Is Blockchain Still a Revolution or Becoming Another Upgrade? Ep.621

As blockchain tech gets co-opted by legacy players for efficiency gains, has the revolution lost its edge? Crypto philosopher Paul Dylan-Ennis and Jito's Head of Governance, Dr. Nick Almond, join Friederike to probe this shift from 2017's visionary DAOs to today's Telegram-negotiated votes and whale capture.

Rooted in philosophy and complex systems, they unpack mind-hacking risks via data micro-targeting, the polycentric bulwarks (full nodes, prediction markets) shielding against cultural flips, and why epistemic tools could fortify crypto against real-world censorship.

Their call: Reclaim the ethos through event evangelism and normie outreach for grassroots empowerment.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• 0:00 - Introduction
• 1:32 - Nick's journey: Physics to DAOs
• 3:59 - Paul's path: Philosophy to crypto counterculture
• 5:54 - Crypto's shift from niche to incumbent tool
• 7:37 - Governance as crypto's "soul"
• 10:54 - Early DAOs vs. today's backroom reality
• 11:45 - Diluted ideas & human workarounds
• 1:03:44 - Elevating better leaders & social consensus tools
• 1:05:05 - Hacking minds: Post-ideological vs. cypherpunk
• 1:07:21 - Polycentric defenses & full node bedrock
• 1:10:50 - Advice: Evangelize at events & outreach to normies

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Dr. Nick Almond, Head of Governance at Jito
• Paul Dylan-Ennis, Crypto Philosopher

Sponsors: - Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at gnosis.io

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
When I think about, say, cypherpunk, when I think about
decentralization, I'm more focused nowadays on the chains
themselves, the protocols that the, the, the real inelimitable
core, as I like to think of it of, of cypherpunk is primarily
to be found on the chains, and that's where it really matters.
And then you're probably fighting a losing battle.
If you want every application, every doubt to have that same

(00:21):
degree of commitment to these traditional values.
I think those days might be coming to a close.
How do we stop Web 3 from merelybecoming an infrastructure
upgrade for Wide St. I think we've seen a lot of
this. I think that's already happened.
If they understood more the level of micro targeting and
corporate surveillance that's happening under the hood, I

(00:43):
think people would be more worried about it.
Welcome to Epicenter, the show, which talks about the
technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization
and the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Adams, and today
I'm speaking with Paul Dillon Ennis, who goes bipolar on
Twitter, and Nick Almond, who's also super active on Twitter.

(01:06):
Paul is an independent crypto philosopher and a lecturer at
the College of Business at University College Dublin.
And Nick thinks very deeply about governance and other
aspects at the DITO Network as the head of governance there.
And today we want to be having aconversation whether we might

(01:27):
have to adjust our intro in due course.
So is the blockchain revolution really still a blockchain
revolution? Or is it becoming an upgrade for
more legacy players? Before we dive into it, we'd
like to tell you about our sponsors this week.
This episode is brought to you by Nosis, building the open

(01:48):
Internet one block at a time. Nosis was founded in 2015 and
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(02:09):
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All of this is governed by NosisDow, a community run
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(02:29):
So if you're building a Web 3 oryou're just curious about what
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Hey, Paul and Nick, super nice to have both of you on.
Hi, nice to be here. Good.
Maybe for everyone who doesn't know you kind of who doesn't
spend as much time on Twitter asI do.

(02:52):
Can we get brief backgrounds of who you are, why you are here,
and what you came for? Yeah, OK, I'll go first.
Yeah, so I'm, I'm a physicist bybackground.
I was actually an academic for agood chunk of my career.
I sort of sailed from physics through to learning theory and
governance research over about adecade or so.

(03:13):
And then in 2020, I jumped into crypto full time because I was
obsessed on Dows and the what wonderful things this technology
could do for the world. And I worked on prediction
markets, Dow tooling, and now sort of govern a large Dow in
the Solano ecosystem. Cool.
Thank you, Nick. It's it's interesting to have a

(03:34):
fellow physics physics PhD on onthe show, just just mostly for
my benefit. Tell me, tell me what you did
research on. I ended up doing the PhD in
biophysical surface science, so I was interested in.
I was working on sort of photonic probes to try and
understand how biological molecules and biological systems

(03:57):
ordered at surfaces. So I was very interested in,
yeah, the emergence around like how life started, how sort of
self organized systems begin in biological systems, that kind of
stuff. That's fascinating.
It's also not that that much removed from governance and kind
of. Like it is, I think I, yeah, I

(04:19):
got very, very obsessed on complex systems and self
organization. Yeah, for the last 20 years or
so, it's been very much there. There's there's a lot of
parallels. 100% So I did my PhD in low dimensional context
quantum systems, which is actually by it's actually
pretty, it's actually somewhat similar to what what you did.
So kind of like, I mean work, work on surfaces and kind of I

(04:43):
did, I mostly did carbon nanotubes and graphene and kind
of like these sorts of systems. Yeah, so condensed condensed
matter physics then basically, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I.
Did simulation and experiments. So it's yeah lovely super cool
pie. We we've kind of bypassed you so

(05:03):
far, but I'd also very much likea a, a short intro on you.
I think many people will recognize you from from Twitter
as post polar. Yeah, it's one of those
situations where I've reached the point where that has become

(05:23):
my name in real life, even at conferences.
And by the way, Pol is Paul in Irish, so that that's where the
the origin of the name. But yeah, so a similar
situation, another academic. So my PhD is in philosophy.
So I guess the other side of the, that spectrum.
So if the the physics materialist, the philosopher

(05:45):
who's maybe in the clouds a little bit.
And then really I was interestedin crypto before I got involved
in it in terms of writing about it in an academic context,
because I had friends who were involved in WikiLeaks early on
and they were telling me about, you know, Bitcoin, the embargo

(06:06):
that made me curious. And then I heard about Silk Road
and I've always had this attraction to counter cultures,
subcultures, that kind of thing.And then I never thought about
it of being something that I would actually write about in a
academic context. And then just by chance, I saw a
job ad while I was doing my bitsand pieces of teaching across
Dublin. So I was like teaching

(06:27):
philosophy, interior and so on. There was a job ad for a
blockchain researcher at the university I am now.
This is 2015. And because nobody else in the
country was really had a PhD andalso an interest in crypto, I
got the job. So.
So it's just kind of lucky. And then since then I just said,
OK, this is a unique opportunity.

(06:47):
I'm looking at a research area where there is nobody else
really working on it. Or you could count the amount of
academics at that time on one hand.
So yeah. And then just ended up writing
op-ed articles and then accidentally my my Twitter
account, which I don't really understand its popularity as
such, kind of took off as a my student, one of my students
called it a micro influencer, sowhich I quite like.

(07:12):
I like that too. Maybe she got a T-shirt kind of
like micro influencer. I think that's yeah, I think
kind of like that. There's you already kind of let
us into why we're having this episode.
So you said kind of like you youare you were always interested
in counterculture and kind of ina way kind of the crypto

(07:33):
ecosystem is very much shifting out of that niche.
I would argue that that segment of Web 3 is still there, but
it's becoming increasingly marginalized.
So if you look at a lot of the things that currently happen on
Web 3, it's more or less kind oftechnology being appropriated by

(07:58):
the incumbents to kind of increase their efficiency rather
than kind of turning this agencyand ownership narrative into a
reality that a lot of us kind ofcame into the space for.
And kind of I want to explore with you guys how you see that,
how dire you think the situationis, whether it can be turned

(08:21):
around and if so, how? Maybe I'll start with UNIC
because kind of like you've, you've written about governance,
which is your core focus as the soul of crypto, right?
What values do you think it was meant to protect?

(08:42):
Yeah, I think so. I was super obsessed on
governance in my academic career.
In fact, decentralized organization in particular.
So I, I kind of built a decentralized organization
inside a institution as a means to help the academics self
organize around improving the university and kind of got

(09:04):
pilled on that and realized thatdecentralization and
decentralized organization was awas a powerful force for good in
that it's sort of distributed power more evenly across systems
at scale. And then when the sort of Dow
happened, I realized that you could like really scale
decentralized organization and it was a potential real force

(09:29):
for good in the world. Because I, I see a lot of the
frailties, if you like, if the conventional governance orders
due to centralization, there's, you know, power concentrates
around very small amount of people that limits decision
making capability. Decision makers get increasingly
divorced from reality and peoplethat they're governing.

(09:52):
And that was 20 years ago or 15 years ago, and it's way worse
now. So I was kind of hoping the this
would be a huge force for good in the world.
Sadly, we haven't really focusedon governance as an industry
yet. I think it's one of the, it got
very lonely in the bear market last time around.

(10:14):
Sort of still being a believer in Dows and decentralized
governance. Bit sad that it's not really
manifested as yet as a kind of broad influence on on
conventional governance systems.My sort of belief was that, you
know, crypto was almost by like osmosis influence the global

(10:35):
ward world order by just like distributing decentralization
around the world. And yeah, it's I've got both
kind of optimistic and deeply pessimistic views of where
things could go based on how things might play out.
And yeah, both of them involve like crypto and blockchain as as
like potential accelerators of that if you like.

(10:59):
If you look at governance in particular, it is one area that
kind of we were extremely optimistic about in the past
kind of. And I mean we were we as Gnosis
were up there with kind of the the the best of them and the
earliest of them, right. If you look at DX style, for

(11:21):
instance, which was possibly theone of the very early kind of
actually Daos that actually kindof governed A protocol.
And then you look at the DAO infrastructure that kind of
we've seen over the years. So kind of in a way kind of I
feel in 20/17/2018 thoughts on how DAO should work, we're

(11:43):
actually way more advanced than they're, they're actually today.
So kind of if you look at, for instance, the DAO stack
protocol, kind of they kind of like, I mean, it was founded by
two physicists. So of course I liked it, but
kind of it was it kind of like it had very good mechanism
design in terms of realizing that attention is really the

(12:04):
scarce resource and kind of you,you need to make sure that you
can't spam it down. Kind of like if you look at how
governance plays out today for the large towers, it's mostly
backroom Telegram groups that kind of where where kind of you
don't really have access to if if you kind of just come in and
you and then kind of like deals are negotiate there.

(12:27):
And then kind of the, the, the, the, a lot of the votes are just
kind of are full gone conclusions because kind of like
that they've already kind of been negotiated in some backroom
Telegram tenants, right? Yeah, I think so, yeah.
We, I in many cases, both in things like token economics and

(12:48):
governance, there was a much more advanced thinking or or
rather the the thinking that wassort of deep and interesting was
more prevalent in the space at that time.
I think maybe an equivalent amount of it exists, it's just
diluted by, you know, the rest of the industry.
But also I think there's the reality of governance systems is

(13:09):
exactly what you described is that we have this lovely public
mechanism that we should be using, but the reality of it is
people don't want to use it because it's public and they
want to conduct things in backroom Telegram channels
because it's easier. So yeah, there's the reality of
the way humans interact with technology.
They're kind of socio technical systems.
So what how a technology is usedis only really manifested as

(13:34):
people start to use it. And that's the kind of reality.
Humans don't tend to behave in the way that you want them to.
And so we we kind of built thesequite idealistic mechanisms,
assuming everyone would like conform to the mechanism, when
in fact you can just choose not to use the mechanism and work
around it and people will. So, yeah, I think there was a,

(13:57):
you know, and largely people at large just haven't done much
governing, right? It's it's not, you only get into
governance if you end up it's kind of super senior in a, in a
large organization or you go into politics or something,
right. And like 99% of people just are

(14:18):
not in that position. So it's really quite an alien
sort of thing to do. And I think that's been one of
the really large challenges is the yeah, people just don't sort
of tend to want or know how to govern stuff.
So it's just a there's a big distance between people and the,
and the tools, I think, but I'm still optimistic we'll close

(14:41):
that gap. But it's it's it's it's it's
definitely one of the most difficult things that you can
work on. And just so the other thing is
it's not easy to productize. So the kind of contemporary
paradigm of technology as you kind of hyper focus on a very
specific niche and then extract rents from it and build a very

(15:04):
tight revenue model out of it. Whereas governance is completely
context dependent. So you just can't build a really
tight neat product out of these things.
And it and it's that's just madeit very uninvestable for the
most part over the last sort of several years.
So we we kind of got a bit stuckI think.
It's uninvestable, but kind of like 4 Dows that actually have

(15:25):
treasuries. It's also extremely important,
right? So kind of like the principle,
there should be funding for thisbecause misallocation of funds
is, is such a huge risk for these Dows.
I, I would very much take the position that having some level
of transparency and also the ability of new people with new

(15:48):
ideas kind of enter into an ecosystem openly and being heard
that that's really high value. But one belief that a lot of
people, I think mistakenly hold in the space is that everyone's
voice should count equally and kind of as as someone, I mean,
maybe this is this is somewhat arrogant.

(16:10):
But as someone kind of like who is build medium sized
organisations before and kind ofwhose voice usually carries a
lot of weight, having people come in and expect to kind of be
given the same amount of reverence or kind of attention.
It's, it's, it's sometimes starring, right?

(16:32):
Because kind of like I, I want to appreciate people who come in
and kind of people who kind of bring opinions and and one to
sit at the table because kind ofobviously you need fresh blood,
right? Kind of like this why you wander
Dow. This is what kind of like what
can elevate Dow's into kind of this paradigm shifting mode of

(16:56):
organization, kind of akin to kind of like when we got joint
stock companies or something, right?
But at the same time, it not everyone in a DAO is created
equally. And I think that's, that's, I
mean, obviously you should, you should be able to kind of move
within that framework freely, but it should it, it should be

(17:16):
in my eyes, extremely meritocratic.
Couldn't agree more. That's very much what I've been
kind of chasing for many years is that paradigm like exactly
how you can shape a consensus byby merit.
So yeah, I think there's there'swe came to this with these very

(17:41):
idealistic framing. You know, there was a lot of the
early Dow thinking was very flatorg.
You know, we want to get rid of hierarchy completely.
We want massively open porous organizations, you know, and the
reality of it is that's a terrible idea.
There's, it's just, you can't, there's also a sort of feature I

(18:02):
call the public governance trap,which is if you do everything
completely open, there's always someone hanging around who's
going to just nitpick on absolutely everything that
you're doing in public. And it just creates, and I, I
know this because I've done thisfor like over the last five
years, right? When I used to do, we used to

(18:24):
have team meetings like openly on Discord and everyone would
just, you know, and you'd have like 20 people just sitting
there watching you not saying anything.
And it just, it changes the dynamic for how you make
decisions, right? And, and this was a time when
you like, you know, this was a quite risky thing to be doing.
And in terms of like global regulatory sort of environment

(18:46):
and things like that, you know, dynamics changed a little bit.
Be like, who are these people? Makes you more guarded, you
know, it's it's difficult to make good decisions in a
radically open context like that.
And then occasionally you get someone who's got nothing better
to do who will just hassle you all day every day, but they're
like don't know what they're talking about.

(19:07):
And that's just not a tenable sort of system for for for
governing sensibly. So there's a middle ground
somewhere, right where you need to have decision making.
You need to have a path that forpeople to walk into an
organization and be elevated into a position of status and
power if they are capable of doing it and have a material

(19:29):
influence over the project an berewarded for their
participation. That sounds almost like a
company. A company is kind of like an
interpersonal fiction, right? Kind of like it's historically
that kind of we as humans kind of tell themselves it's nothing
you can kind of, it's nothing you can touch.
It's nothing that's physically there.
It's just kind of like a set of.Rules and abstractions.

(19:50):
Exactly. That like a legal fiction.
Exactly. It's a legal fiction, so and in
some ways kind of it, it was it was created to kind of do a lot
of the things that you just talked about, right?
Kind of like to to allow new people to kind of come into it
and kind of like if they're useful, they can kind of rise
within the structure kind of. But it's still seen as kind of

(20:11):
like one large entity that kind of like acts as an entity and so
on. How?
Kind of like if, if you look at kind of like the kind of a, an
idealized corporation, that kindof is that where there's no
politics and there's kind of like it, it, it's purely

(20:31):
meritocratic and kind of has a strong leadership and vision and
kind of, but it's fully permeable.
How would that differ from kind of your ideal vision of a DAO?
I think there's a few sort of key differences.
I mean, for one, these structures are very centralized,
right? They're very centralized.
They adopt this very sort of pyramidic structure of power and

(20:55):
they start to degrade in effective function as they scale
very big are. We talking about Dows or
corporations here? Corporations, corporations,
large, large, centralized. I mean, the same is sort of
true. That's true.
For that, I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of.
That's so my theory on this is that largely we've projected the

(21:15):
and I think this is back to yourcentral point of this episode,
right, which is largely we've projected the old world onto the
new. So a lot of people rather than
try to explore this new paradigmof decentralized organization,
we've just effectively tried to rebuild centralized
organizations in, in this new world, right.
So like really, if you, if you look from a governance

(21:35):
perspective, like like Max Weber's sort of bureaucracy
theory of bureaucracy has like revolutionized the world's
organizations of the last 200 years.
And it's created these kind of like very hierarchical
structures. And, and in reality, the,
they're not that meritocratic inthe end, right?

(21:56):
The, the theory is that meritocratic, but actually the
people that end up at the top ofthese organizations stay at the
top of these organizations, whether they're should be there
or not. Finances tend to be very
untransparent, right? So the, the, the radical
differences in Dow's is that we have this people can contribute
to the organization and there's a degree of consent that spreads

(22:21):
out across every participant, which is also not the case in,
in conventional structures. So it's, it's somewhat subtle in
a sense, but a, a decentralized organization is more about local
autonomy. Centralized corps are more
oppressive generally, right? The the systems of power in

(22:42):
there with managers who enforce people to, you know, codes of
conduct and and contractual form.
And it's and it's trying to finda new organizational mode that
deviates from that effectively more about radical local
autonomy, distributed decision making where in theory people at
the lowest levels of the organization could influence the

(23:04):
global structure, which is tendsto not happen in more democratic
if you like. Yeah, I, I, I hear that Paula,
you, you've been pretty vocal about crypto drifting towards
corporate corporation. So kind of and would you apply
that to kind of the DAO landscape of crypto native

(23:28):
projects or would you apply thatpredominantly to kind of web two
players kind of coming into crypto new?
Yeah, So I think it's really a story about, it's actually an
old story, you know, geeks, mopsand psychopaths.

(23:49):
As the the old article goes thatyou, you start off with this
culture, which is at least when we think about Bitcoin, it's a
combination of libertarianism and cypherpunk.
So we we have these this very unique mix.
That's actually really the storyof why it kicks off.
It's, it's the fact that it's cypherpunk and libertarian.

(24:10):
And then over the years we, we drift into Ethereum land and
Ethereum in the beginning actually isn't a cypherpunk, I
think as people, you know, tend to talk about, but it like if,
if Ethereum inherits anything, it inherits cypherpunk and
basically drops the, the libertarianism, at least in the,
the Bitcoin Goldberg kind of variation on that.

(24:32):
And then there's a little bit ofan issue when it comes to
Ethereum culture, which is that it's not quite clear what
Ethereum is for. So it's a big question mark in
the middle. The, the white paper tells you
that it's it's, you know, it's not like it's, it's going to be
a general purpose blockchain so you can build whatever you want
on it. So you know, essentially it's,

(24:53):
it's for anything, which is great.
That's a pluralist perspective. And then that's where we get all
of our different narratives. They're actually really often
technical narratives. Dows defy NFTS prediction
markets, I guess might be the current version of this, but
that question of say, what is Ethereum for has always been a
little bit unclear. And then, OK, we maybe we could

(25:16):
say things like decentralized acceleration, ISM network
states. That's like the the attempt to
answer the end game social question of like what the
Ethereum society is for. And I think that that's worth
mentioning because if you compare it to what the
Bitcoiners believe, they know what they're for.
We're going to transition over to hyper bitcoinization.
The Fiat system's going to collapse.
Then you're going to live in thecitadel, right?

(25:38):
That's, that's their vision for society.
Whereas knowing what you end up with in the Ethereum is a little
bit more, a little less clear. And I think over the years this
has led to people becoming more pragmatic.
So in Dow, as you can actually see this.
So in Dow is so every decision is being made in the Dow before

(26:00):
anybody votes. So that, that's something, I
think that's something I always tell my, my students like
there's never a decision made ina Dow that hasn't already been
back roomed before you get to it.
And there's a lot of insider dealing and pressure.
It's a soft pressure, I would say, like a social pressure to
kind of conform with the, the group.
And then also the, the fact thatfoundations stick around so that

(26:22):
like the, the, the company progressively decentralizes, but
they're usually the, the foundation is kind of like the
surveillance state of the, of the, the company in the form of
the transition over to the community or something like
this. And then you also have the, the
founders themselves, the team having huge amounts of tokens.
So the, and the, I mean this, this doesn't really surprise me

(26:43):
in the sense that the, in terms of cultural evolution, because
more and more if you look at what I call the CTVC podcast
industrial complex, or sometimesI call it the block works
extended universe. So this is, let's say people
who've emerged into crypto, so they're emerging into say
Ethereum culture or into Dow culture, but they're from the

(27:05):
Business School so that they've got a Business School kind of
mindset. They're primarily interested in
markets and primarily primarily interested in like the like
what's happening in the previousweek, not what happened 10 years
ago, what happened five years ago, umm, under their
forward-looking as well, which can be quite good.
Uh, but they are generally speaking post ideological.

(27:25):
So one of the terms that I took from one of their podcasts.
So this is a term that they use themselves, like, not as a
critique that I'm giving post ideological pragmatism.
And so effectively just looking at the, it's not really
important whether Ethereum is more decentralized on Solana,
It's whether people's perceptionof Ethereum being decentralized
matters relative to whether it matters, uh, to say to someone

(27:48):
in Solana that it's centralized or decentralized.
Like it's, it, it becomes, uh, apart of the market discussion.
It doesn't actually matter as a value or an ideology.
So, umm, I think we're, we're, we're deep into this, like
we're, we're maybe a lot of people haven't accepted this,
that this, this transition has happened.
And so cypherpunk and the valuesof cypherpunk like

(28:10):
decentralization, permissionless, this credible
neutrality, et cetera. This is a minority sport and it
has its representatives, but actually the representatives
have even themselves given way to A to a certain extent.
So if we think about the transition that happened with
the Ethereum Foundation, so there's a basically a populist
revolt from, you know, people who want E to be the primary

(28:30):
focus, who want the Etherium foundation to be more hands on.
So not the Etherium foundation should subtract or disappear or
be decentralized, but should take over should be like the the
entity which directs Etherium going forward.
The response to this was essentially to bring pragmatism
front and center into Etherium in the form of like a a kind of

(28:54):
jewel jewel approach where a dual power approach.
So you've got Tomassism, dankratism.
So I kind of think of it the thepragmatist approach and then say
civil culture council, Vitalik D5 punk representing the OG
part. But I think that was an
admission that the culture is sort of this dual complicated

(29:14):
situation and maybe it will work.
So one way that I think it can work is that the pragmatists are
probably the people who look at the the near term.
So they're thinking in 2-3 yearsthat can be a good focus.
And then the cypherpunks are arethinking in like 10 year terms.
And then the other question, yeah, is whether whether these

(29:35):
values, I guess are supposed to be also found in the Dallas
themselves. I'm not so sure.
So I, I am more and more inclined toward when I think
about say, cypherpunk, when I think about decentralization,
I'm more focused nowadays on thethe chains themselves, the
protocols that the, the, the real inelimitable core, as I

(29:56):
like to think of it, of, of cypherpunk is primarily to be
found on the chains. And that's where it really
matters. And then you're probably
fighting a losing battle if you want every application, every
Dow to actually look to, to havethat same degree of commitment
to these traditional values. I think those days might be
coming to a close. I mean, decentralization, to me

(30:21):
as someone who's been in this inthis space for a really long
time, decentralization itself isnot a value.
So to me, it's kind of like whatit empowers.
So kind of the, the fact that kind of you can have permission
as innovation. So kind of say you're on base,
kind of ultimately you are at the mercy of Coinbase, right?

(30:45):
Kind of like, and this is kind of like they run the sequences
so they can cut you out if and kind of like same goes kind of
like if you build an applicationon that, right?
So kind of, so kind of the fact usually kind of decentralization
is not something that you need in an everyday situation.

(31:06):
It's something that you need in a crisis.
So kind of you don't need it until you need it.
You don't need it until someone kind of shuts down your AWS
server or kind of unbox you or kind of does whatever else kind
of like centralized entities cando to you and your business
offering. And kind of the, the
decentralisation kind of kind offosters the resilience that

(31:33):
underlies that. At least that's kind of that's
my take. And I think there's now kind of
these kind of some of the the second group that you kind of
talked about kind of within the theorem foundation, kind of
there's a lot of people who kindof almost, kind of almost are in

(31:58):
this as a cargo cut. So we're kind of kind of
decentralization is kind of the the one thing that matters.
And I would argue there is such a thing as decentralization
decentralized enough. And kind of like how what level
of decentralization that is verymuch depends on what it is
you're doing. So kind of like if you're if you
kind of have on chain Candy Crush probably don't need a lot

(32:21):
of decentralization. If you have your identity on
chain, your reputation and so onshould probably be very
decentralized. And I think it's a spectrum,
right? And I think kind of having this
almost purity trial like mindsetwhere you say, oh, this is not

(32:42):
decentralized. I mean, it, it kind of it
depends what you're doing with it, right?
Kind of like, it's just like I am adamant that my car has a
better security than my bike does because kind of I typically
drive my car faster than I ride my bike.
And, and if I kind of don't weara helmet and I kind of crash in

(33:05):
the park on my bike, probably the, the, the, the, the kind of,
the, the potential spectrum of outcomes is not nearly as bad as
if I were to kind of crash my car at 180 kilometres an hour on
the autobahn without wearing a seat belt, right?

(33:26):
Joking that I think there's different lenses on
decentralization. I think I think it's absolutely
true that we've moved from A almost an extremist view of
decentralization in the early sort of era of the I think, you
know, the sort of first year of the industry was basically, you
know, it was all Bitcoin and post Ethereum sort of second

(33:50):
era, we, we hit this very ideological position of
decentralization. And I saw people making, you
know, completely Unchained to dolists, you know, and it was even
with, you know, low gas fees, itwas like 50 bucks to use, you
know, make A to do. And we, we discovered that,
yeah, with this kind of like on chain everything,

(34:11):
decentralization, maximization sort of stuff, it just didn't
work because it's completely unfeasible that everyday people
would a pay for it and accept the UX pain points for it.
And I think we're moving out of that now.
I think there's a kind of pendulum swing like revolt

(34:32):
against it where, you know, now we're starting to get people to
say, you know, forget it all together.
No one cares, right? And there's the problem is, is
when you swing that way, the failure mode is the something
disastrous happens, right? Where I think we saw this with
like FTX where, you know, who cares about decentralization

(34:54):
anymore? Let's just give all our money
and put it in this black box and, and trust this guy.
And, and we saw what happened very publicly when, when that
happened. In fact, that whole sort of
explosion in in the last cycle was largely just due to
centralization. It was just due to poor trust
models, people putting their money in centralized boxes.

(35:15):
So I think we've, we've seen first hand why it matters,
right? And why, why where it matters
and there's there is a kind of philosophical dimension to it in
the Dow world. We were talking earlier about
what's the difference between corporations and Dows and it's
largely it's about more bottom up approaches rather than top
down. That's a philosophy and a value

(35:35):
I think that does manifest in decentralization.
It's just generally about distributing power more widely.
I think the world needs that. But it is, as you say, is it's a
just good enough kind of paradigm.
Like one of the things I'm trying to push at the moment I
call governance realism, which is like, let's use the things
for what they're actually good at rather than presume this Dow

(35:58):
can do this stuff that it can't.What is it actually good at?
It's not necessarily good at making complex decisions, you
know, is it basically a multi sig?
You know, let's, let's, let's really look at brass tacks, what
this thing is and what it's goodat.
So I think, yeah, I think it is that pragmatism.

(36:19):
I think there's also, as Paula was saying about the sort of MBA
efficacion of a lot of this stuff that we're starting to
see. You know, the revenue narrative,
revenue matter as people are calling it is, you know, picking
up a lot of lot of steam. So I'm hoping we find a kind of
sensible middle ground, rather than just this massive pen

(36:40):
pendulum swing the other way andwe just stop caring about
decentralization altogether. Just on that, yes, So the reason
why I think like considering a value is sort of important.
So like political decentralization as opposed to
say architectural is is because of that threat.
There. There are people who quite
clearly, and I've see you see this on Twitter in that NBA if

(37:01):
occation kind of school of podcasting where like
centralization or like decentralization itself is like
up for debate as in like it's not that important.
And I think the, this idea of realism is quite important
because my, my, my thinking on decentralization is it's uh, to
distribute power as widely as possible.
So as, as much as you can is sort of the value or principle

(37:24):
that the crypto community goes for.
So when we're talking about a chain, we want it to be like
truly Poly centric, right? We want Bitcoin and Ethereum to
be multiple decision making centers that take each other
into account where like no decision can actually be made
without basically convincing allof those parties very slowly
over the course of say months. We actually have an example of

(37:46):
that in Bitcoin at the moment between Bitcoin core versus
knots, which is actually a really nice example of populism
versus expertise and so on. But I do think that's that's so
like I would say like decentralization as much as
possible begins then to kind of soften a little bit when you are
talking about say applications that are built.

(38:07):
So you want say file verse to bedecentralized as much as
possible, but I don't think people should be policing say,
an application built on Ethereumas harshly.
I say the the the consensus likeon chain consensus itself, you
know? Fibers actually does a really
good job in kind of yeah, yeah, kind of having having almost web

(38:29):
to like user experience and still being fully decentralized
end end to end encrypted. So kind of I'm I'm a I'm a die
hard fibers stun. Yeah, me too.
We're all, we're all, yeah, we're, we're all on side there.
Yeah. I mean, it, it shows you that a
world of software like that can exist, right?

(38:50):
It, it shows you that you can have this kind of stuff can be
realized, you can make a good application that protects user
privacy, data sovereignty, all of this sort of stuff.
And I, I think we just need to see more practical real world
use cases, land for people to really get why it's important.

(39:13):
Do you think they'll get why it's important without anything
terrible happen happening? So kind of like if you look at
if you look for instance, kind of like add a web to example.
So if I look at my non crypto friends, almost everyone uses
Gmail, right? Despite the fact that ProtonMail

(39:35):
is much better for you, it kind of it protects your, your, your
data and your privacy. And it's kind of, it's
functionally equivalent. So kind of there's no big kind
of user experience drop off and still people don't mind being
data farmed by Google. Right.
Yeah, It's, it's crazy. I mean, like terrible things

(39:56):
happen all the time. I mean, you know, the people.
I think it's almost worse than that in that people are so used
to having their information on the dark web and that they've
just given up, you know, it's like.
Almost everything that you, almost all data that's put
online ends up being hacked. And I think we're almost post

(40:17):
people caring about that anymoreand they've sort of capitulated
to it. I think the scary thing is we're
kind of close to something terrible happening.
Then to kind of just spread actors, right?
Kind of like you're giving your data willingly to kind of the,
the, the five corporations whom it's impossible to kind of

(40:37):
bypass on the Internet. So kind of like if, if you kind
of actually made it a challenge for yourself, how do I do
anything on the on, on the Internet without accruing
revenue to Google or Microsoft or, or AWS?
It's impossible. You can't.
You can't. You can't do.
It, it's very difficult. I lost a year in a Dow a couple

(41:00):
about 3 years ago trying to on Google.
It's a nightmare. It's really, really difficult
to, to separate yourself from these entities.
And, and largely people just, I think if they understood more
the level of micro targeting andcorporate surveillance that's
happening on the hood, under thehood, I think people will be
more worried about it. But do you think people don't

(41:21):
know? No, because kind of like, I
think kind of, I mean, we've hadkind of like the entire
Cambridge Analytica kind of fiasco come out and I'm like,
they were outraged about it for a hot minute and then they went
right back to using Facebook. It's way worse now.
There's a really nice Gigi quote.
It's like they they know what ishappening, but they're doing it
anyway. So like that's that's modern
ideology. Like you know exactly what's

(41:42):
happening, but you just continueto practice is like the nature
of contemporary ideological life.
So how do we get people to care?How do how do we get people to
kind of embrace the in my, in myeyes, incredibly appealing kind
of cool tenets of Web 3 as kind of they emerge kind of like in

(42:06):
in the early twenty 10s. I mean, it may need.
I think we're starting to see, you know, fairly public revolt
against things like CBDC's and digital ID.
There's very coordinated global strategies converging on very

(42:30):
like extreme surveillance practices.
Kind of like, I mean, are you, are you guys in the loop with
chat control kind of the EU, it's terrifying.
And kind of they are voting on it next week or so on.
So on October 14th. So kind of like by the time this
episode has come out that the vote will be there.

(42:51):
And as far as I know, kind of there are quite a number of of
of states who already said they will vote in favour of it.
And currently it kind of, it hinges on Germany, whether they
kind of vote for against this. And I mean, basically what, what
it entails is kind of it, it, itbasically builds in a back door
into every communication channeland, and kind of bestows axes to

(43:16):
state actors on, on unencrypted,unencrypted messaging.
And I mean, it's, it's, it's terrifying.
It's terrifying. And there's you don't see a lot
of it in the mainstream press atall.
It's, I mean, we have the equivalent in the UK, the online
safety Bill, which explicitly has a carve out for exactly chat

(43:40):
control like functionality. The danger is they've been very
over about what it's for. You know, it's the it'll, it
will allow the intermediation ofall communication by the state.
And I think this might be the thing that that changes people's

(44:01):
attitudes about the requirementsof things like privacy and
decentralization. The question is, is do does it
need to be installed 1st and forpeople to be oppressed by it and
for it to backfire and, you know, ordinary good people be
targeted by the state through surveillance and by by mistake

(44:24):
getting rounded up into, you know, for people to start
getting seriously worried about it.
Or will people realize beforehand?
But eventually, you know what they will realize and it's just
a question of like, will, can wedo anything about it beforehand?

(44:45):
I mean, I don't know, like this is that this is what's worrying.
It's it's kind of scary. I've been, one of the things I
realized after a few years of research into these technologies
is that, oh, actually these could be used for really
terrible things. And specifically in the realm of
digital ID, you know, the convergence of that and block

(45:08):
chain is like deeply scary. You can build very scary systems
using this kind of stuff. The affordances we understand
around token gating and permissioned access and things
like that, that as it embeds into society is really, really
scary and like. Social scoring on steroids.

(45:29):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've, we've so
certainly in the UK there's, there's actual policy emerging.
There's a campaign that was launched by one of our MPs
called We'll Take Away Things That You Love and it was
explicitly talking about targeted sanctions on people
such as like, we'll stop you from going to the pub or getting

(45:52):
on a plane or going to the football match.
It's a social credit system. That MP is now the Home
secretary. And we've just announced that
we're rolling out digital ID andin fact, we're forcing everyone
in the UK to adopt it. So eventually revoking people's
citizenship rights, the right tolive and work, and unless they

(46:12):
install, unless they participatein and adopt this technology,
this is happening. I mean, we're, we're just there.
This is the thing that we've been worried about.
I was talking to Polar about this through the day.
These are the things that we've been theoretically worried about
in this industry for many years.But it's happening at a scary
pace at the moment. I'm really quite worried about
it. Yeah, it's kind of like the the

(46:36):
the dark version of the it's happening kind of like Guy
getting. Yeah, but yeah, just on this.
I mean, this is one of those things I think is like really
like the heart of what crypto culture is really about.
It's I'm going back to that quote that I I mentioned there
from she's like the the idea of they know what they're doing,
but they they continue to do it anyway.

(46:58):
I think that that's true of people in society.
They, they, they, they know thatthese like the I think at this
point even you're like not very technical mother or grandmother,
maybe my grandmother, but your mother might have like even some
sense that like the phone is spying on them, right?
Like everybody kind of knows this.
That's general knowledge. It's not so obscure privacy nerd

(47:19):
thing that, you know, that people used to have.
And there's there is a a sense in which I don't think you can
really always one of the things that is maybe difficult for
crypto people to accept is that,and this is something I've
argued before, is cryptos A subculture that can't accept
it's a subculture. So it it always has this idea
that it can be the savior of everything.
Like we're, we're going to solveXY and Z, like sometimes very

(47:41):
dramatic, expansive areas of society that we're going to, you
know, suddenly find. You don't think that's going to
happen? No, no, no, I think we, we have
a cap, you know, like, and I think, I think actually I'd say
now we've kind of learned that lesson.
Maybe like maybe this is the time that we've learned that
lesson a little bit. And then there's also another
part of this where it's like they know what they're doing,

(48:02):
but they do it anyway, which is us, like we ourselves use web
too. So we're on Google Docs instead
of File Verse, we're on Twitter instead of Fire Caster.
So like, why would anybody use our apps if we yourself don't
use them? So like we're just as bad, you
know, it's just at a different level.
But we do use like kind of like sending and receiving assets and
using perps. So I guess we are a bit more
crypto, but not by much. So I think that that's a part of

(48:25):
it. And there's a a quote that I
like from Neil Postman. He says the clearest way to see
through a culture is to see through its mode of
communication. Like what medium does it use?
And I think, you know, air obsession with like X, like
reveals a lot about us, which isthat ultimately we are just kind
of like our ultimate desire is just to kind of communicate with
like minded people about this very obscure technology.

(48:48):
And then one of the things that I just wanted a couple of other
things. One is the UK is the the crypto
marketing department. So we we've been kind of rely on
them with their increasing Bobby's turning up at your door.
You can't have a beer if you sayXY and Z.
Like this is actually the thing that could radicalize normies.
There's nothing we could do thatcould ever be a better
propaganda than just allowing a government to become

(49:10):
increasingly authoritarian. That's and we're going into that
age. This is the dystopian,
apocalyptic reading of crypto. I have, which is that the way
crypto succeeds seeds is that essentially things go so bad
that people suddenly realize theimportance of like non state
digital currency, etcetera. So in a way it's an
accelerationist argument. Just allow the society to
collapse and we'll be fine. Yeah, I, I, I hear that.

(49:35):
I also think it's hilarious thatapparently the worst thing you
can threatening threaten an Englishman with his you We won't
be able to go to the pub. I mean take away footy and pints
is the is the thing that's goingto start the revolution.
I mean crazy. There's also a slightly less

(49:58):
dark, but in my eyes still pretty dark future where Web 3
is not primarily appropriated bystate actors to kind of ensure
absolute compliance with stupid rules they kind of arbitrarily

(50:19):
set, but kind of extractive incumbents appropriating the
technology to kind of do the extracting they already do in a
more concerted and efficient way.
And I think kind of like this iswhat we're currently seeing with

(50:40):
the revolutes and stripes and Robin Hoods and so on moving
into this space. So how do we?
How do we? How do we stop Web 3 from merely
becoming an infrastructure upgrade for Wall Street?

(51:00):
I think we've seen a lot of this.
I think that's already happened over the last few years.
I think, you know, instead of, you know, again, in my early
crypto idealism, I saw utility tokens has been a real thing.
You know, these like digital assets that mediated access to
decentralized systems and how touse within those systems and

(51:21):
opened up new kinds of incentiveincentive engineering
capabilities. And, and actually we just use
them as a form of non dilutive equity and largely, you know,
the amount of this. So you end up with this dynamic
where you've got quick liquidityand A and a game that's largely,
you know, pre market and post market and the private market

(51:43):
took over. And largely that has manifested
in a case of, yeah, private equity game, but worse, right?
Because what we've had is peoplejust like accumulating tokens in
private markets from directly from founders and their
proprietary deal flow and then atoken launch which allows them

(52:05):
super quick liquidity, some light sub six months sometimes.
And the retail market just gets butchered every time.
And and that's just what we've had for the last few years.
So hey, that's already happened.But yeah, there's a whole new
realm of that when we've got, you know, these massive
corporate actors have just been waiting in the wings like, you

(52:26):
know, the likes of Google, Stripe, all of these lot.
And yeah, they're just setting up their own L ones.
And, you know, and and I don't see this is good for Aetherium
and or good for the industry at large.
I think they've just been waiting for the right time to
come in and plunder everything. So I I think thinking more

(52:47):
defensively and cautiously aboutthis is probably a good idea at
this point. I mean, I think kind of like
part of part of, I mean, I, I would very much take the
position that kind of like we can't stop kind of Google from
launching its own L1. And I mean, who are we to do
that? But we should make sure that the

(53:08):
L1 that kind of you want to build on are not Google's L1.
And kind of like if, if you kindof look at their press release,
kind of like when, when, when they kind of announced it, it,
it said kind of we're launching an L1 so that they'll be a
credibly neutral one that other people can build on.
It's like, do you guys understand what credibly neutral

(53:28):
actually means? So it's how, how do we, how do
we sway people, entrepreneurs and builders into the right
direction, kind of how do we make them see the light?
I don't think you really you there's no way you can really

(53:48):
force these things. This is I think it's it's the
nature of the culture where you just have to hope that there are
there are enough of you who are interested in these traditional,
say, cypherpunk values. Say Crops is 1 version that I've
heard of put other censorship resistance, open source, privacy

(54:09):
and security or so defy punk, all these different kind of ways
of thinking about it. It really comes through just the
practice of people attending conferences, giving the talk and
sort of stressing these values. And one thing I will say about
this is you can you can actuallyget surprised.
So the recent trend of merit andZK cash and sort of Zolana, all
these things that I never would have expect.

(54:30):
I'm giving a talk on Friday to the Solana Super team about
cypherpunk, which is something, you know, if I just listen to
kind of crypto Twitter, I never would have thought was a
possibility like that they wouldbe interested in it.
And so it is just a consistent application of people talking
about the ideas that that that secures it because I don't think
you can really resist them at any other level.
We can't compete in markets. We can't compete in the

(54:52):
technology. But that's like a it's a
complicated story that most people aren't going to get.
And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because
they'll just use your term anyway, even if they're exactly,
they'll just take like a credible neutrality and say, OK,
well, that's error term. And you know, they'll use in
some very ambiguous way in termsof the this is, but there is a

(55:13):
bit of a deal with the devil situation when it comes to the
institutional adoption. So people want E to go to 10K.
They know that the way in which this happens is going to be on
boarding the institutions. But you know, one day you will
wake up and essentially the institutions will be in this
very powerful position. And I in a, in a strange way, I
think that this might be a good thing.

(55:33):
So what I think is maybe the thegreat reminder or renaissance of
traditional values, like what exactly a blockchain is or what
what credible neutrality is, will only come about when we get
a situation where some institutional player, maybe like
a Tom Lee gone rogue, actually try to in some way interfere
with, say, ethereal governance. Or else we just have some kind

(55:55):
of bug or, you know, something like strange happens, which
requires a state of exception like a Bitcoin civil war hard
fork type situation or the Dow. We haven't had one in such a
long time. And I think that's probably why
a lot of the the younger people are simply unaware of the the
structure and why the structure is in place.

(56:16):
So it may require a little bit of the like.
Maybe the the best way we can dothis is sort of push ourselves
closer and closer to the institutions until something
'cause it like forces a little bit of a a battle so that people
can see why it's important to bedecentralized or permissionless.
That is quite accelerationist, Ithink.

(56:38):
I think, I think I said this theother day, we can't stop them,
but we should be thinking of counterattack strategies.
And the thing that I'm most worried about is, you know,
these incredibly well capitalized players just
poaching all the talent and they're being a kind of massive
brain drain across the industry where everyone just worked for a
bank. I mean, like the, the most

(57:00):
tragic end to crypto is all the cypherpunks work for a bank in
the end. And so, yeah, I mean, like we
need to be doing something aboutstopping that from happening.
So I, I, I think things like thefinding ways to like, we need,
we need to find what those apps are.

(57:22):
You know, we need a lot more file verses we need a lot more
like real world applications. We need Dows to start hitting
mainstream and solving real problems for real people in real
communities that aren't in crypto.
I think we need to start lookingout into the world and, and
hitting adoption vectors that Stripe won't do and we need to

(57:44):
be funding it. We need to be like raising Dows
and, and like locking in the talent and making sure it's very
difficult to, and it's going to come down to money and like
making sure people like taking the at the moment, there's a lot
of people who will end up working for a bank because
they're poor right in. And that's one of the things

(58:04):
that I think we need to get better at as an industry is like
supporting independent developers, grass root
applications and like real worlduse cases that are outside just
basic payments at the moment. It's just payments
infrastructure that's rapidly accelerating in that.
And yeah, I think we need to start working like I sort of got

(58:29):
a lot of stick for defecting to Solana after several years of
Ethereum. But Salon is like more of a more
aligned than you might think. Like like Polo was saying, the
cypherpunk mentality is there. I'm trying to push them into
adopting a values based governance system at the network

(58:49):
level at the moment. It's we need to start thinking
more as an industry about there is a, you know, we've been
having these kind of internal micro culture squabbles for many
years between different block chains and even L twos within
Ethereum and stuff like that. And it just doesn't make much
sense. I think we've got this.
There's an abstracted value structure that sits at the at

(59:12):
the level of of crypto that I think is somehow we need to find
the kind of unite the tribes, ifyou like, across the, across the
crypto industry. Do you think that Ethan?
Sorry. Just briefly, I do think like
cypherpunk is kind of the unifying principle of, of
crypto. And like one of the one of the
jobs that we have in that that battle is to to keep using that

(59:34):
term, to keep using those that, that terminology because nobody
else will use it for us. Or if they are using it, they'll
be using it in that sort of likea credible neutrality, but not
really kind of way. But yeah, I think that that's
yeah. So that we are more similar than
we think and we we need to get to that that mindset at some
point. I I I am 100% with you that kind

(59:57):
of like this tribalism and kind of inter faction warring that
that's it kind of like it just creates a lot of friction that's
ultimately A unproductive and B trans people like like nothing
else kind of and but I wonder how much is.

(01:00:18):
The decentralized nature of crypto kind of working against
us here because kind of like people are somewhat reticent or
kind of resistant to kind of having one kind of one kind of
leadership figure that kind of speaks for a united ecosystem
and kind of speaks for cypherpunk values at large.

(01:00:43):
And I think kind of like this isalso something that that kind of
Ethereans have failed over the last couple of years kind of
with respect to Solana, which I think it's also why Solana kind
of rankles the Ethereum, the Ethereum people so much.
Because Solana kind of has a much more vocal and centralised
leadership that in some sense kind of is the voice of Solana.

(01:01:08):
And kind of does the kind of marketing that the Theorem
Foundation doesn't do. And that we don't kind of has
have as an overarching structurekind of across all layer one
ecosystems. How, how, how do you think, do
you think we can get to kind of like a consensus figure that

(01:01:32):
everyone can kind of rally behind?
That's a really interesting question.
And I think that like a lot of the rambling against the
Ethereum Foundation last year, earlier this year was almost a,
it was a reflection of looking at the likes of Solana, which

(01:01:53):
had a more unified voice. And I think there was a lot we
should be doing that, you know. And so I mean, nothing about
decentralized system says you shouldn't have leaders.
Like there's like the I've heardthe term then they they should
be leader full, not leaderless systems.
As in what a good decentralized organization system would do is

(01:02:16):
elevate good leaders. So like find ways of discovering
people who can lead people. And the sort of leadership
paradigm I see is what's like ifmanagement is effectively about
control and conformity, leadership is about follow,
getting people to follow you with soft power, right?
So there's, there's nothing around like influence through

(01:02:40):
just by adopting a leadership position is exactly the kind of
thing that we need to be elevating people towards, right?
It's what isn't congruent with these systems is people being
forced to do things right. And, and it's that kind of, so I
think there's different ways into this.
I think, yes, you can elevate more leaders across the

(01:03:04):
industry. There are good ones.
We went through a phase of elevating absolutely the worst
people in the industry to almostlike God like status, which was
disastrous. So we need to find people who
are like genuinely represent theindustry, the best of the best,
if you like, in the, in that represent what differentiates us

(01:03:25):
from from and embodies the principles of the, of the
technology and what we want to see in the future.
But also I think we just need better social consensus
machinery. Like one of the things that I
got very excited about Dows is that you could use things like
voting systems and this gets more possible with things like

(01:03:46):
AI Dow crossover stuff of synthesizing the views of many,
many people. And and actually, you know,
innovating in sort of democratictooling, which is one of the
things that I found very exciting about this industry and
its potential to do is democracyin the conventional world is
like failing, you know, represented representative

(01:04:07):
democracy and things like, you know, it is leading us down into
chat control, you know, and like, so how do we find better
systems for genuinely connectingwith people and having them
influence the system as a whole?I think that's that's what we
need to discover. Maybe kind of a final question,

(01:04:27):
kind of kind of kind of buildingon this.
So in a way, kind of philosophically, we kind of
think about people as unhackableand kind of I think this is also
what kind of a lot of the governance mechanisms that kind
of we've built in the past kind of kind of take as a

(01:04:52):
prerequisite. But we have seen that people's
minds are supremely hackable. So kind of, I mean, we, we just
talked about the micro targetingthat kind of like all our data
allow us kind of to kind of to happen, right?
How it is, is there a shift needed in how we think about

(01:05:14):
people's minds? And I think maybe this is this
is a question for Polo. Yeah, so this is one of the the
debates that I've been seeing from the the Block Works
expanded universe by my friends over at Block Works where they

(01:05:36):
had this idea about Tom Lee recently.
And like how this is the debate that's kind of really in my mind
that he has very instructive of the current culture post
ideological versus traditional cyberpunk.
And the idea was that say someone like Tom Lee could come
in and hire various different devs.
You know, we saw that the report, the EF like the like

(01:05:57):
Etherium core developers and howmuch they're making and how
distant it was from say just being on the open market.
And so I think from their perspective, they are thinking
in that kind of way that we're probably entering into a world
where with enough resources you can essentially buy people
regardless of values. You could maybe even shift
culture over time. This is something actually, I

(01:06:19):
think is probably the secret danger of the social layer of
governance is actually just the idea of wide body with any kind
of attack. Just simply seed new core
developers over a 1020 year timeframe who aren't cypherpunk and
know Etherium is no longer cypherpunk.
So like I do think that this is like a yeah, the the ultimate
frontier, the great repressed oflike, you know, kind of

(01:06:42):
blockchain truly be say credibleneutrality or permission list
and so on, so long as it has an open governance process, which
is populated by people who themselves can be hacked
culturally over time. So This is why I think that that
where you get to the importance of the the polycentric or non
monocentric was actually a term I heard someone use instead

(01:07:03):
recently, just meaning that there are multiple decision
making centers that are supposedto take each other into account.
So if you're trying to take overa Tyrion today, you know you've
you've got to take over the ACD call, right?
You've got to somehow get Tim Baiko and you've got to like
flip him. You've got to infiltrate the
Interior Foundation. You've got to think about the
the independent researchers. You've got to think about the

(01:07:25):
cat herders, you got to think about the Ethereum foundation
itself, like trying to flip now two different sides of it, the
pragmatist side and then also like Vitalik and Shaw way,
etcetera. And then you also need to think
about the the infrastructure. So or PCs, Lido rocket pool,
each of which have their own sort of mini microculture famous

(01:07:49):
figures, Kobe and Hassu like those, those kind of figures as
well would have an important sway, I imagine.
But then even beyond that, right, you've got the client
team. So they're all working on
different client software. So you've got to hope that all
those teams will flip as well. And then ultimately the,
probably the, the, the reason why we, we could do with a, a
state of exception, a Dow hack, a Bitcoin civil war is people

(01:08:11):
need to see the idea of the power of the, the full node as
the, the last offence. Because at that point you are
talking about the ultimate, uh, bedrock of cypherpunk culture
that you're running a, a node, right?
Like you're a non economic node,as the Bitcoiners would call it.
So you're not doing it in order to, to be a validator, et
cetera. Like you are a pure true
believer. And that's a group that's

(01:08:32):
distributed all across the world.
To me, that's the, that actuallyis the real essence of the
social layer that is the the cypherpunk bedrock of Ethereum.
So the way that I would be thinking of countering this is
what we need to do is we actually should be thinking
about more distribution and getting across the people.
The importance of just how everything ultimately comes down

(01:08:53):
to the, the polycentric nature of the system and making it so
that like you can sway some parts of the culture, but that
will take you a long time and then you need to get another
part that will take you more time.
So now the the proof of work or proof of the stake at the social
layer is actually time itself. And you know, you're, you're
kind of making it expensive culturally for somebody to flip

(01:09:13):
you. I, I think that that is
brilliant. It's sort of look at how the
crypto is actually more resistant to these kind of like
mind viruses that can take over people than potentially the real
world system. And I, I don't think there's a
government in the world at the moment that's not scared about a

(01:09:33):
populist uprising like with, youknow, attitudes changing
radically because of social media.
And yeah, I, I, I think there's,this is a very real concern,
right? And I think it's one of the
reasons why we're seeing, you know, a real rise in in online
censorship because they're worried about, you know, this

(01:09:57):
effectively populist uprisings by things just like ideas going
viral and people's minds being hacked and so on.
And I think there's like crypto potentially has a space in this,
you know, we sometimes refer to this as epistemic tooling, but
things like prediction markets and, you know, decentralized
sense making systems and, and stuff like that have a real
potential to, to add a layer of Poly centric decision making

(01:10:23):
that can lead to good decisions.That's one of the things that I
think we should be focusing on as an industry to, to, to
actually influence the world in a in a good and good way.
If, if each of you could kind ofcould suggest one way kind of we

(01:10:47):
as kind of players in this ecosystem can improve on the
culture or the kind of permeating the culture further,
how, how would you suggest we goabout this?
I, I think the, the, the most important place at the moment is

(01:11:13):
the, the conferences, the events.
So if you go to say dev connect or you go to ECC, etcetera, then
you know, you're more and more going to encounter people who
are new to Ethereum, uh, maybe new to Solana, whatever, uh,
adventure at. And you can't presume the
familiarity with, say, the, the,the, the values, the the

(01:11:34):
importance of cyberpunk. And so even though it's sort of
like, even though it's kind of boring, if you're giving a talk
and you're talking about cyberpunk and you look out in
the room and you see other people who obviously know about
it, I still think it's really important to to run through it
for the, the benefit and the service of the, say, small part
of your audience who came, who are fresh and new.

(01:11:56):
Because the way that I've tried to think about this recently is,
yeah, if we don't say it, nobodyelse will.
So it, it now becomes more and more incumbent for, for those
people who are, who go around and give talks and even if it's
just like a local event to ensure that these things are
actually mentioned and to not presume them.
So, yeah, giving talks, if you are thinking of getting into

(01:12:17):
giving talks, promoting that. And then also the, the promotion
of the apps, I think is going tobe in crucial thing.
So Ethereal's big focus recent years, all the infrastructure
and in many ways at the, the, the Solana issue plus the, the
revolt against the EF is also about the, the, the lack of
focus on apps that we, we have this, we had this hyper emphasis

(01:12:39):
on the layer 2 road map and thensay Beam, as it was called at
the time, where you're thinking in 10 years.
And people like actually know weshould be thinking in now and
what people can use at the moment.
So yeah, the the that that idea of like promoting followers,
promoting farcaster, I think becomes a small, it's a small
thing, but it's these, these, these add up culturally over

(01:13:00):
time. OK, beat the beat the drums we
already have is is Polar's kind of advice.
Nick, what's your what's your advice?
I think we need to go to real people.
I think we need outreach effectively.
There's a magic moment that I certainly experienced when first

(01:13:21):
discovering this technology thatwas this kind of hopefulness
about how this could be used, used to like make things better.
And I think and then experiencing several, several
waves of being completely jaded as as the reality of the
industry sort of beds in as as you learn more about it.

(01:13:41):
But that moment is still waitingfor people out in the real world
and a lot of the times right. I think we need to be going out
to real people and, and explaining why these
technologies are important and developing real use cases that
can improve their real lives. I still think things like Dows

(01:14:03):
and social coordination tools are what could enable real grass
roots communities and empower them.
I, I still do a bit of teaching work at the Architectural
Association in London, which is taking it, I'm trying to
basically downhill people in thereal world.
It's very challenging, but it's incredibly interesting to see

(01:14:29):
real everyday people like understand what is possible
here. And I think we somehow need to
like do that more at scale. Yeah, let's go to the normies.
It's time to we, we're in echo chamber and like I think two
sides of the coin there probablythinks we should make sure the
inner chamber, if you like, staylike it stays on message, but we

(01:14:53):
need to be taking the message outwards at the same time.
Fantastic. In this regard, so just in this
regard, Jesse from base who getsa lot of abuse for going out
there, like he is actually doingthat which he shouldn't get as
much abuse for trying to go out and talk to people.
I think about these things. Cool, thank you both for coming
on. We'll, we'll include your

(01:15:16):
Twitter profiles and whereas to follow you in the show.
Now it's it's it's been an absolute pleasure.
Likewise, thank you very much for having us on.