Why Decision-Making is a "Big, Fuzzy, Hairy, and Messy Thing" - Joe Lubin, ConsenSys

Transcript

hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and the token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers if you enjoyed this podcast please give it a top rating and review on iTunes and feel free to follow me on Twitter at Manuel's daggers this episode has support from no official sponsor but from my very own the blockchain and us newsletter get an email from me every two weeks with a very short summary of new podcast episodes so you can immediately pick those interviews you'd like to listen to to stay up-to-date just visit www.hsn.com and sign up today my guest today in this somewhat shorter

special episode is the one and only Joe Lubin Joe is the co-founder of etherium and the founder of consensus which is in its own words a global formation of technologists and entrepreneurs building the infrastructure applications and practices that enable a decentralized the world this conversation took place on very short notice and I'd like to thank everybody at consensus who made this happen and now to the interview hi Joe and many thanks for taking time today pleasure what do you think or maybe things that people most often misunderstand about the etherium so what do people most often misunderstand about

aetherium i think it's a big complicated sophisticated project may be the main misunderstanding is that people either significantly in the space or outside of the space I think try to map it on to the way corporations operate right now and the etherium project is a massively decentralized project it's essentially an open-source project in platform and decision-making is a big fuzzy hairy messy thing there

is so I think in terms of leadership there are lots of leaders on the project Vitalik is an outstanding driver of the technology and outstanding research scientists and an individual of great integrity and great decision-making capability in that he sources opinion broadly weighs opinion makes his own decisions but he doesn't I've never seen him tell anybody to do anything and I've never I haven't seen him often make decisions for the project decisions are really made by consensus and there is a

consensus s us and and there is a a process by which proposals get proposed and commented on and essentially voted on by people who implement things and if there's sufficient popular opinion they make their way through this arduous process and into the clients and even even if they get into the clients at times as we saw during the the DAO event the software developers actually gave the people downloading the software a

choice of which of the forks they would choose to activate on their particular note so that that would be I think the biggest misunderstanding that there is nobody in control mm-hmm there's nobody in control and everything's decentralized even decision-making so maybe this whole idea of a decentralized world is just hard to understand well I guess that's true we have different degrees of decentralization amongst different systems so theorem is not a top-down command and control infrastructure and that is I guess unusual for some people but it's a it's increasingly an

architecture that makes more and more sense so we have great communication mechanisms right now around the world and we have tools that can enable us to come to decisions amongst a group of actors even even if up to half of the actors are malicious so these blockchain systems can enable that sort of decentralized collective decision making and we're building tools on top of those protocols so different different tools different voting systems liquid democracy for delegating votes and few tarkie and so we really see a

lot of experimenting with different mechanisms we're doing some of that at our company and the age in which we need to organize things via top-down command and control and hierarchically is dissipating somewhat there those are still good mechanisms in many contexts but those mechanisms are most effective when communication is slow and expensive and decision-making is therefore difficult and we're often in contexts where we don't have those sorts of constraints anymore mm-hmm and you said it yourself that that world is maybe slowly you know coming to an end and maybe something new emerges absolutely

and even within decentralized organizations there there are good uses for hierarchy so they're good uses for increasing increasingly abstracted representation of information or fluid hierarchies where you have role systems that form for a specific project as long as you don't have a rigid structural hierarchy so that people you know can lock in power and silo information as long as these things are able to fluidly construct themselves and dissipate and reconstruct themselves for different purposes then I think you're fine when you imagine that all

these visions that you have with the things you're building with what aetherium can do imagine all of this came true how would you describe you know some of the main characteristics of that kind of world so on the permissionless network side of things it would look like a decentralized world wide web where we have full control over our aspects of identity can monetize those if we wish to and much greater agency much greater economic agency a much greater political agency social agency where we for our economic or other lives can participate in protocol-based open platforms and we

don't need intermediaries to facilitate transactions for us and and we can [Music] occupy different roles on protocol based open platforms in situations that we care about like maybe in the music industry on-air Joe music and make a living that way or just get greater satisfaction from participating through our own greater agency mm-hmm okay imagine we went you know to the year maybe 2025 and we look back what do you think might we have underestimated and what might we have overestimated 2025 is pretty far away it's definitely hard to

figure out all the ways of using this technology because essentially when a new technology becomes established the early uses of the technology basically reflect the uses of previous generations of technologies so TVs invented and people stand up in front of the camera and do radio plays basically they do they just read their their radio play part and so we're gonna use this new technology and we'll know poke at and explore little dimensions

that are obvious to us to make use of okay great we can tokenize some assets that's cool we can no vote we can create true or fair randomness we can have gaming systems that are provably fair but those are just cute additions to current paradigms or enhancements of current current paradigms we don't really know what is going to be constructed by creative people ten or so years from now so it's a bit of a cop-out answer but if you look at at how

the web technology ramified between 1989 when it was invented and 99 when when like normal real normal human beings were using email if I guess he could have extrapolated from there but you couldn't really I think extrapolate to people sending a hundred and forty character messages or dating online or getting into a stranger's car sleeping in a stranger's home and and that these would be sort of very common mechanisms in society and in a couple decades it's definitely hard to imagine what's

possible yes we it is I mean we have lots of speculations about what's possible so we're going to tokenize virtually everything we're gonna deep liquid markets for tokenized everything we're going to be able to trade many different assets against many other assets we're going to have fluid buying and selling mechanisms where all we do is think or we basically decide we want to buy this thing and our smart agent wallet will figure out which tokens we we want to get rid of first and and and use those to buy things we're going to have data markets we're gonna have sensors feeding those data markets we're gonna have my utterance is my personal information signals coming

off my body maybe feeding those data markets I'm going to be as we discussed before in greater control of those things and have greater agency in how those things are used so I think we move into a world where the silos dissolve significantly information silos power silos transactional silos into a world where free markets will be pretty pervasive so free markets for data and in virtually everything which is a good thing in many events but if you if you look at the other side I mean why would such a decentralized world not be a good idea I can't think of any reasons why a

decentralized world wouldn't be a good idea I think any technology can be used for an American affairs purposes but that technology because it is open and accessible will have bad actors drawn to it but will also have good actors drawn to it and I think will have the ability to create self regulatory mechanisms that can police bad behavior so for instance right now if I want to issue shares in a company and sell those shares to naive grandmother's I can do that I set up a bucket shop I start

making phone calls that's as a difficult activity to track down and police I can do traditional police work the SEC and law enforcement does take care of those situations but we have a lot of great stuff going on in token launches around the world but there's also lots of bad projects and fraudulent projects and we're at the start of that ecosystem as we evolve in that ecosystem it's going to become necessary to release a white paper and to share certain significant pieces of data about your project in order to get anybody to pay attention to it and so in that context

global access to this information low barrier to going out and collecting that information I think we would be able to create much better self regulatory systems to essentially crowd police that sort of activity if you're not disclosing all the relevant data and if you aren't well received by a incentivized set of analyst actors who are sharing their analyses then you're basically not going to be relevant in the token launch space what is the skill that you think is important for people to have to be relevant in the future well if the thesis is that various

technologies will ramify on systems in the future and blockchain technology is one of those profound technologies then it's going to be everywhere so we are gonna need people with all sorts of talents from obviously software development but now anything legal marketing etc so it's I think it represents a shift in how society will operate in 1989 we all lived our lives very differently and we've all essentially adapted many of us have

taken similar skills like in the legal profession and we've had to upskill ourselves and understand how these these new systems work but we're still essentially doing some you core classes of activities and I think will continue to do that certainly as we move towards a world in which software undergirds lots of our activities it's all about creating appropriate user interfaces so that the human beings can operate on their terms and and the software facilitates what we as humans want to do together cool imagine there weren't any aetherium there were no consensus what do you

think would you be doing I would do what I've been doing all my life read about technology build technology and I probably sleep more okay great so I have a ton of other questions that I'd love to ask but I know you have to go I really appreciate your taking time for this interview oh I get food thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on the podcast web site the blockchain and us comm to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast

platform of your choice i'm manuel staggers and i thank you very much for listening you [Music]