think a fairly good justification for beta versus prod as to you know when edits up so now now we're post merge I mean and I was um I was just crossing my fingers actually before we get to post about I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the

the other thing that happened in 2016 just because I think it's uh it's equally fascinating but like tense atmosphere people have heard of it um so okay so the time is uh 2016 September 19th um and in the background of this time was that the Dow had gotten hacked months ago and the Dao hard Fork that had uh like done that kind of surgical intervention to the chain to just like delete the Dow coins and move them into this other place uh had happened about two months ago the whole situation where the ethereum classic community rebelled and made their own version of ethereum um had that refused to implement that

change had happened and the entire kind of Market drama where um you know you had Barry silbert push trying to push ethereum classic really hard a whole bunch of characters kind of buying in early trying to get it to flip ethereum uh when you had uh a whole bunch of exchanges uh supporting it I'll I'll adjust a whole bunch of people really like watching and seeing you know which of these two chains would win because this was uh the first time there was uh any kind of like literal crypto civil war between uh two chains so that that had all happened and the ETC price had hit a maximum of you know 0.4 East and then it had dropped again um and it had dropped I think a bit

below 0.1 at the time and it just felt like maybe just maybe you know the ethereum community was finally on its way out from being in the kind of Dao Arc of uh the plot of the story but then at uh 5 15 a.m uh Shanghai time on September the 19th when I was uh staying in the uh hotel where the Devcon 2 was literally about to start in three hours into 45 minutes I got this military style wake-up call but just woken up by a call I picked it up and someone from the ethereum foundation had said hey you

know we have a situation you need to come down now so I pretty much stood up grabbed my computer and put my get computer in my computer bag I'm gonna walked out of the hotel room an elevator down walked over to this room where I was supposed to go and I saw about you know 20 ethereum developers gathered in a room and at that time they were still trying to figure out what was going on basically what had actually happened was that someone discovered a bug not in the ethereum protocol but in ethereum implementations that would cause it to process a particular type of transaction much more slowly but it basically yeah

instead of uh taking like end steps to process a transaction that I had and computational steps in it in this one particular case it would take N squared steps right basically because it was like each single step of the evm would add one extra thing that the that the the node would need to worry about um and then so the first thing it would be in the first step would need to worry about one thing and the second step we need to worry about two things and third steps we worry about three things right until one quadratic like this kind of bug could totally have happened actually a a quadratic bug actually did happen in Bitcoin right so one of the justifications for not it what are the secondary justifications for not

increasing the Bitcoin block size uh back when the Bitcoin block size debated happened this was uh one of these like techno one things that again all of a sudden no one knows about right is the quadratic attack issue with hashing so the quadratic attack issue with hashing in Bitcoin basically as yeah it is I think it's I think it still is but um the only for old style transactions uh segregated with this fixed it but basically that if you have a transaction that has n inputs then to compute the hash that gets used for the signature in each of the inputs you have to Hash the whole transaction Reddit so if you have any inputs that each of those and inputs need and different signatures you have

to create in different hashes and each of those hashes contain um you know at least kind of like the structure of all of those inputs um and so each of those hashes will be size n i mean so you would have n hashes of size n in order to sign a size n transaction so you need o of N squared hashing right and because Bitcoin is just like because it was just hashing and not evm execution and it's because Bitcoin just has a lower absolute limits to its capacity it ended up being I think okay for Bitcoin as it is like a worst case block at that time I think ended up taking like 30 seconds to process but if the block size had increased that would go up quadratically right so if the

block test has gone up from one to ten then the uh the worst case block time would have gone out from 30 seconds to 30 000 seconds which is almost an hour right so so it's not a turret complete this issue right it's a quadratic like literally Bitcoin also had a quadratic execution uh issue and that ended up influencing at least to a slight extent I think It ultimately happened for other reasons the swab Block versus Big Block discussion in the ethereum case it was uh it had to do with the implementation and way the way that the system handled recursive calls or or just like long towers of calls in general so like a calls b equals c or it could be equals a

calls a um and how it create but basically what it created I called the VM ended up copying everything and the the amount of stuff that got copied kept increasing with every call um so there are actually a whole bunch of these different quadratic execution attacks so the attacker discovered the first one in uh at you know early morning uh Chinatown time of September the 19th um I think the attacker might have even intended to kind of create a nasty surprise and basically make the ethereum Chain break on the morning of Defcon ouch right uh but we ended up working um you, know, really, yeah, hard, and, really

intensely for those few hours we had uh by about 6 30 a.m I think um isolated the bug uh by like maybe 7 A.M am or so created the patches that would fix the bug um and that's pretty legit that's hard to do for a subtle bug that's actually quite difficult go ahead it absolutely was yeah and then by like 8 30 a.m We had I think published the patches of people were starting to download them and at a 9 25 a.m 25 minutes after the intended start of the conference uh we uh we're all kind of confident enough that everything was stable people were running the new nodes everything uh was working as expected and the network was

running fine again and the conference basically started uh pretty much as it had been planned to start right so we had turned a in a basically an attempt at creating a PR disaster for us I think uh you know into something that really showed the unity and the uh well just the dedication and the confidence of the guest developer team right I think it's uh one of the other reasons why I kind of wanted to tell um the, story, which, by, the, way, is, not done yet um is uh that uh you know like the core devs really are these kind of unsung heroes of the ecosystem and they tend to be more introverted and they

tend to be less podcasty than um you know myself or Justin but they've just done a lot to make ethereum the ethereum clients faster and to really enable like let's say the 7x capacity increase that the chain has had since uh since it launched right but it took a long time to get there right so that was the first attack and then when Defcon finished on the evening of the third day the attacker discovered a second attack a few days later the attacker discovered a third attack there was a fourth attack there was literally this month-long period where we were literally in constant cyber war between the Geth and parody development teams a gif in parody

were the two ethereum clients that were functional at the time and there would be often periods where either death works and parody did not work where Purity works and get the network and a lot of users ended up switching between the two clients so really frequently um and the two teams were both just like frantically putting out fires that this attacker was starting an attacker was figuring out every single bug in each of these ethereal clients pretty smart guy or that attacker was yeah yeah his uh really impressive right and then finally a month later he discovered a bug which was not in the implementation but in the protocol itself right this was a bug with the self-destruct of code that basically allowed it to be used to do some uh a real would basically make the

ethereum stage much much bigger using a very tiny amount of gas and that and that bug had it been left alone like it would have been fatal within some number of weeks right because basically the ethereum state size was just bloating up and once the ethereum state size blows up too much then there would just be no way to do any kind of caching and that would make a theory even slower in other ways there we had to do another hard Fork another emergency unexpected hard Fork to increase the gas costs of a couple of operations to just make those uh um attacks just not viable in the future you remember that and do you remember the second hard Fork that uh added a feature to clean up all of the

junks um State objects that the attacker added into the ethereum chain um and I remember basically that at the end of 2016 in December like ethereum's price had dropped quite a bit over the course years being like a long slide down people were demoralized after the Dao and the multiple hard forks and people thought that the this is not you but folks you know like who are in the broader crypto Community or whatever thought okay smart contracts are just too hard and just add too much complexity and too much attack surface it's going to be a while before this thing works and you know much much power to them but it'll probably take a few years then three months four months later you have this gigantic rise and it's like uh you know we should play that rap thing

you know where the guy is like on his back and he kind of gets up like that you know what meme I'm talking about uh we'll put this in the show edits go ahead yeah but you know the the drama was not was uh not not quite over as you said, until, December, right, um at, the, end of November there was this situation where like I had to send a bunch of transactions uh to maybe corrode pythons grow up to send thousands of transactions to clear out this junk that the attacker had added into the chain into the chain I'm like and one of those transactions triggered another bug that had accidentally been introduced that actually for the first and only time like really act proper what actually had a consensus failure like same thing as what happened in Bitcoin in 2013 kind of

split the chain in half um like I was the one who sent a uh the the transaction that like basically broke ethereum in that way for the first and only time which was one of these uh kind of fun stories again but yeah after all that the price had been dropping um everyone knows definitely demoralized and then 2017 happened and uh you know the crazy bubbles of 2017 happened then 2018 happened and the 2019 happens and people in ethereum were demoralized again the end of 2018 was the birth of uniswap which I think was a good a kind of segue into the defy era and then in 2020 we have the summer of defy and uh then you know it started to be nfts and

if these are probably the one thing that I did not predict by the way right like if you look at the list of applications that were in the ethereum white paper and you look at the applications that are popular today the big thing that's in the second list that's not the first is nfts but otherwise you know their prediction markets or D5 there are a lot of, things, right, um and, then, finally, you know this uh last year 2022 the merge happened and that was Serenity right Serenity was always in 10 to be proof of stake and later on we added on charting the basically some kind of scaling solution to that um and, uh, no, no, proof, of, stake, has finally happened congratulations on that so can I say why I was concerned about that I was I was just sure I was

obviously you know rooting for the success since everything but I was like you know a full switchover of the uh of course consensus had been tested for about a year or thereabouts but you're moving the whole ecosystem over and it was a everything that isn't tested is usually where bugs arise and so the fact that that was as smooth as it was and basically a non-event and that they're hasn't been I mean maybe there's something that eventually but but it's certainly nothing at the time nothing in the few weeks afterwards was really impressive it was um it's one of those back-end changes where the whole point is that it's a non-event but a very very difficult to pull off so congratulations on that

um you probably have some thoughts on on that whole transition over yeah the transition took a lot of work right like I I think it actually surprised all of us that the transition wasn't unevented the extent that it was right because every single test run that we had attempted had at least one tiny thing break in it like never anything bad enough that like it would have been a big problem had it happened on the on the live network but it was always like some combination of client settings ended up not surviving and like 10 percent of the nodes dropped off one time 35 percent of the nodes dropped off and that actually caused finalizations it's delay by an hour there's just like always a couple one or two tiny things that would break and then when the real

merge finally happened you know everything just went extremely smoothly right and I think that again you know it's just it's a testament to the quality of you know the uh all of the ethereum client development teams that works hard for multiple years to write the software that would make the transition to proof of stake possible right and basically pull off something that I think some people were describing as changing the engine of a jet while the jet was still flying right it's a pretty really complicated operation I mean like a lot of people I think definitely did believe that it couldn't be done but you know eventually it was done so so now that the Verge has done and I I think the main thing that's left for the

uh for in the original kind of roadmap is uh sharding right and shorting is something that we talked about for a long time but I think the ideas around how sharding would be implemented have changed it's gotten more ambitious right like early versions of Chardon were willing to trust honest majority assumptions and basically are willing to trust the idea that uh like let's assume 50 of the yeah nodes are going to be good people which ill is like a lot less ambitious than like say the Bitcoin Spirit right which basically says that uh you know hey even if 90 of buyers are pushing the wrong chain you as an operator of a node should be able to reject it right like

Bitcoin is not a minor oligarchy it's like a constitutional system where it's supposed to only accept things that are valid and the original vision for ethereum sharding had been like okay fine you know obviously we have to trust that 50 are gonna be honest but then we started being more ambitious and saying like oh can we actually make a system that supported many more transactions that a single node could verify but that was still verifiable in the sense that the system would still kind of force itself to follow the rules and where users could verify the rules are being followed even if a great majority of the consensus participants were trying to subvert that objective right there's a lot of really interesting research and

uh one of the big I think so so what percentage would be trying to subvert in that case so not even like what's the honest it's not the honest majority anymore it's honest fraction of what yeah right so we had like an honest minority assumption in uh some of our protocols that basically required like the user and maybe a few hundred other uh other numbers not even a fixed percentage basically no or is my right hmm right exactly that's really interesting okay I actually I should look, at, that, go, ahead, yeah, um but, it's uh what if the Fateful decisions that we made around 2020 um this is I think another one of these uh trivia that uh is well known within ethereum circles but probably it does it

hasn't really kind of filtered out to the yeah you know the wider narrative mean blocks is uh the roll-up Centric roadmap right this is basically this idea that instead of ethereum itself trying to kind of boil the ocean with uh scaling and turn itself into this complicated hyperscalable system we would make some changes to ethereum that would make it be more friendly to people making layer 2 scaling Solutions right so Layer Two scale like Solutions are like protocols that try to do the same thing that ethereum does but that plug into ethereum for security without doing every single thing on top of ethereum right so most of the work would happen off-chain but just just enough work

would or could be done on chain that if something happens the ethereum system would kind of keep the rest of the system honest right so one of the defining analogies for layer twos in general is like the Supreme Court right like the concept of a exactly the Supreme Court is uh what things are kind of ultimately rest on but you don't literally have the supreme court hearing every single case right you have a whole bunch of these appeals courts and like a whole bunch of lower courts and then you just have the fact that the threat of a court uh case being possible uh can drive honest Behavior without uh most of that behavior ever needing to get into a court system right that kind of analogy

like drives the lightning Network which is that basically the only kind of Layer Two that's possible on bitcoin and it also drives you know State channels which are like the lightning Network equivalents on ethereum as well as Roll-Ups which are this more complicated thing that was only we discovered later on ethereum that are actually powerful enough that you could do smart contracts on top of that right so lightning Network and state channels support transactions and they support uh limited kinds of Contracting the Roll-Ups they support like kind of full-on edms that are that kind of get indirectly verified inside the evm so layer twos um have kind of been the ethereum scaling Direction since then and since

then there have been these discussions around data availability right basically the the Practical capacity limit to a layer two is how much data the ethereum chain uh chain itself can store right because uh one of the trade-offs of Roll-Ups is that they do require the ethereum chain to store a few bytes of data for every single transaction like a lot less than using ethereum directly but still a settlement of data and and that's where stuff like data availability sampling and eip4844 which is uh looking um scheduled to come um you know early to bed maybe maybe later next year is is all about exactly so three well part of

the egg charting is like a bit of a pun right because uh so first they're starting and then there is dank sharding which is uh this uh version of uh sharding which was uh created by ethereum a researcher named dankrad and then there is Proto dangsharding which is called that because it's a stepping stone to full day charting it doesn't technically Shard data yet though it does Shard history and computation um but, it, was, also, created, by, another ethereum researcher his name is proto-labda right uh so yeah so prioritive charting happening next year and the other thing that uh like I've talked to the roll-up teams that they all want to do next year is they want to start taking off training wheels right so the Roll-Ups and the layer twos that exist on ethereum today they basically

all have what I call training wheels like some kind of back door that lets developers uh come in and like say stop and change the the protocol if they see that some kind of bug has happened and like trading wheels are obviously a uh you know an affront to the moral idea of trustlessness and all of those things and nobody wants training wheels to be the status quo long term but basically yeah they're like a compromise saying okay people um like we want to hit the ground running and we want applications to be able to start um you know start deploying on Layer Two is before we can be fully confident the thing that the thing has no bugs and so we're going to have a back door for a while and then once uh things are

stabilized and once we're confident enough in the code then we can finally start switching the back doors out right and all, right so, next, year, uh, yeah, some, of the projects uh are going to actually I I think might be actually taking their back doors out some of them are going to be kind of limiting their back doors and going to a hybrid right where a back door exists but there's like it's not like one person that that manages it and it's not even a multi-sig with a 51 threshold it's like a multi-sig with an 80 threshold or a 75 threshold with members that are like highly distributed in uh between a bunch of different organizations and so it's

like a halfway house between uh you know being a yeah kind of trusted sidechain the in the style of you know something like liquid or in the style something like polygon today versus being a fully decentralized system right where it's like you know the humans have half the votes and the code has half the votes there's probably one sort of mathematically accurate way to think about it and so it's like the senate in the house if you want to override the code you know exactly well like if the uh you know if even a majority of the humans are dishonest as long as like unless you know you have like almost all the humans are dishonest like if it's just a majority then you know the code's still kind of carries the day right but so the

idea would be that if there is some political controversy um that then you know you're not gonna you know you could see yourself getting 51, of, the, humans, but, um you, know, you're not gonna get like 80 percent of the humans whereas if it's a bug then like that's something where it's easy to get like a you know 100 uh uh even agreement that that the bucket needs to be fixed you know not total uh kind of uh you know take the training wheels off and weave it to the code but like a very large step toward that um and actually yeah one of the teams I talked to actually is more ambitious than even that one of the their approach is to basically say we're gonna have a system where we only turn on the humans when someone submits a proof that the

code disagrees with itself so if the code can create a valid proof for something that's valid and that and for something that's invalid then it's inconsistent and so you switch to humans like exactly if you make a proof of inconsistency right which is much easier than a proof of incorrectness like basically just show that it provides two different answers to the same question right like uh you know if like if I ask a chat gpta you know who was the president of the United States in 1850 and I ask it 10 times and one of those times it gives a different answer like that's that by itself is proof that that it's not you know a perfect system just like even two someone who knows nothing about us history right it's like that

kind of idea um so but this is all like I think the details of that are still being figured out but like the thing that everyone is dead set on is that 2023 is going to be the year when um you know Roll-Ups really come to maturity we have 4844 that gives ropes more space and we have uh the training wheels on Roll-Ups that really get weakened um a lot um and like basically yeah uh we go most of the way to these uh uh you know ethereum scale like being this kind of fully trust us and uh so not fully trustless but you know most of the way to being fully trust so most which most we trust those system that kind of gets us to like most of you know we would

call sharding being finished and then after that there's uh Roll-Ups going fully trustless and then there's full tank sharding and I think those things are going to take a couple of years longer but like for me personally I think after the changes in next year like that would be the point the first points where I would feel comfortable saying even if nothing else happens past that point I would be happy with ethereum right and that to me is like a the like my yeah like that that's the personal milestone for me right like the uh you know equivalent of uh like when can we call ethereum done if we really have to call it done well end of 2023 right so merge done withdrawals done uh so be being able to

withdraw, from, the, proof, of stake, system um you know basic scaling done um a lot you know a lot of basic improvements done um enough cryptography added to ethereum though we can support privacy um Solutions, that's, the, layer, on, top, and you know if we need to we can stop there but at the you know we're not going to stop there right and we want to kind of like go ahead and try to actually make sure that the ethereum ecosystem gets support 500 million users before um you know the ball over 500 billion users we're knocking on the door actually yet you know ends up happening that's great uh so that's uh you know that yeah okay so that's the that that's probably the next part of the future you know the transition from ethereum as

this kind of fear very theoretical ecosystem that's still discovering and finding itself to ethereum ambassad ecosystem that actually is you know tries to be useful and usable and uh you know secure and and all those things and like actually provide value for hundreds of millions of people here's a question which you can skip if you want but um basically in terms of ethereum being done so you mentioned you know the trustlessness um you, know, some, folks, have, talked, about like the ofac compliant blocks due to you know the whole Mev issue others have said oh when are when are we going to be able to withdraw ethereum from staking um do you have any thoughts on and then the third is basically you know I think Zuko has mentioned that it'll be hard to

have privacy completely bolted onto ethereum if it's not there at the base layer and I I think I might agree with that third one but maybe do you have any thoughts on those three or do you not want to address those or um go ahead and I think I think they're definitely important issues so withdrawals are the easiest one like it's uncontroversial everyone agrees that it's going in the next hard Fork which is uh I think expected to happen early next year um on the like privacy and uh censorship resistance stuff I mean it's uh there's definitely like a big bundle of uh problems that um I think the yeah if they're in vehicle system is facing at the same time that are important right so it's uh

like basically one of the things that's happened over the last year a few years is the rise of Mev um and Mev like one simple way to get to think about it is it's like the facts that there exist strategies for um miners, or, block, proposers, or, whoever creates the block to make even more money where those strategies are complex and require you to have a complex algorithms to be able to execute on them right so it's basically the fact that like being a really dumb automaton is no longer the optimal strategy for a block Builder the the challenge is like how do we prevent that fact from being a source of centralization um where you know let's say yeah staking

ends up centralizing until like two or three pools that become better than everyone else at actually yeah implementing these algorithms right so that discussion started happening in around 2019 um and uh flashblots came out around that time and then at the same at the same time you know they're definitely you know were mining pools that were independently thinking about how like they would try to extract this extra mvv arriving Us pools um so the that was one of the things that happened and uh the way that we ended up solving that uh problem is basically this concept of proposer Builder separation right where instead of uh the uh whoever creates the block

the proposer uh being able to or lead into it figure out the contents of the blocks themselves they can auction that off to third parties right and they could basically uh run an auction and they can accept bids that say hey here's an idea I have for what you include in a block and if you include this um or you know I'll let let you include uh this and collect the fees and uh if you let me do that I'll pay you 0.018 eth and someone else might say oh here's a another block that I have and if you include this I'll pay you 0.022 if right and there's like a lot of complexities around how to make that kind of Market Fair for all participants

and like make it decentralized that the resisted cheating in the tax funnels on all sides without the resistance or without the anti-cheating itself turning into a centralization vector but one of the things that happened as a result of this is basically that uh you know we ended up outsourced like block proposers ended up Outsourcing too much right like you know what actually we need to Outsource the entire process of block creation if all you want to do is to capture Mev revenue and the problem with Outsourcing the entire process of block creation is that we've moved block creation from this set of more distributed um actors to this set of more concentrated actors and more

concentrated actors are inevitably going to be much more legally conservative and uh even more likely to over comply um in the terms of what kinds of transactions they are accepting right like basically we now have about 70 percent of uh block of the builders that are creating that are actually responsible for constructing blocks that are going into the chain that are refusing to include certain kinds of transactions like I've actually you know I've even like talks to legal counsel that think that they're going too far and that they're even you know blocking uh Transit transactions to an extent to an extent where they don't need to right

but you know the facts that they are centralized actors the fact that you know even lots of them are you know based in the US of the fact that they are actors that are connected to other actors and all these things right like it ends up kind of pushing uh things over to the cons you know to this uh conservative side that like you know goes beyond what a lot of uh you know legal counsel and even you know have you even told me is legally necessary and uh so the good news is that nothing has been censored in ethereum right so the good news is that even the transactions of the type that people are being most conservative about uh trying to censor those transactions can still on average get included into the chain after about

three blocks right uh so actually yeah post EIP one like basically eap1559 it did more to make those uh to make those transactions faster to include than the whole ibv situation actually you should make them slower Canary for ethereum transaction censorship like could you uh there's probably something there but I maybe I should know the site that's just looking at the mempool or uh and seeing that there aren't blocks or there aren't transactions with valid high amounts of fees that aren't making it in so the yes the canonical site for this is uh mevwatch.info that's actually the site where I pull the 70 yeah I do remember this the ofaka blind blocks the at the

top right but the censorship offenders it says censored so it does actually claim that some of them are censoring these entities around censoring MVP relays on their validators yeah but it's improved so that's interesting I have not seen this graph at the bottom the post emerged so so it looks like green is increasing which is interesting and a little bit counterintuitive is it your view that that's going to continue to increase or that green is large enough that that's the free ethereum for a while and it just needs to be large enough or how do you think, about, that, I, think, we're expecting green to solely increase over time right um so but by the way just like my view on like is it are are we in a state that's good enough or not is

that one of the nice things about blocks be a transaction censorship in blocks is that it's what I call a one event trust model right so even if you know you have 99 of uh Builders uh or block proposers connecting to builders that are censoring that just means that someone has to wait a hundred uh blocks instead of one and that's still like kind of fine for them right like basically if you look if you want stuff to be said so you'd have to like reach pretty much everyone but at this same time we had or you'd have to lean on pretty much everyone and get them to stop including um uncensored, blocks, but, at, the, same time like you know given how things like you know Norm Cascades work and just all of their social phenomena like we're definitely not heading the Sands about

this right so like just to give some concrete examples of the ethereum ecosystem being not head in the sand um one, is, that um multiple new um entities announced um in I think is in December in January that they have started uh operating I did see that nonsense during realize right and uh yeah and like a lot of them were even you know entities that are you know outside the US serving stakers that are outside the US and all the and all that um but uh you know they they did watch and uh some people have

switched over to them um but it's uh it's like one of those slow processes because I mean it was staking is like a multi-billion dollar thing and everyone who participates wants to be just careful about moving over infrastructure and all that so that was the first thing the second thing is that the flashbots team added a setting to mvv boost that allows you to say I'm only Outsourcing block production in those cases when Outsourcing the block production is significantly profitable right so if the revenue is like less than 0.05 or some threshold then you can still make blocks yourself if it's over 0.05 then you can uh you know go and Outsource and it turns out that if

everyone said 0.05 is their fee setting then you would have a world where forty percent of blocks would not be outsourced but every have single validator would gain like something like 96 of the revenue gains that they would gain from Outsourcing all of the time right so this is like one of the examples of what I mean when I say that people are Outsourcing too much much and that's a setting that people are starting to use and then in the longer term I think one thing that we want to do is this concept of partial block auctions where I mean basically yeah instead of it's like when you Outsource you set conditions so you say for example I have seen these one these 23 transactions and so when you create a

blog I want you to include all 23 of these transactions um or I'm going to let you choose the first five transactions in the block but I'm going to choose the other ones and if you do this then like you're still going to be able to get like 99 of the revenue from Fallout sourcing but because 99 of the revenue from flow Outsourcing really comes in like the first five or ten transactions but at the same time um you know like if everyone does that then like Furby censorship perspective that's great the chain is going to be fine right so that's the that's the base chain, um I, think, uh um the other thing that I I think is worth talking about is like the application layer perspective on privacy which I think is important like privacy is super important but I do think that

there's like there definitely are these kind of extra legal challenges that have to be that have to be navigated right like basically yeah so you know tornado cash exists and tornado cash still exists right but like even if tornado cash has um is still completely yet you know usable and uncensored from an ethereum protocol perspective that does still in practice like like the legal actions have in practice a little bit of its usefulness right and they've limited its usefulness for two reasons one of those reasons is that it's uh you know become extremely legal or risk at a use for uh us persons but the other reason is that if you

receive a tornado cash coin you're going to get a lot more trouble from like exchanges and the entire rest of the kind of crypto Fiat Bridge ecosystem that needs to comply right like one approach to trying to kind of uh deal with that is to basically say you know we're going to make privacy a defaults for everyone and uh we're just going to make it uh you know impossible for anyone to distinguish themselves from anyone else and also and maybe we can do this and then we'll move on to other stuff besides crypto stuff but it seems to me like something where um you know whether it's commit reveal or zero knowledge there's like a bunch of different Dynamics but

where miners can't see what transactions are including nobody can see what transactions are including it takes away Mev that's a justification for it on a completely different grounds and yourself privacy baked at the base layer where you intentionally make miners dumb pipes in a sense right they're blinded to it and there's probably some clever crypto you know cryptographic tricks you could pull to make that feasible and then you also support zero knowledge for the transactions themselves not just the you know the mining process and so something like that where the system cannot quote discriminate against transactions because it cannot tell the difference between them seems like where you ultimately want to

go or you know tell me tell me your thoughts on that yeah and I think at protocol level um moving in that direction it would definitely be a really interesting but maybe you could do it on an L2 yeah but but I mean like at application Level I think it's more challenging right and add application Level I think the like I mean I know this is a very controversial topic and you know people have uh um you know all kinds of opinions on this and I think uh like my view on this is probably yeah a little bit more willing to compromise than uh some of the purists which is that like even though like I think that

the ethereum change should absolutely have like layer one censorship resistance as the hill it dies on and uh you know if it has a choice between um you know censoring on L1 and uh you know even like a 50 chance of getting killed or like it should even take a 50 that take the 50 chance of getting killed because what's creative or what's credible neutrality is of the chain is broken then what's the point but on the application layer like like first of all you know I think uh you know there there are legitimate concerns right so like you know it is true that a very large portion of the inputs to tornado cash ended up being these large-scale G5 hackers you know it

is true that there are a lot of uh large-scale criminals who are using these uh using these systems and who would uh use these kinds of systems if they ended up you know even big kind of becoming much larger unchanged which one of the largest criminals is maybe supposedly the North Korean government so would you say government was one of the largest criminals I think they just go yes keep going very, possible, you, know, um but, it's, uh and I think just also from a philosophical perspective right like like, if, I, had, to, choose, um you, know, what would the right uh kind of place to be in terms of financial privacy like there's this uh so there's this slogan that you know even I think a lot the The

Cypher pugs originated like 20 or 30 years ago which is uh like what we want is transparency for the powerful and privacy for the week right yeah like surveillance but from beliefs right exactly and I think like even outside of uh law enforcement use cases like you know people appreciate the facts that they yeah can do kind of Open Source on chain analytics and like track the crazy billion dollar stuff that's been happening inside of FTX or um you know what some of the other large exchanges of doing or whatever right so I think uh what would be what would be nice uh you know is a world where there was something approaching complete anonymity for small transactions and um

you know very high privacy for medium transactions but where larger transactions and especially transactions that um you know huge amounts of uh people don't like don't even you know wants to make attempt to mix themselves in with um you know don't necessarily have that same level of privacy and the interesting thing right and the interesting thing about zero knowledge photography is that it actually lets us do this right so here's like the simple um way, to, do, this, um so, imagine, a version of tornado cash where when you withdraw from tornado cash you make one proof which is uh proving that you know you have a valid coin that's positive to

the system but you haven't done you and you haven't withdrawn yet which is the thing that's being proven now but you also add in another proof which proves that you are not one of um let's say 23 addresses that like chain analysis or some collection of or of organizations uh decided you know our large scale possibly North Korean hackers right so like you as a user decide to say hey I'm willing to mix myself in with the randos but I'm not willing to mix myself in with large scales if I hackers and contribute to large-scale Z5 hackers and anonymity sets right and if let's say yeah 95 of users take this option uh then the anonymity set of the words you'll see if

I had to reduce this by a factor of 20. right um and, so, that, makes, like, privacy, for large scale D5 hackers much smaller without affecting privacy for everyone else and like the the really nice thing about it is that it's incentive compatible right because like you as a user you know you want to I think prove that you're not a large scale defy hacker both because um you know USA user you know I think morally don't want to support that kind of behavior and because you as a user don't want to get this mistaken for a possible D5 hacker and you know get a higher suspicion score whatever because of this right have you ever seen the ending of The Thomas Crown Affair it's the uh it's a scene where they all are wearing hats and they're

indistinguishable from each other and I think what I just uh you know Zuko has talked about this as well but it's not a private transaction it's a privacy set right that pool in which you can so I think uh you know your comment there just made me realize that um privacy is actually a collective good that a group can choose to give a member or not it's not that it's not just a technical thing it is that because obviously there's cryptographic kinds of privacy where you can't invert a function you know determine who wrote something like you know let's say you Hash a document you can't just invert that doesn't matter how many people around it but a but a collective privacy does exist as well for some use cases and think about that as a tool that you

can dial up or dial Down based on cassette is interesting just an interesting point um I've known about in the context of zcash I just hadn't thought about it in the context of something that the members could selectively do actually you know in ring signatures that's more common where people are choosing who's part of the Ring right but I just hadn't seen it in just this particular context which is interesting so do you want to switch gears for a second we've talked about crypto for about an hour we'll spend one more hour on other stuff all right so second big question first big question was basically what's going on with ethereum which we know about the history what should we know about you know what happened with the merge and with all the stuff in 2016 and you know uh how does ethereum actually become a final product

how do you get past uh uh you know the issues with uh um ofac compliant Miners and how do we increase Freedom there how do we get past uh the withdrawal issue there's a pull request or you know this is going to be a hard Fork on that early or next year and then how do we add more privacy we've talked about all that stuff okay so now Switching gears um here's a big question ready all right so vitalik you have uh you know as I've said many times we've started new companies we started new communities and you yourself have started a very important new currency so if you could go one more level what new country would you start and why um

so I think it's uh importance to approach that question not from the uh the kind of larpy point of view of like I wants to have a country because countries are cool right it's uh like this like it's actually important I think to kind of dig down into um you know what is a country break it into its constituent parts and look which of those constituent parts do you need do we need in particular you know which of those parts and what combination are valuable for people in the context of um you, know, being, uh, just, out, of, uh, the grand old year of 2022 right um I mean the serious version is what is the single biggest problem in the world

that you'd address with that new country or would you for example disagree that there'd be a single biggest problem as per our discussion the other day maybe you can go into that um right so I think uh one of the ways to kind of break down a country right is that there is the social network and there are the legal and jurisdictional properties right and I mean POS possibly a third one is like physical location properties right so like for example if you know if, even, if, um you, know, you, decide, that the legal environment environments and even cultural environments of um like

you know Dubai for example is uh is perfect for you and like which like I personally you know don't think I mean I think there's a lot of a lot of uh you know upsides definitely but also a lot of downsides so they're there too right but like the the really big one is climate right and climate is not their fault and uh climate is uh not uh is kind of something that definitely has been you know unfairly allocated in a lot of in a lot of ways and you know there's a strong case that climate is kind of being unfairly reallocated with you know global warming and the emissions that are um that are happening and how that's uh kind of maybe good for

Canada and Russia and Norway but uh you know not very good for a huge number of other people but climate's like the third one right so one is uh social network to its jurisdictional properties and uh three is uh climate and the lives of the laws of the land that right exactly it's funny because you know one thing when I talk about this with people I think most people go immediately to uh how do you get the land or okay we need to write up a constitution write up laws and I think that the the people is actually the most important part because you know laws are boundary conditions you know in the sense of your their uh the things that

are mandatory or forbidden they're they're the edge cases typically you don't usually run into a law in your daily basis you know like as you're running around and and the land also you know uh it's hard to get land and you might just start with the community and then you can afford land rather than vice versa so I'd always be in you know that's a big premise of the network tip I think those are two I don't quite call them false doors um but they're traditional ways that people have started things or thought about things that are perhaps a little less applicable today the counter argument would be something like code is very similar to law but you're writing code all the time and I think the difference is um the, machine, doesn't, do, anything unless the code is telling it to do something but the human does something

unless the law tells it not to do something and that's like I think a difference in terms of code versus law that's the difference between code I know I like less extinct code AS law but that is one difference between code law anyway but go ahead you're saying so all those three things climate you thought was or land was a big thing so for those folks who have bad land you would do x what is X a one way to look at it one way to kind of separate out like to what extent yeah like what properties you need of jurisdiction is to think about the difference between starting a new country and starting a new city right so a city is also a social network and cities are also very climate dependent right and so I don't know if you've seen the uh the the charts and Maps but like

there's this uh really annoying fact about the us and this is uh one of the reasons why uh so many people end up moving to California is that California is like literally the only place in the mainlands US that has what uh a lot of people would call a pleasant climate right so if you look at like number of hours of sunshine California escorts remarkably well if you look at there's a statistic number of pleasant days like someone actually tried going through this they defined the pleasant day as like a day where the temperature doesn't go somewhere outside of like I think it's 8 to 24 degrees and the average might be like between 12 and 20 or

something like that and there's no rain or there's no rain and there's no snow on the ground like California just like beats out all the other parts of the Mainland us um they're like there is a huge tax to being in California right like there's uh I mean first of all um you know regulatory issues and kind of you know the the whole famous thing where like pretty much everything that's based there needs to have you know some kind of a warning label saying that it's uh you know making change races of something that make it that make it dangerous of causing cancer or whatever um but then there the other one that I think is so much bigger for a lot of people's lives as the cost right and cost is uh

yeah 240 is expensive um real estate in California is expensive and there even is this kind of pathological effect where you know the the combination of building restrictions and property right uh rights uh rules and like a whole bunch of aspects of law basically mean that like there's this uh you know funnel where huge amounts of uh or the just basically this, the the, Silicon, Valley, startup ecosystem essentially gets uh really yeah heavily yeah and you know de facto kind of texts and kind of blood sucked by California landowners a lot of his deadweight loss also though because

landlords would prefer to actually just build more so it's like laws that are just causing them to jack up prices because they can't build more units they prefer to do on volume any of them anyway go ahead you're saying exactly right but despite this uh you know if you're a heavy uh drag on the yeah doing things in California there's like it's still a huge Network effect right and uh you know we've just been seeing how much of it uphill battle it is to uh for for projects to you know real uh relocate to other places I'm actually I think uh crypto interestingly enough has been possibly the one Frontier tech industry of the last decade that has managed to really be really not be

California Centric right I mean maybe there was a couple of others like maybe you know bio is a sub California and some Boston and but I feel like crypto is like crypto is scored better on decentralization than a lot of the others uh but like AI very Bay Area focused um you, know, VR, from, what, I, can, tell seems pretty barrier focused um you know meta is there apple is in Cupertino you know Google's Google's there um like it is a huge attractor and part of that is just Network effects and uh a strong initial Network effect leading to even more Network effects but part of that is just like the climate being closets right uh so we're coming back up so so son how would you relate that to

say to if you're starting a new country you are addressing climate how right if you're starting a new country or new city right so this is where we have to kind of unpack things right like one is uh that like climate is just an important property right so uh of uh you know whatever kind of in-person physical thing that you want to start and basically if you're starting a new X then the thing that you have to create from scratch is the network effects right like you're basically paying a large Network effects penalty from the beginning and there are people who I think are willing to pay the network effect penalty because they want a different kind of network effects

they're willing to sacrifice quality uh quantity of network to get quality of network right but now that Network effect is one thing that's being like sacrificed or at least kind of radically reimagined out the door um as far as like what the climate needs are that's that's one of the two factors that's going to judge where he wants to base yourself and uh you know do you want to be uh in in existing country do you want to um you know be in a big country do you want to be in a small country do you want to be in a particular part of the world um I think other things that I would add to climate uh because like even though they're not technically climate but there's still kind of features that are given to us by the physical world time

zones are a big one right so were if you watched like a remote work for American companies it's much easier to be in Argentina than it is to be in a Europe despite those two being equal distances from America because uh you know in Argentina you have and in Latin America in general you have time zone compatibility right so there's a lot of those uh deciding factors that come from the natural environments and then there are also these deciding factors that come from the law right and so basically the question is like what what is the benefit that you're trying to achieve and what are the things that you're willing to sacrifice a lot of people

don't really have that much fancy stuff that they wanted that that they need to do in terms of uh in terms of law for example right like for a lot of uh you know people and projects actually yeah the big law that that people don't sometimes don't realize that is a law but that they uh wants to ask that they want to escape is a U.S immigration law right like the US and a lot of other wealthy, countries, they, do, have, um you know quite restrictive uh immigration a lot of ways and like the the tragedy is that sometimes it's pathologically restrictive in that like people who you know try to go in the front door can uh yeah you know apply for visas and all that like in India I think it takes like

what 900 days to get an appointment or something uh crazy like that but on the other, hand, um you, know, if, you're, willing to, take, the, uh, the, route, of, um you, know jumping fences a bunch of times then yeah like sometimes that's even easier than uh you know taking it a narco-tyrannical in the sense of like the law isn't enforced on the law abiding all right the law is enforced but only on Law Abiding and is not a forced on you know uh it seems so logical but it's not it's like those who are habitually law abiding or have the book they're on them for small immigration things yeah but but U.S immigration wise like is uh like it really is a huge drag on I think like a lot of difference it's also not letting it high-end Talent it's it's it's basically just deadweight

loss across the whole system it's not it's not smart yeah right and it's one of like it's one of those things that's like potentially Asia like a 2x or 3x tax on many uh groups of people's ability to operate even if they're doing some completely normal thing that's right and the thing is it's one of those things where basically right different groups it's not simply about making immigration law harsher as some people think it is because what happens is that is just those laws are just enforced against those people who are who are not the folks that are um it's not like the guy who came across and shot somebody you know it's a person who's filling out you know paperwork to be a programmer but anyway so we kind of got off track a little bit here so

climate cost I mean the one thing about climate just for a second or land is um I would argue potentially at least for a new country the more desirable the land the less desirable the land and the reason I say that is the more desirable the land the more contentious it is for people to try and get it whereas if it's something that's God forsake in middle of nowhere like what Burning Man was built on it's easier to build on it if your goal is freedom as opposed to a pleasant climate Pleasant climate I think is like the very hardest thing to get because it's so broadly appreciated and so memetic in a sense so you might have to suffer a bit you know land wise in order to you know get Freedom yeah I think that's uh I think that's very possible

um I think but I think the bigger lesson from all of this right is that there are ways to um improve your situation in terms of law right so like for example there are lots of countries that are Visa free to Chinese people there's a an unfortunately smaller number but definitely still a significant number of countries that are even Visa free to India people I mean India itself so Visa free day India people obviously uh but uh at the and then there are countries that, um are, just, easier, to, get, visas, for right like there's you know countries that have Visa regimes but uh you know they're not indians they're not going to have to wait 900 days to get one but at the same time like if you have to be

willing to sacrifice something right like the hard thing in the world is to find kind of like actual Alpha like to find to actually find something which is like further along the frontier along all the dimensions that people care about it's pretty optimal of some kind you're trading off a for B exactly the the easier thing to do is to try to is to get a better score on Dimensions that you care more about by sacrificing something on Dimensions that you care less about either because you have like you're you just are the kind of person or you're more or or you have some trick for like tolerating a lower quality on those Dimensions or because you have like some different path for getting those same things right and I think the big thing like one of the ways to

think about the like Network the start of you city or start a new country genre is that it's basically the genre of saying well what are the things that you can get if you're willing to completely sacrifice on network effects because you're gonna bring your own network object right if you can bring your own like there's a lot of uh you get a lot of options right so for example um over, the, last, year, and, a, quarter, one of the things that I did is I am intentionally spent more time than I usually do in like very small towns right tell everybody about it because most people don't know about it okay yeah so svalbert is an island a thousand kilometers north of Norway it is uh officially uh part of Norway but there

are international treaties that have existed for about 100 years that say that anyone from the world is uh legally allowed to come and live there open borders act but it's so forbidding that many people don't actually exercise it right exactly so the ATL largest city in small bird is a town called one Caribbean it has a population of about three thousand its latitude is 78 degrees north but interestingly enough the climate is a somewhat less inhospitable than it seems right because uh basically that entire region like all of uh Scandinavia benefits hugely from the Gulf Stream and and the Gulf Stream makes uh all of those regions significantly warmer than like lots of stuff at comparable latitude if you look at say Tromso a city in Norway 69

degrees latitude the lowest temperatures there are like actually not much worse than the lowest temperatures in Toronto which has 45 degrees latitude but the latitude there is much higher than small bird like when I was there in September the temperature was like between -5 and plus five so like actually you know New Yorkers minus five and plus five I guess that's adapt at least it's it's it's not like too bad right I mean it does get it definitely does get bad in uh like in January for example right but uh so you know there is a reason it hasn't grown so more than 3 000 people but it's like it's less bad than a lot of people think right and there is a town of three thousand people and that town has a

large supermarket and has a post office it has a hospital it has an airport and it has one of the best sushi restaurants I've been to in a while okay now it's gonna have lots and lots of people go and get visiting there forget to have a hundred thousand people right I mean I think like I think marginally at all better some more terms more people coming there right but it's uh definitely you know we encourage people to just like go and visit and you know if they can visit for a longer time like you know give them up to two weeks or so just to get a feel for like you know what it feels like to actually live in this kind of place um but it's interesting how even in a town of 3 000 people like that kind of

infrastructure you can get right like you have a supermarket you have a hospital you have sushi um if you do the math then uh 3 000 people basically means that you have about 30 people per a year level which means that uh so long European also has a school right and at three people that's enough for like one or two classes per grade uh so it's uh actually surprising like how few people need to put up civilization enough Network effects to at least have the so at least have the boring Basics right but the one thing that you can't get with 3 000 people is you can't get like people that are organized around particular interests right whether that's for like work or whether that's for like for you know just like social interaction

reasons right and I've often thought about how the early American colonies only about two and a half million people at the time of Independence something like that you know the Greeks very small population at the time I think Rome was only like a million people yeah or something like I mean these are much smaller than we think of uh and not roam the entire Empire but I think the city of Rome in the Roman Empire was like a million people at that time I might be wrong about that we'll check that in the show notes yeah like the thing that's fascinating right is that 3 000 people is like actually yeah it's totally viable from that standpoint like I think uh as a residential three thousand percent down your main risk is getting bored right and also you have a risk of you know not having not being able to

find a good job and one way to answer that is to basically say we're only going to cater to remote workers and remote work is only going to grow from here another way to answer that is basically through the same channel that um we, can, answer, the, being, board, problem which is well let's look at the one type of town that already exists that has a small population that is still very interesting for people to often spend a lot large amounts of time in and that's the University Town right so you know you have something like Ithaca in the upstate New York population 30 000 home of Cornell and uh you know if you uh care about any of the academic topics that Cornell specializes in then like

you know you're you're not going to be bored right and uh so if you like really concentrate and you really try to create a network effects around specific kinds of people then you don't you don't even need 30 000 like even three thousand is going to be enough right like if uh half of those three thousand are people who are into let's say crypto or let's say a longevity research you can create an environment that's like gives people enough of that that it with a surprisingly small a small size right um so, then, you, know, what, do, you, get, for that right what are the things that you get is uh I think cost savings right

another thing that you get is uh like the right type of network effect right so you or a different type of network effect you sacrifice on uh quality and uh or you sacrifice on quantity and you get quality um cost savings are also huge right like one of the big things that I think has happened over the last 10 years is that prices have increased in the US significantly more than they have increased on a lot of other we were talking about this I don't know if you have a graph of that I'd love to I think that's true but I'd love to see that I I agree but go ahead you know that's actually something that I haven't checked yet right well I can just like it feels true for my from my personal experience in even uh Switzerland I think uh the price of like tea in

Starbucks has increased vary whether or little or like maybe maybe even not at all over the last over the last 10 years which I thought was fascinating right so costs are huge and uh the cost difference between being in the US and being in basically any other country is like getting to be pretty significant at this point well I think to be fair it's always been significant but I think what we're seeing now is like it's quality of difference at the same time and you can earn outside right but it's like at the same time you see right a significant right one thing is that a significant cost difference is staying another thing is that now you can earn outside and more generally like the quality of life difference between being in a major sensor and uh and being in you know it gets called a kind of

quote periphery location the cost of increased as the benefits have decreased and so they're coming closer together yeah go ahead exactly right so that creates a big opportunity right so cost this one um and then you know we've mentioned the law is another one and uh lost an interesting one because um I, think, it's, uh, it's, one, that, a, lot of people don't think about it and it's easier to not think about if you're in a situation that that is fine like that feels to you as being normal right because uh if you're just an average American and you know you're you're doing some completely you know Norby industry that's uh you're not going to feel

um you, know, law, as, like, as, being, a, large drag and it's and it's even easy for you to get into the mindset of believing that oh it would if someone does come up to them and tell them the law is a big drag well possibly they're doing something wrong and they have something to hide right and what's uh interesting is like the further away you get from like that kind of like privileged rich country context the and like I think it's even important to kind of you know talk about the rich country part right because uh like even the yeah privilege discourse that exists within the rich countries it tends to like at least in my view it focuses a lot on underprivileged people within those rich

countries but you know there's also this entire map like much larger mass of people around the world around the world that are not even in those uh rich countries right and I think even the US and even progressives in the US often still have uh you know what's de facto very much and out of sight out of mind mentality toward a lot of those people um but uh the further away you get from you know being in in Asia Asia citizen of a rich country the further away you get from being in a kind of average industry the more you start, feeling, these, kinds, of things right so obviously the crypto space I think has uh felt regulatory pressures are very keen away from the uh from the

beginning but in 2022 I think uh caring about the law like really universalized in a lot of ways right in the sense that like there were a lot of uh countries like a lot of non-us countries and even you know anti-western countries that have historically been authoritarian but the political geopolitical environments for the last 20 years has been this kind of Fairly stable one and fairly friendly one where even in the authoritarian once the authoritarianism kind of felt theoretical and it's like oh you know if you personally aren't somebody who like really cares about criticizing the government and like why would you even do that one I'll just focus on your family

um then, you're, not, really, feeling, much right you know yeah you know focus on the family you know enjoy the enjoy the local culture enjoy the trains and it it doesn't look that bad in the normal case from like that kind of uh cultural standpoint but like in 2022 in a whole bunch of ways the authoritarianism became real right and it became something that even really heavily touched the lives of normal people and it's something that just overnight created a whole bunch of like basically homeless Nomads right like I personally have multiple friends who in 2022 just like packed up left their country and they're just jumping around

so they're not really clear where they live um and these in a lot of those cases these are even people who were not that worried about the political environments of where they came from before 2022 yes right so on the one hand yeah I have a visual analogy that you may or may have agreed this is like a you know for example when you're driving on the highway your speed limit could be minimum 40 miles maximum 55 miles per hour and that's like a you know it's a bounding box that you have to be within your V has to be within that right and you start extending it to every other set of laws and essentially regulations in the law are a bounding box where you have to remain within that right speed

greater than this you know not less than this you're you know bank account balance uh at a certain time can't be over this or under this or in that sermon um I don't for example building cannot be more than this High it probably cannot be more than this low that kind of stuff right multiply that across thousands hundreds of thousands of laws all the laws so you have to sit within this box and most the time most your environment which your life is configured to live within that box so you're so in the box that you don't even feel the edges but then sometimes like in 2022 or really recently those edges suddenly like move and they kind of put you outside of that box where what was totally normal suddenly becomes abnormal and you're you know looking around

you're like how did that happen I thought I was just totally in the mainstream and then this just sliding of walls got you outside the mainstream and I think that in many ways what we're we do in crypto is for the powerless and the power user in different ways they're pushing the limits like the power list wants to hold down to a bank account and the power user is pushing the limits of what a bank account can even do and sometimes they're the same person or the same entity like like binance is both absolutely a power user of money but I'm sure early on maybe now but you know they had like it's let's call it regulatory issues or what have you right like they you know well reported um I you know I have no beef with binance whatsoever just saying sometimes it's the same person at the same time

those are not necessarily disjoint categories and so that reminds me of what you're saying which is um these, walls, on, this, box, that, people took for being static became Dynamic these constants became variables right like some like I think uh up until 2000 that that and the 22 you just like had to be either one of those people whose situation was that you were in a beside a wall or in a court or in a corner of the room or you just had to be an explorer that would definitely touch against them but like yes in 2022 the walls moved yes and exactly and so so I'm bringing that back to the start of new country thing right so if you could start a new country how would you so you

know we talked about the climate aspect so when we talked about cost so and now we're talking about law so it seems like what you try to do is hyper deflate cost or you know obviously I know I'm poking on this thing because I've thought about this a lot and you know um but you know what is it would you would it be ethereum based I assume either landia right um is there is there some funny uh etherea I don't know what would be the would be the land if the dollar is a currency well it doesn't actually conjugate in quite that way right you might have Germany and the Germans but the mark doesn't quite conjugate so let's say you've got a theorem what does the ethereum land look like right and and is that related to this okay yeah

well right it's a good question I mean I think one of the questions is like what actually makes sense to create as a uland and the other question is uh what level of tired should have through ethereum right because uh I think on the second question like one of the things that I do wants to be careful about is like not assuming um you know more agreement between people that actually exists and uh you know not basically like I want to avoid getting into the like intersectional activism trap where you know you start by creating a community around one cause and then you know you start kind of like adding on more and more of the exact Coalition partners that have their own causes that you know they're they're good at expressing in your language but

then a lot of the time when you poke into the details you're just uh ends up getting stuck in a mindset where like the Asia the you know the intersection of all the causes actually they're against people are who are against what you're against but they're not for what you're for that's the tricky part where you'll win the war but you won't win the piece go ahead right that's exactly right so yeah to what extent like some uh you know new city or new country started by ethereum people like should even uh Market itself as being part um a part of the ethereum verse or even being a central part of the ethereum verse right like those two are different like like to what extent uh like I think it would be it might even be good to be

careful about creating the impression that if you're an ethereum person you have to like this other thing like I think it's big enough now it's millions of people using it so exactly, like, I, think, there's, even, um you know virtue in uh kind of uh you know people who are in uh multiple movements like basically yeah say it like saying that it's okay to be with me on one thing but not uh but not the other thing on the second question right I think the yeah the answer is maybe anything but at the same time I like I do think that uh there's a huge momentum momentum within the ethereum ecosystem for um wanting this kind of thing and so I think the crypto world and the AI and the

ethereum world are definitely like natural places to start and I think are just inevitably going to be big parts of uh you know any new country that's or or any new city that gets created right um so it's it's you know there's about 300 million depending on how you count it but like coinbase and binance alone are a good chunk of at least 300 million crypto users worldwide who hold at least some cryptocurrency and I kind of do think of them as an Intuit country because you know they they all need to kind of accept each other's coin right and so they have to have in a sense of bilateral relationship where it started kind of currency and network first so it is a good group of people early adopters somewhat risk tolerant that could

Pioneer something like this even if they aren't all pure 100 ethereum or what have you they're likely certainly know about it and hold some um so that's why I think it's not a bad analogy or at least it's a predicate for it it's not the full thing right I mean I think one good analogy for this might be like something like forecaster for example right so this actually, gets, to, another, um topic, that, I think, is, um important, which, is, uh, that one thing that I think Network States and social networks have in common is that especially with just to be able to get them started it's not about the institutions it's not about the technology it's about the people right like if if you imagine five clones a

forecaster where let's say one of them is run by Dan Romero um another of them is run by let's say a uh an American trans social justice activist a third is run by let's say an Indian person a uh fourth is uh run by let's say yeah some Eastern European Ultra Nationalist and who by the way likes Bitcoin and thinks that Bitcoin is the only coin um and a fifth is uh run by like some 14 year old um in, uh, in, Hangzhou, that's, uh, just, uh

you know happens to be interested in in let's say like West African philosophy and has some you know really crazy yeah a fusion ideology that for whatever reason they can convince that he can convince a significant fraction of Chinese people to or Chinese Generation Z or generation a to what's up but no one else right like those five forecasters are gonna look very different I've I have a concrete a concrete example for you uh share chat is it is that third example it's an Indian social network that is non-english and so there's a Hindi Channel a Bengali Channel Malayalam Channel kind of the channel and so on

right, thermal, Channel, and, um so, that's an example of something which is Twitter like but looks very different than actually because forecaster has ethereum functionality built into it so therefore it's like ethereum Twitter this has it's it's just partitioned a different access you wouldn't have thought of okay which Indian language do you speak as being a primary axis for forecaster but it is for this right whereas for forecasters like which nfts you hold so it's just like moving on a different axis go ahead yeah right but I think the larger point right is that like the the root Community is important and uh I think this was a lesson that I I think I kind of intuited for ethereum itself right that uh like the different one of the differences between like web

2 and uh web3 I think is that like things like Facebook they just tried to scale to the world and reach out to everyone right and uh things in the crypto space and things in the network State space and things in uh even let's say the radical democracy space like they're they are more rooted in specific communities and they do they are I think kind of more respectful of the idea that like well sometimes Network effects aren't positive Network effects are negative right there are people who are negative value to other participants especially when you create like products or ecosystems where the interaction between the participants says yes I think I mean it is it's like kind of saying like law is meant for virtuous

people and you know like I'm paraphrasing but that's like the early the you know founding fathers said you know we can write all this stuff down but it's meant to deal with things in the breach you have to basically be good you know or like you have to be virtuous so it's kind of like that you the the structure is something that expresses the community's will okay so basically we've got about you know 15 ish 10 minutes left um and uh so just to recap what do we talk, about, well, we, talked, about a, brief history of ethereum from Concepts at the present day we covered the merge and the Dow hack and ofac and privacy and a bunch of other things we talked about um you know what new country you'd start

and addressing problems like climate and cost and whether ethereum people would be there you talked about actually the really interesting place svalbar that anybody can go to and how what open borders would actually look like in real life we have we have an empirical example of it should be on the cover of a bunch of books uh maybe it'll it'll be changed by that attention and I wanted to maybe touch on one last thing which is um you, know, we've, talked, about, how, to improve the world we've talked about how to improve ethereum how can people improve themselves what should they read watch and listen what online courses what should they be doing you know like how what would you advise people to do to level up sure

um so I think one of the reasons why this is an interesting topic is that it's not even entirely separate from the uh networks State topic right because uh to a very surprising extent I think like learning and motivation are very social right and they like being really successful in those things actually depends on having the right social environment and I think this is one of the key reasons why like for example um you, know, Coursera, and, the, various moocs have failed to completely replace Stanford uh to the uh in anything like the extent that a lot of people were predicting like I mean one aspect is definitely you know just like credentialism and the facts that the

books don't give you a fancy diploma but I think the yeah like the social elements to learning and motivation is the other a really big one and actually it's like the question of like what new country what I start like that might even be part of the answer right like I I personally would start with the city before, a, country, by, the, way I, mean, I would uh like a city located a city located in a country that has enough of the right um you know law properties to get the yeah 80 the 80 20 of that right but like like trying to like actually uh you know tweak the root of uh you know of the legal system and like go at The

Sovereign level like that's both it's very difficult and it's a very challenging project and it's just like all kinds of international diplomatic risks that you don't really want to get into unless you're fairly big right and so I think uh you know working with existing countries is just something that's gonna realistically make sense for projects uh going I I think going into the future for a while right but uh starting a new city in but and at the same time like having the country aspects to the extent that you're creating a network effect in a country that that would otherwise not have that Network effect um but one of the things that I would add in there is uh definitely like have a stronger emphasis on like education as a part of the culture right like imagine

going through your entire life like your living experience for your entire life being a University at 10 at 10 intensity right so not a university 100 intensity but you know keep it on ten percent at 10, intensity, have, like, very, um easy, and like very socially available opportunities to constantly keep learning new things um it's, funny, you, see, this, because basically sorry I didn't mean to cut you off but like the uh it's like buying a car a college is like buying a car not budgeting for maintenance over your life the entire cost is up front and then you have no gas or oil change and then people are like oh I studied them like you studied for four years and doesn't remember any of it this extremely expensive install of ostensibly

education that is has zero maintenance associated with it you know Amy go ahead so I'm agreeing with you learning that I think especially in the fast changing world that we're in like it really is something that should be a lifelong process right it's uh like and especially once we uh you know solve longevity I think uh I forget either Aubry to gray or someone else talked about this that like his historically the pattern has been a study work retire but the new pattern might be study work retire study work retire study work study retire work retire study work study um you know but the other approach of course is to like really integrate the two more and that like studying should then not even necessarily have bfas

which would just be a regular part of your life right but so the social aspect is importance right and I think like one of my yeah number one advice is to like probably young people and all people everywhere is to be intentional about the, social, environment, and, um you, know to have to have friends that help you bring out the virtues that you want to see in yourself um it was uh something that I like I just think that's so hugely uh importance right like you're there's just all kinds of subconscious ways at which your behavior changes for the better when you're around people it's funny because the way to prove that to people is just actually AI prompts like the prompt is so insanely important and so you're just getting effectively

prompted in a sensory fashion by oh okay yeah all right they're lifting weights I should probably go and do that too like as a small example or oh they're studying math oh yeah let me take a look at that so like the prompts that you surround yourself with both digitally and physically have like such an influence on you and that and one of them is like your social network it's such an obvious thing but people don't usually think about it exactly yeah but I think you know until you can uh you know until we have multiple of these um established intentional communities and all this just whether they're you know creating new cities or or new countries or um you know new uh Bitcoin monasteries or you know whatever people in that camp are trying to create or

whatever it's uh okay things that you can do while you're by yourself um you know I think like motivation as the number one problem is uh I think uh one of the key uh lessons that I've learned and there are like less not social ways to get that too right so like one of my personal experiences right is that like I've used that Duolingo for a while I mean I've you know used that as one of my yeah ways to kind of uh um practice on my yeah Spanish uh for a while have uh you know also experiments at all some of the other East Asian languages with it too and it's uh like the way that the app prods you into like just trying to like uh

into doing at least one thing every day and the way that the app makes you like even feel the fear of you know losing a multi-hundred day streak um if you decide to go away from it like it's stupid and it's like so obviously um you, know, gamified, in, a, in, a, way, that even seems a little bit trashy but like for me it works somehow like it but though there are limits to it right so like one of the things that uh logistic kind of go down the path of the old and go in particular um that I found in that other people I found is that it pushes you to optimize not for the game of knowing the language but for the game of uh winning Duolingo right like for example sometimes Duolingo gives you a task like translate

this sentence and like maybe about 20 of the time you don't even need to look at what's at the top of the screen like the yes sentence in Spanish or whatever you just like go down you look at the list of words that they give you to select from and they're just obviously is one sentence the English in English you can construct some of those words and so you look at the bottom of the screen you just like tap that sentence and you're done right and like you've won the game but you haven't or actually learned any Spanish yeah so I do think it's like important to mix other tools I mean I can actually tell you the app that I talked to or learn Chinese so so at the beginning I started with pamzor that's p-i-m-s-l-e-u-r it's this set of online courses uh well basically audio courses

right so it's like a 30 minute flight base uh course that and they have 90 of them right you go through them and you know it gets you up to a very basic level right so I think different people might have different experiences but like for me personally you know there's this kind of on there's this stereotype that exists online that like it's possible to somehow pick up languages just by like you know going into a country and eventually kind of pick up words and uh obviously two-year-old kids can do it and possibly extroverts can do it but I totally can't right like if you just like stuck me into China with no training possibly yeah after even after 20 years they're not like you know quote pick up Chinese from zero I would just be miserable and uh but so for me

personally you know for the first stage of learning languages like you know you need the structured stuff so I use pmsor um I, also, used, some, flashcard, app, store in the characters and then once you get above a certain point there's like a certain level of like medium comprehension where that's the point where you can start picking the language up from right so before medium um you know you start with the uh you know the podcasts um I did Panama so or I think I did a Chinese pod and a couple of others once you you know get past that point with the flash card apps then you go but like for me personally you know and I actually spent like a total of about one and a half years in China and you know

sometime in Taiwan and uh sometimes in Singapore and just like a lot of time talking to just like other Chinese friends that I had outside of China and uh it's once you get to that level then you actually can just like keep learning by by just talking to people right so talking to people um and this is ironically enough actually there's one particular way in which Chinese is easier than languages um like um you know German for example uh which is that uh if you try to speak in uh in English to or if we try to speak in in broken German to someone in Germany very often they very quickly switch to English so you don't get those training

wheels in China like this might part right exactly you don't get the training wheels right but like in Chinese though no no you know there's uh lots of people who barely speak English at all and like they're they'll be happy to try their best to understand you I'm actually Spanish as well as well it's like I think in maybe in Spain a bit more English speakers but in like deep Latin America uh you know definitely lots of people who are some English is very bad and uh you could definitely yeah and get your Spanish up there especially if if you try right but like past the other thing that I did in China is like you just like walk around the city and you look at street signs and the street signs they all have the name of the street and Chinese characters and then

the name of the street in Kenyan right that gives you the pronunciation and so you just like look at street names and you passively learn a whole bunch of characters just like as part of your life right so like basically yeah so to get from like zero to Mid um you know you do the podcasts say you do the flash card apps you do the like very structured courses and then to get from bid to high that's when like picking up things up and the and, the, more, social, approach, um that's that's a good combination so basically if you're an adult to summarize if you're an adult don't just start with immersion do courses to bootstrap yourself to that basic level get your bios up and running and then you can kind of assimilate the content if you're two years old you might just be able to

be dumped in right exactly yeah I said for technology um that, for, like, things, like cryptography for example um I one of my lessons has been the importance of learning by doing right like if you just um you know if you just read and listen there's just it's just so easy to kind of go you know in one ear or uh or one eye and out the other um but uh if you actually make yourself build the thing that's the way that like you actually kind of get the knowledge into muscle memory like you you were work with the concepts with your brain in a much deeper way you ever heard of Shams outlands it's basically like I've very similar Shams islands are pretty famous in India basically these yellow outline books where they just have

solved problems they just go straight to solve problems and so you just go straight to the exercises and there's like relatively minimal introduction just go straight to exercises just like just start working out not reading about working out you work out you know and that's similar to this where basically by coding coding it by building it and then trying to break it you understand it in a way that just Theory alone reading about it doesn't get you something no that's actually fascinating like, if, you, try trying, to, the, idea, of teaching people even without contents but but but by just like repeatedly giving them exercises that are like one inference step away from the previous exercise that they solved regardless of them you know what specific tool you use I think if you'll learn if you want to learn about some arcs and build a snark

if you uh wants to learn about how ethereum Works build an ethereum implementation and get to pass some of the tests or even get to the point where it passes all the tests and then if you want to learn about like homomorphic encryption build an implementation upon morphic encryption right like if you want to learn about AI then like actually yeah you know build a yeah a neural network that's like you know at least powerful enough to do some like basic job of recognizing digits or whatever right that's uh I think that's one of the things that helped me um in 2011 I went through some the machine learning course on I I forget the the there's one in Udacity and one in

Coursera that was one by one was by Andrew right one was my special to run one was by Andrew Eng and they were very Hands-On right where like you had to actually Implement you know a lot of like things like a star um search algorithms and like info that's you know multi-layer neural networks and all of those things so actually implementing a thing and just like gives you this very deep and Hands-On understanding about like what the thing is and uh you know how to work with it it just gets intuitions that you can't get by just reading a textbook um so highly yeah you know encourage taking an experiential approach um you know definitely it's uh the uh you know I think they're it's the

equivalent of like the the Star Wars uh kind of like uh kind of Jedi tradition where you're supposed to build your own lightsaber right it's you were doing others do try except for the more competition try which by the way you should actually do and Implement that's a good one so lesson you know build your own people um laws and uh um and the land um you know sacrifice quantity of network effects go for Quality um you know get the yeah get the right group of people um you know be modest online on law especially especially at first um you know focus on the public goods motivation um if you want to learn about things then um you know go and build your own

lightsaber and uh I think awesome yeah lots of stuff for people to do thanks for coming on vitalik and this is the first episode of the network State podcast