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Economics, cypherpunk culture, and the social layer w/ @themandalore9
Recorded: Jan. 26, 2026 Duration: 1:03:28Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the evolving landscape of blockchain technology, highlighting Teller's recent project launch and the shifting cultural dynamics within the Ethereum community. Key trends emerged around privacy concerns, the role of traditional finance in blockchain, and a renewed focus on cypherpunk values, signaling a transformative period for the industry.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Music
Music
Music
Music
Music Thank you. All right, there we are.
Yeah, man.
How are you doing?
Good, man.
How are you doing?
Doing pretty good.
Right on.
I saw Brenda dropped off right as you dropped on I'm still still not sure you're not the
same person actually uh never seen you guys guys in the same room together yeah
I wouldn't fit in their clothes
divide and conquer that's a good strategy How are things humming along at Teller?
Things are great.
Yeah, no, it's...
Nobody ever tells you starting a chain is a lot of work, man.
Yeah, and you guys are starting...
You're almost restarting your chain.
I think you guys went...
Did you go live like a month ago or so?
Yeah, we're not restarting it, are we?
I agree. No, we're not restarting it, are we? I agree.
No, we're not restarting anything.
It's coming along nicely.
That's awesome.
Yeah, no, it's, yeah.
My thoughts on blockchain have changed so much
over the past five years.
It's insane.
I know, I've been there watching.
I think you more than maybe anyone else have changed my mind on several blockchain hot topics.
I think adjacent to the social layer and strategy of how blockchain gets adopted and to what kind of audience and things.
gets adopted and to what kind of audience and things.
I think it's, yeah, you have more divergent opinions
than most people talk to.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think I would love to hear yours too.
It would be cool to see just, yeah,
go over writings from people over the last like six years
and see how everyone's changed their mind
would be rather fascinating. Yeah, that'd be a fun back and forth commenting on how each other's
opinions have changed or on articles that we've digested over the years. I think one of those
things that has been really present with me is something that we talk about a
lot, the social layer.
But I'm thinking a lot more about the social layer in terms of the culture of the people
and the community that is being built in crypto.
And this is kind of like network state adjacent and, you know, in-person event adjacent.
And also, you know, about like the spirit of the Ethereum community.
I feel like that's been shifting a lot lately.
So I throw all these topics out for you to chime in on whichever one you want, because
I think any direction we take this conversation, as always, will be interesting.
Yeah, no, I'm up for kind of wherever you want to go to you know it's it's always easy like like I don't necessarily want to
bash on aetherium culture or the shifting stuff because it's it's lowball
it's it's not it's not too hard now just because it's it's clearly changed and I
think a lot of people have noted that and pointed it out.
And it's always easy to say, but it's always a much harder discussion as far as like, okay, well, how can we create some more value in the space?
Or how can we move the ball a little bit farther?
Yeah, that's more than thinking about lately. And I'd be interested to hear your take. There's a, you know, I actually, I've been thinking that Ethereum culture has been changing a little more positively lately. It's, and I think it's, it's partly gimmicks. But it's, it's partly genuine renewed interest in some cypherpunk values. Like we're seeing it, I think, mainly with the resurgence in
Yeah, that's more than thinking about lately.
And I'd be interested to hear your take.
privacy narratives. What do you make of that? Have you noticed this? VCs are all about privacy now.
I wouldn't put much credibility or thought into what VCs do, as far as giving credence to it.
Yeah. I think they'll bite or whatever like i think the cooler thing about it
is you know kind of like back to the social layer so like you know to quickly define the social
layer it's like like to me it's just like this is the community underlying it so if you think of
value in general like i would think of it as like, okay, so if all value is communal, right? The subjective value, so nothing actually holds any value. We just, if we agree it holds value, it holds value, right? I think you and I would be on the same page on that.
I might disagree.
Okay, no, please.
I'd say like closer to intrinsically valuable than others. Like, like, um, you know, how,
how, how far do you extend that? Like, is food not one of those things that can be like concretely,
um, you know, articulated as valuable?
It can be in a way. Um, but, but even food, you know, like food's only valuable in a society that you can sell it.
Yeah.
You know, or else you have storage costs or other things.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and there's even the taste of food or what people prefer if it's in a larger context so yeah like any anytime
you're buying things as like investable assets or something like that it's it's different um
but yeah it's like i think this was part of the part of the reason i brought this up was just
Part of the reason I brought this up was just what, when we're starting to make all of this value, it's, it kind of goes back, you and I had talked about this before, like, like, I'm, I'm moving against a lot of the people are as well.
Because I think if you're credibly neutral towards these
sort of use case, towards any use case, what happens is, is that then you may get captured.
So you it may come that everybody wants to use the system for TradFi.
Yeah.
And if you're neutral on that, then you just sort of have to let it go.
Right. You have to allow that like you're supposed to be neutral on that, then you just sort of have to let it go, right?
You have to allow that.
Like, you're supposed to be neutral on the topic.
But we don't want to be neutral on the topic.
We want network state experiments.
We want DAOs.
We want, you know, the unbanked to be able to protect their, you know, money or value from hyperinflation.
Like, that's what we actually want. to be able to protect their money or value from hyperinflation.
That's what we actually want.
And so moving in, it's almost in some weird way,
it's like a less credibly neutral direction because we're actually trying to instill some values
in who's actually using it, which is good.
Well, what use cases would you say are anathema to our ethos
or the original intent of Ethereum that
people are rejecting or should reject that you know when you describe
Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation as being sort of biased like what are those
things that do you think they don't want to see or are leaning against well I
mean you could even do the easy ones the scams right okay like you know like anytime you
have a system so like any blockchain system or any server it's it's naturally resource
constraints right yeah like we actually that's it's sort of like our most people's views of
credible neutrality are like okay so we have this block space and we're going to give it away how do we decide who to give it to well we'll be neutral we'll just auction it
off to the highest bidder right um the problem is is that then any use actually threatens use of
another app or user yeah because it's it's scarce it's strange, right, so if a bunch of people want to
use it to be scammers or do trad fi, then the person who can only pay five cents for a transaction
because they don't have a lot of money can naturally not use it. So if you want, if you
want those lower value ones, the people who might not be able to compete in the open market to be able to use it,
you have to limit what those other people can use it for, right?
Yeah, lower financial value, which I think is an interesting distinction, maybe not worth diving into a tangent on. But I like that you use scams and trad fi as two examples in the same breath. I think we're broadly aligned on that.
And, but it, you know, I think I haven't thought too far down this, down this line, but, but like,
what is the, I think that the key that you mentioned is that resources are constrained,
right? So like, if that were not true, then maybe this wouldn't be a problem. And I wonder if you've thought about in what kind of blockchain architectures or non-blockchain architectures, ways of organizing that we might have that would solve this problem. And I'll throw out one that I that I saw today just as as food for conversation. But Vitalik was
saying how he is slowly started to change his mind on people
running their own nodes and everybody being responsible for
storing the blockchain. He's now leaning more in favor of that
kind of architecture, which I think is an interesting way to
solve the problem. Because there there are different variations of that.
Yeah, so it gets, it's super hard, right?
Like you're trying to solve it by just outscaling the problem, right?
Like how could we actually solve the problem by just getting,
okay, there's never going to be you know any sort of gas fee
like everything's going to be free and I think the problem there would be like you know like
I've written an article on this in the past like the roads problem right like if you have a
if you have traffic in your city like people are, oh man, let's just make way bigger and bigger roads, right? So everybody can come downtown. And the problem is like, it's this theory of
induced demand, like as block space gets cheaper, then people start doing more. So in the context
of the lanes, if you have more lanes going downtown, and everybody can get, maybe people
move out farther, you build you build you know more people start
commuting downtown or people get more deliveries they you know downtown might build some high
rises because they know you can get in and your whole city changes so because you can just do
more and i and i think you see the same thing in blockchain land like in in solana for instance
and some of these really really hyper fast blockchains like people just
spam the chain on stop like it's so free so you just see you know some of these chains have 50
of it is just spam because it's free um so as and you can never just break out of that constraint
so in an effort to listen we just want to make a system that these 10 people can use, you like end up having a massive system with millions of users that's
90% spam and super cheap. And it's like, no, like, just, just throw a little bit of
limitations on what people can use it for. And it'll, it'll probably just actually allow you
to use the thing.
Well, for sake of argument, I mean, you could say that because Solana exists as the preferred blockchain for spam, there's no problem, right? Like people are logging the block space of
Ethereum. So maybe it's not so bad after all. I mean, is there a world where Ethereum is just
the censorship resistant blockchain and TradFi migrates over to Solana because they're like, oh, this is easier to spam and we can store more of our stuff with no carry cost?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely like a possibility, you know, like just basically like everybody leaves Ethereum except for the few people who actually want to use it for what you know this cypher funk vision um but it's ethereum's then not competing on a cost basis like like i think
we need to get it out of our heads like we're going to be we're going to be able to compete
with solana on a cost basis and that's why you know like oh it's going to make sense for trad
fi to come on here and you'll be able to do super fast and cheap trades it's like this isn't like
we don't really care if that happens like like it's cool that we're not competing on that.
Like same with if we try and, you know, if we ever tried to compete with like AWS for storage costs
or something like that, it's like, listen, like it's just, that's not a goal. We don't need that
to be a goal. Yes. Like we're credibly neutral towards all these different goals, but we're
really not. We're, we have an idea of what we want to use it for. And we're goingibly neutral towards all these different goals, but we're really not. We have
an idea of what we want to use it for, and we should just keep pushing in that direction.
Yeah, so I think, I don't know, I kind of agree there. I think it's cool that TradFi has
seemed to want to use Ethereum and consolidate there.
I don't see, I feel like TradFi is going to ultimately realize
that blockchains are not good for them
and they're going to want to in-house it.
And the best way to do that is call it a blockchain,
but really just be running a centralized database as an L2.
Yep. Yeah. No, I see that too.
And I mean, that's what we see.
Like what Robinhood doing their chain.
It's that same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's kind of like that.
And it's reminding me of this age old problem.
I think this was probably four or five years ago.
What is an L1?
Like that's the, it's, If you're looking topologically at a
network structure, you're going to have a hard time distinguishing between L1s and L2s. The L1s
are just going to be the things that are maybe more connected than everything else, as long as TradFi is not too concerned about network security and double spending, which they shouldn't be because they're able to reverse the transactions on their own L2s on their side, then it almost doesn't really matter to them whether they're using mainnet or an an l2 and i think i think in most cases they
would they would prefer to be using that so i think is that potential future available to ethereum
yeah and it's just like why why would they continue to be supporting ethereum right and i don't i
we'll see if they continue to um you know it seems like a lot of people
have rallied around it though so same with like bitcoin and even gold you can you can support
assets for a long long time yeah so you know we might not ever see the day like it's not going
to come tomorrow or anything like that they might like same with a lot of these L2s. You just pay some less service to it.
But, you know, hopefully as Ethereum,
we start almost moving away and, like, trying to just follow our own path.
Like, do you think they would be on Ethereum
if we made it, like, completely private tomorrow?
I do, yeah.
I think they wouldn't be on Ethereum
if it wasn't for consensus pushing in the background because it looks organic to all of us. But really, I think you wouldn't be on Ethereum if it wasn't for ConsenSys pushing in the background
because it looks organic to all of us.
But really, I think you know enough.
I know enough.
Probably the people that are listening into this know enough to know that ConsenSys is
the one moving the needle on institutional adoption.
And that has always been the case.
You know, they even had Enterprise Alliance.
And, you know, they've been campaigning
in this direction for a long time.
But I think...
Shout out to ConsenSys.
We got a
ConsenSys grant back in 2019.
They were great. Did you?
Well, you guys were almost the
first Oracle, right? It was you guys
in China.
Were you properly the Oracle on Ethereum?
What?
Were you actually the first Oracle on Ethereum?
Well, I mean, like, because Augur pitched itself as an Oracle, if you remember.
Yeah, but they were in the market.
Yeah, but I think technically Maker was Maker's Oracle.
So, you know, it was a multi-sig but it was uh technically the first
oracle you could say yeah so yeah there was and then i mean even historical lore before if you
remember like zap oracle um there were lots of really weird designs back in like 2016 that just
sort of failed out failed to to play out at all.
Like even really get any users or traction.
Yeah. I remember some names like that just from conversations with you,
but I think I was,
I was half in half out to the Ethereum ecosystem until 2020.
And then I really started to dive in and understand it.
But yeah, I agree.
I mean, I think it's great for us.
I mean, whether it's institutionally,
like officially or unofficially
to move more toward cypherpunk values and culture
and implement that in the chain to a degree.
I actually don't know if I would be in favor of explicitly trying to implement that into
the chain.
I think there may be some ways to do it roundabout, but you've been thinking about this a lot
more than I have, and i can only think
of one example of a chain that is that is explicitly tried to limit who uses it maybe two
i think uh kujira which is now absorbed by thord and um and then i think cult tao with modulus does
this somehow but i'm not exactly sure how yeah well I think what you run into is just trade-offs.
You know, like, part of the lure of blockchains
is this transparency aspect.
And how much of that do you lose as soon as you go private?
You know, like, you lose a lot of the immutability
or a lot of those guarantees of just letting everyone check the thing.
And you sort of
you move it into zk land in some way or at least that would be probably what's going to happen and
whether or not people are quite ready for that is interesting but you know even as we've realized
with oracles like doing an oracle or a price feed is really really hard in privacy
spaces at least a decentralized one um so what are the what are the challenges and trade-offs
that come with that well because it's subjective right so like most of the time a blockchain like
with ethereum you can post any bytes data on the chain right right? And it's correct. It does not, there is no notion of
uncorrect. Like it has to follow these rules. It has to, you know, fit within this structure.
And as long as it fits within this structure, it could be malicious code on malicious code. It could
be, uh, just you're randomly wasting gas. It, it, it doesn't actually have to mean anything to
anybody. Um, as long as it just follows the rules of the chain.
So you're saying privacy, well, you're saying that an Oracle, as long as it fits the schema,
the price or the data, whatever it is, can be assumed to be correct because it's there.
No, yeah, that's for a chain.
For an Oracle, it's impossible.
Because an Oracle, you put data on chain.
So let's say it's a price.
The price of Bitcoin is $100,000 or whatever it is today.
You don't know if that's correct or not.
Are the validators, who gets to pick whether or not that's true or false, right?
You actually need it to be open.
And then, you know, you have this almost like, you know, the way that Tyler would work is you post it and then other people can dispute it.
But there's no way to know before it's posted on chain, whether or not it's good or bad.
So it's like this, there's this lack of objectability.
And like some people are talking about like, oh, well, we could, you know, move to ZK.
So like you're posting a ZK proof of an API.
The problem is, is then that that doesn't actually work for any of the use cases, right?
Like you can't actually, like none of,
like Aave doesn't want just a ZK proof of an API
because they know APIs break.
They know, you know, if you hard code in like,
oh, any 10% moves,
and then we're going to automatically dispute
or not allow prices to move greater than 50% in a block.
It's like, then you're going to get manipulation
up to that amount.
And it's private, so you won't even be able to tell.
So it's really hard to put that in place.
And I think that's one of the reasons that privacy is really limited, because you can't
do a lot of the subjective stuff or even, you know, people have talked about, like,
doing private DAOs.
You think, like, DAOs are hard in a public space. Try making them private and then
look at the bribe aspects and things like that. It's just the game theory changes completely.
Yeah. I mean, I kind of think that's why DAOs should have prediction market governance.
Everything should probably have prediction market governance
because I think you'll never get around bribes. They'll always exist, right? That old idea of
that's what we have now. This both informed and changed a lot of my political opinions over the
years where I would object to something or other people would object to some policy, some institutional policy
in government or usually in government. And it would be pointed out that that is what we have
now. It's like that whatever they're arguing against is oftentimes the current situation,
but maybe marginally worse. Yeah. But the know, the problem with prediction market governance is like,
you're just kind of hyper financializing it, right? Yes. So this is the next thing that we,
we always talk about. And so what is, what is like a good balance between everything being for sale
and you know, people, people being able to gatekeep culture or, or maintain, you know, people being able to gatekeep culture or maintain, you know, some kind of non-financialized or ideally non-financializable assets.
Like, where's the balance?
Where have your thoughts moved on this over the last six months since we talked about it?
Yeah, it's what one of my, I was doing research last week and I was looking at Dutch East India Company.
I don't know if you've ever deep dived on them.
I haven't, but that's a, how did you deep dive on Dutch East India Company?
I don't know, man.
I love to read or watch.
If this is a YouTube video or maybe a TikTok short for my small attention span, I would love to
unironically, I would actually love a documentary on this. Do you have one?
There's lots of documentaries. I'll send you a decent one I found.
But yeah, like it's
so this is Dutch East India Company. This was the first public
stock, right? So this was, we're going to make, we're going to create paper here in the Netherlands.
And then people, whether you're a baker or a nobleman or whatever, you don't actually have to, you know, go on this venture yourself.
You can invest in it. We'll share the profits.
And this was like one of the most successful companies of all time.
And it's kind of like crypto, right?
This is a new financial innovation that allows every single person to invest and share in profits.
And it's a beautiful thing.
But then you go farther down the line, like in your research, and then what you find is that they actually made their profits by they would send these giant warships over to Indonesia.
profits by they would send these giant warships over to Indonesia and they would like in basically
like decimate islands and genocide you know entire civilizations in order to like corner spice
markets and and then they would ship it all back to Europe and sell it massive profits and you're
like oh man like this was like a financial innovation that allowed them to raise a ton of
capital. And then they would go and just do awful things with it.
And you're like, this is like, it, yeah, in some ways, like,
like, you can't help but see the correlations to crypto or kind
of, you know, traditional finance in general, like, we
abstract away, like, none of the people who are actually investing would general, like, we abstract away, like,
none of the people who are actually investing would say, like, oh, I'm going to give money
to go do this thing. But what you do is you separate it out, right? Now, it's just listen,
like, you're giving money, and they promise to give you the best return for your money.
And then it naturally, it will just lead to, you know, the person with the least amount of values that will sacrifice all of their values in order to get money can give the greatest return.
And this is not a good thing. So like that would be my fear with prediction market governance is if you have this singular focus of which of these decisions can, you know, yield us the absolute greatest return.
It's like, well, clearly going and, you know, decimating some weaker opponents and stealing all of their money will yield you a great return.
But it's probably not the one that everyone wants to do.
So you actually have to make like the hard decisions of politics.
And so how do you see that in the context of Ethereum?
Like, where do you see the chain being slightly less credibly neutral?
Or, you know, how do you think they've been doing this in practice?
And what ways could they do it that you like or dislike?
Sure.
Yeah, I think just keeping, just even be more explicit of what we want to use it for
you know we want we want people to be experimenting with dows we want people to be
moving in ways that experimenting with new financial tools and cypherpunk values or even
banking the unbanked but you know like i think one of the biggest
problems that we have you know back to the social layer is like who makes up the social layer right
like who controls the value on the chain and lots of people have talked about this but like
you know like does usdc control the fork choice um we don't know. I was going to ask what your latest take on that is, but I don't want
to go too far down that rabbit hole. Although it is maybe a good example of, you know, where,
where we could be less credibly neutral, but like, what would that do? You know, like, like,
how would, and how would we even do that? Right? would we say like oh by circle like we're actually not like we just banned circle one day like all the clients like
just blacklist circles usdc and then you know maybe they even create another one like what
what are the you have to use a social layer to prevent things from getting so big
like in my mind that was like i think we learned the
wrong lesson from the dao like the original dao hack you know everyone's like oh never again like
we should never fork the chain and you know give people money back after a hacker right
but like i think i think the real solution would be like we need to somehow prevent
the application from getting so big that we would fork the chain and give them their money back.
Right.
Yeah.
And how you do that is really hard.
Like,
that's what I mean.
Like it actually takes like a bunch of the users and community members getting together and going over the hard choices of whether or not something's too big,
going over the hard choices of whether or not something's too big, whether or not it's actually,
you know, these multiple things are one entity or their control is too much. But
that's like, that's like, it all just boils down to like, oh, man, like, it still is just like,
we have to interact with each other and agree to cooperate. And it's really hard.
Yeah, that's one of those things that I, I think makes sense in theory, but in practice, it's really hard yeah that's one of those things that i i think makes sense in theory
but in practice it's like that's like i feel like the strongest thing you can do is basically
advocate for liquidity or even tether for that matter like um tether being like a um based on
shadow banks like it's you know tether is is kind of cypherpunk like it's it's
messed up and the founders are shady and it's banned more people than circle has um but like
it's it's kind of cool uh what they've been able to pull off and the degree to which they've
and the degree to which they've ingratiated themselves with governments
to just continue running their sketchy operation.
But you always have to be the conspiracy theorist, right?
Where could this actually be the deep state?
Yeah, 100%.
They paid off
or attorney general. They literally paid bribes or paid not bribes. They paid fines. Same thing.
Who knows where that money goes to the New York attorney general. And they've been good ever
since. Like they're, they're totally set. Like tether's not going away. There's, there was all
the, and this was a less popular opinion maybe a a couple years ago when you had bitfinex crying from the rooftops every day like tether's
gonna tell me the story what was the story with tether at a buying home okay so so most people
don't know this but new york attorney general had a case against tether for being fractionally
reserved for being partially unbacked they had
70 percent of the reserves might have been 74 76 or 74 percent and the rest was like billions of
dollars just unbacked they were just printing more to um i don't know whether they determined
they were buying bitcoin to uh like inflate the the run or what. But they settled with the New York Attorney General.
This is public record. You can Google it. And it was for $18 million. They made billions on this.
And there was a condition of their audit that they get quarterly, a condition of their settlement that they get quarterly audits. And so at this point, if Tether is fractionally reserved and, you know, any kind of, I don't
think they're any kind of issue.
If Tether is fractionally reserved, they are either in so deep with the government that
they will never get caught or it is a perfectly sustainable operation.
Actually, I would adjust that.
If Tether, yeah, Tether is either in with the government or they're fully legit at this point.
So I think Tether is a non-issue, but to circle back around and not digress too much. Circle. Circle.
Yep.
To tether our conversation to previous point.
Stupid, stupid.
But I think it's difficult to do in practice.
What other things can be done in practice or are being done to align Ethereum ethos and like culture, the social layer?
Yeah, well, I mean, I love the, so they have the correlation penalties.
So like, I think the design is where you get it, right?
Like, you know, like I think there's been a little bit of a pushback recently against like the roll up roadmap.
Like people are like, you know, we can actually scale L1. I think that's the greatest
thing they can do. You can own it a little bit.
Yep. Pushing back against
the, can you explain correlation penalties for everyone?
Well, the correlation penalties, this has to do with like, so like
in the validator set. So like Lido is a decentralized node operator. And they run, I think it's like 25% right now of the validator sets. And the idea with correlation penalties is like right now, if you shut your, if your validator shuts down, you get slashed a certain amount, you know, for every minute or so that you're down.
But now if your validator goes down at the exact same time as other people, then the penalties are actually higher.
So the more you're down in accordance with other people, so if you always go down at the exact same time as this guy, they assume that you're the same guy.
So, and they try and do that.
That's a really good idea
because even if you're not the same guy,
it's the effect that you want to incentivize is reached, right?
Like you get people all going down at the same time,
which is kind of the goal.
Yeah.
I mean, that's like, I would take it even one step farther and have like,
try and prove that people are correlated. You know, like if you know they are the same.
Like a, like a bounty on people for, for doxing.
If you just like dox them and show that they're the same, then it would be, it would be cool,
right? Cause then like, it would be it would be cool right because then like
it would really make because like part of the issue is like even if you because if you're running
because ideally like it someone who's a really well good validator they could run you know their
machine they could have like 10 different aws zones and they could have a bunch of backups and
if they run it perfectly they're still all one entity backups. And if they run it perfectly, they're still all
one entity, but they're just, they run it in a safer, more distributed manner. And that's what,
that's part of what this helps, but it's still one entity. Like I would want to like push it
farther somehow, like even back, you know, back to the social layer aspect, like how can we even
just say like, listen, if you doc them as the same entity and can prove it, like, you get, you know, 50% of their stake or something and we slash it.
Savage, man.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Make it fun.
Yeah, it could be fun.
I mean, that would really be setting a precedent that this is, like, a nerd's experiment.
It would bring a lot more of a hobbyist feel back to it, I think.
And that would be okay with that. I don't love the idea that people get paid for doxing people.
But I think talking about privacy again, that could be pretty dangerous, right? If you are incentivized to figure out who people are,
and then that information gets somewhere. Let's say you figure out that people are not the same
entity, but you have all 10 of their identities of Ethereum home stakers or validators, and one is
running off of subsidized electricity in Venezuela or Iran, maybe neither of those places anymore,
subsidized electricity in Venezuela or Iran. Maybe neither of those places anymore, but
you get my point. And it's potentially dangerous. So I dislike the idea of the doxing thing,
but I think if it were somehow a fun game and part of the culture, then maybe it could work.
of, I guess, part of the culture, then maybe it could work. Yeah, moral hazard.
Yeah, I mean, it's super hard. Like, how do you, and you know, like, we always talk, like,
they want lots of people validating, but then you have these massive rewards that sort of
incentivize economies of scale with the validator set. So it's hard.
Like part of me would just say like,
we actually don't need to give validator rewards. Like just like,
like you can cut it really close to zero. But,
but then you have other issues is like,
then where do people monetize other places around it? Yeah. Yeah.
And it's, yeah mev becomes
a much a much more prominent um yeah i mean i think you and i had talked even about like
it would be cool like if we all just meet at devcon and have you know we all vote on
the thousand validators for the year and the chain is cool yeah like you're in charge of running it. And like, if you go down,
like there's not necessarily slashing penalties, but we all give you a call and
try and keep running. And it's, it's, it's just more, yeah, cordial, I guess you could say.
But it goes back to like, listen, this is the purpose of what it's, what it's for.
You know, I like, I like the idea of,
so one of the reasons I've been thinking about the social layer
has been in the context of parties
and what crypto is versus what it could be.
Like what crypto conferences and side events are
versus what cypherpunk side events or conferences should really look like.
And I like the idea, kind of blending this with yours, of like, you vote on a thousand
people that are going to run these validators, and if their validators don't catastrophically
mess up in a year, they get invited back to the next cool social event at Ethereum. But the problem here is
there are not that many cool social events in Ethereum. And I can think of a few. I think you
would guess some of the same ones. We had Mario from Ethereum Foundation on last week, Bordell Mario. And we were talking about that venue as being a
really cool coordination hub and not just for hacky tech projects, not as just a maker space,
but as like, it's a really cool cypherpunk spot. And I would love to see more of those kinds of social gathering places coming up in the Ethereum ecosystem.
And I kind of feel like that plus maybe something like social graphs is the way I have this intuition that social graphs and in-person events
are the way to secure Ethereum culture.
What have you thought about that before?
And how have your thoughts on that changed over time?
Yeah, no, that sounds cool to me.
I mean, I love Ethereum events.
Like, you know, like I'm sure you do too.
You obviously keep going unless it's purely business.
But yeah, like every time I get a chance to go, there's just, it's, everybody's always super, super into it.
You know, like I, I live outside of a big city, so I don't get to see too many people in person that are super into crypto.
So I always love getting to go.
Yeah, DC at that.
Yeah, not, not to knock, not to knock Ethereum events, but I get this sense, and maybe it's just because this is what I'm thinking of and working on, that this comes up.
We're looking at Punk.Fun potentially being a launchpad native to a popular L2 that I'll be able to share more about,
hopefully in the near future.
Going to have a call with them again tomorrow.
And so punk is two things, right?
It's like, it's maybe three things.
It's maybe punk, it's dot, and it's fun.
And dot to me is like, it's the financial side.
It's the bare bones that keeps everything together in this launch pad.
But punk and fun, like what are the things,
these are like the two themes of what I find myself doing in crypto over time,
where we're either working on, you know,
right now we have a private messaging app with a token that we're we're helping out to do a
token rescue operation and that's what we want to be working on because that's punk that's
cypherpunk right and then on the other side like sometimes i'm doing goofy things like
like creating a like but coin at a hackathon and that goes viral right and that's that's fun
or we're going to like you know underground raves and things in crypto and that's fun and
cypherpunk and so I've been thinking a lot more about kind of the the like the few events that
have been like that that have blended both of these themes that have been like that, that have blended both of these themes,
that have been the coolest things,
the coolest things that I've attended in crypto,
and furthermore, the kinds of things
that would get Vice documentaries made about them
if people knew.
And I'm thinking, why don't we have more of those?
And how do we get there?
What would be some cool ideas
if you had a good marketing budget to host these kinds oh i don't know man um uh yeah don't make
me your party planner but i actually i i listen i listen to your party planner i talked with brenda
about this last year when we were catching up there was i was listening to another podcast uh
dialectic uh with jack doll. Great one,
by the way, I forget the guy's name. So I won't butcher it, but he was talking about like what it
means to be punk and in music. And I think it rings true a little bit, but he was saying like,
anytime you see like indie musicians now who are making things like for morality or for, you know,
to, to be true to their values.
Like the first thing you know about them is that they're Nepo babies or trust fund kids.
You know, like anybody who isn't playing the algorithm or trying to make slop is like clearly already well to do.
And, you know, I think this is as a lot of times you see this in in crypto as well, right?
Like if if you're the person who can care about the morality or the values, it's almost anti punk in some ways because you clearly don't have to make a living as much as the next person.
So, like, I always wonder, like, you know, do we want to.
Like, you know, do we want to like, like sometimes those kids who are out there grinding, trying to, you know, make money trading, like, like that's in some ways it's like almost more punk than, you know, the Bitcoin millionaire who's preaching about the founder's values or something like that.
Yeah, I guess that would depend how you define punk, but I definitely wouldn't define it as like some kind of like grinding or doing what you have to do.
I mean, like is Wall Street punk?
You know, like there's lots of people that come from nothing and they look to Wall Street because they're like, well, that's the most money that I can make in a year with the most certainty around it.
And of course, Wall Street's full
of Nepo babies as well. But I think there's lots of places that people are doing those kinds of
things. And I would say, like, to me, punk is in some way, carving out a, carving out a space that is a shield for people that want to be anti-establishment.
And it depends, it can vary.
There's lots of different flavors of punk,
but cypherpunk is doing that through cryptography and now economics.
And I think it was always economics,
because there's always an economic calculation
underlying the proliferation of software. The internet succeeded because of the concept that
I wrote about in Sybil Disobedience that once you get enough people doing something,
the government has to play whack-a-mole. It just too expensive to shut down and that's why these movements have succeeded like torrents with the pirate bay or um you know bit torrent which became
a crypto protocol ironically later or um even in corporations like uber that were just growing and
and moving fast enough to outpace that so So that's how I would define punk.
Maybe you define it a little differently,
or what would you add to that?
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think some of the...
Maybe if you just look at, like,
what were the best punk things you've seen
over the past, like, year or so?
Like, one, I got...
Did you get the D-Gen phone?
It did, yeah.
I have that.
I don't think it's shipped yet.
Has it...
Have you gotten that?
I got mine
like that's super punk like it came in a super cool case it's like you know not that i'm going
to use the thing like i don't you know like i don't necessarily need another wallet necessarily
but just even making physical products is yeah it's awesome cool it's yeah i bought it for whatever
utility it's going to have down the road. Right.
To say that I had it.
You know, like one of my most treasured possessions is a blocker uptor from 2013, 2012.
My friend who introduced me to Bitcoin gave me his old blocker upters and I plugged him in, joined a pool, maybe mined for an hour before I was like,
I need my laptop and then started using it again.
So, but that's like one of those kind of cool cypherpunk things
because it is physical and it is like,
it's more what it represents.
But of course, if you did need to use it, it would work.
Yeah, like I think that would be the best conference thing.
Like if you actually wanted to do something cyberpunk,
like get people running some code.
You have to bring a server and everybody has to plug in a server
and we have to run something.
Great idea, actually.
I love that.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, go ahead.
Say it.
Yeah, no, I also, I bought like another punk thing I bought this year.
I bought I saw somebody made a watch and instead of just it tells, you know, the hand spins around in a circle, but it moves at a monthly pace.
So it just spins every month. And so the whole point was to to get around to the concept of
time and to try and move a little bit slower um and i was just like it's it's kind of badass in a
way um that's pretty cool yeah i like stuff like that um i like that that um the running things
in parallel uh like running something there were two two other cool similar cypherpunk things that I saw this year
that I wish were more popular.
One was offline protocol.
You might have seen or interacted with this.
Yep.
I think they're Bluetooth-based,
where you turn it on and it's a mesh network.
And what I love is that they've marketed at festivals.
And to me, like music is the, like music venues are the number one place that crypto
like should be expanding into. You've got these people that are generally like a little more
tech savvy than average, especially in more indie kind of scenes um they believe in some
similar principles maybe more on the egalitarian side than the capitalist side certainly but other
other values that that cypherpunks hold implicitly um and then so offline protocol was one and another
was burner wallet did you come into contact with these guys?
They've been around for a while, right?
Burner, really?
Have they?
They're a hardware.
It's just an NFC card, and they generate the private key and just throw it on there.
But you can tap this thing to any phone, any phone in the world and log
in to your account on their open source website.
Um, I think this is the coolest thing in the world because that means you can be completely
off grid while bringing your net worth with you.
Like you can just go wherever, you know, travel wherever, keep a, keep a burner phone in your,
in your back pocket, in your bag, in your like whatever, you know, and, um, and just,
and just bring that with you.
You know, you say you're, you're backpacking in, in, uh, you know, like East Asia or something,
um, or maybe more like Central Asia, the Middle East, like you bring this thing with
you and then you just tap it to whoever's phone you come into contact with to send a
transaction for peer-to-peer exchange.
Crypto is getting to the point where that kind of nomadic and off-grid lifestyle is
actually available.
It's possible.
And I find that really encouraging because maybe not everybody wants
that lifestyle, but you can still live off-grid, underground. And that's a very compelling
space of freedom. One of few that I think we have left.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think on the topic of just being punk, like, if you look at all these things, like with a theme, it's like, it's almost in that they're like not practical, in some sense. Like, these are the anti prediction market finance apps, right? Like, they have nothing to do with that. Like, it reminds me, there's like a quote by Oscar Wilde, like, where he says, like, nothing's beautiful unless it's useless.
a quote by oscar wilde like where he says like nothing's beautiful unless it's useless
um because if it's useful it expresses a need right and so in some ways too like like anything
punk is by definition like not you know the hyper financialized efficient version of it so it's not
useful it's it's it's just cool because it is and people are doing something for a reason that's not necessarily just to
make money yeah I mean there is that I think it's you know there's there's a
lot you could describe kind of describe Linux that way, right? Like, uh, definitely just not convenient. Um,
but it's not convenient for a purpose and it's not like, I, I actually,
I really, I, it bothers me a little bit.
It's one of my pet peeves that in crypto,
like there is a faction of people that are advocating for maximal use of
Linux. For example, like Mario talking about this,
and it's like most people don't need to use like Tails, right?
Like they're not going to need,
you don't need to have the most private operating system
all the time for every area of your life.
Like no one, almost no one needs that.
And if you do, great, it exists and you can use it.
And that's why we want it to exist, because some people do. Because without, you know, without, without the ability for independent thinking and action, society just gets trapped into one pattern and then there are no more experiments. libertarians, cypherpunks, especially going into this like technocratic surveillance future
that we're looking at is that there will just be no more room for dissent. That's always been
kind of the concern. But not everybody needs to be like hyper private all the time. And so I think cypherpunk to me is that set of tools are those set of tools
that enable that kind of freedom that enabled dissent and counterculture and are in some way,
maybe subversive to the status quo, whatever that may be. Yeah, I mean, maybe maybe but like is using linux descent like i don't know well no it enables right that's
that's my point sure i think it's um you know using linux is not the thing in itself like we
shouldn't be linux maximalists we should be freedom and maybe privacy, but definitely freedom maximalists. And that, if you take that to an
extreme, you can continue recursively redefining freedom, asking, well, is the whole world really
free because everyone can press a red button and destroy the whole thing.
Like that would, that would be freedom by maybe a myopic definition, but not a more holistic one.
But whatever that, that definition is, I think that's the one that, that cypherpunk,
you know, that all things cite Yule.
Yeah, I mean, i'd be curious so i i on that that was like the idea from like albert wegener right that um privacy and almost freedom don't necessarily
be at odds just because there's different kinds of freedom you know so his example was um
assume we move to a future where ai allows every single person to create viruses in their house.
So, you know, you could make the next super COVID virus on some machine.
And so can everybody else, like just with basic household chemicals.
Anybody can look up AI and then make it.
Assume that's the case.
And maybe we'll get there.
Maybe we won't. But if that's the case, And maybe we'll get there. Maybe we won't.
But if that's the case, he posits there's two ways to prevent it, right?
You either need a super authoritarian regime that is spying on you and makes sure that nobody's doing this thing.
Or you have no privacy at a social level to where every single person knows up, you know, knows what everybody else is doing.
That's interesting. I have a third way. And I think you might,
you might like it because I've thought about this a lot and I used to not know
where I would stand if those were the decisions presented, but sip at status is
he's, he's got great tweets. Everybody should follow him. He's just really, he's a good thinker. He's
funny. And he pointed out that this problem in the context of smart contracts, he said,
AI, AI generated, LLM generated smart contracts, LLM generated auditors or LLM based auditors,
no problem. Like there's no problem because
the same level of intelligence that is generating the vulnerabilities in vibe coded smart contracts
are, is also vetting the security of those contracts themselves. And if smart contracts
got, you know, people got so lazy and smart contracts got so complex through vibe coding, then that would be the playing field. It would be people just watching while AIs go head to head. likely future for smart contracts. And this seems to fit the pattern in privacy as well,
or in the potential for, call it like weapons of mass destruction.
You allow AI to invade privacy, but hopefully keep it as...
Well, maybe.
As invasive as possible, right?
it as possible, right? I was actually saying, you know, maybe there's no problem because
there are people potentially creating super viruses with AI, but then there are people
potentially creating super cures with AI as well. Well, maybe like a nuclear weapon might be a
better example than like one word. Yeah, could be. It destroys right yeah um and yeah i guess there's
degrees of difficulty and the the um um disparity between uh offensive and defensive force but
um yeah i think that that general heuristic of like ai generated X is combated by AI supported Y is,
is been a helpful one in,
quelling my mind from thinking about dystopian outcomes.
Yeah,
but I mean,
like I would be curious,
like I wish somebody would run a study whether or not that holds in,
even in like the smart contract realm, you know, like, yeah,
could be total BS.
Do people who write smart contracts with AI even ask AI to audit their
smart contracts? Or do people, you know,
like anytime you interact with a smart contract,
do you ask AI to use, you know AI to audit the code? I don't.
Well, I would go as far as to say it is being audited by AI because that's what the auditors
are doing nowadays. I think that's going to be their first line of defense. So if you get an
audit, you will have an AI auditing your code, but maybe you'll also for a little while have a human until people get lazier
and lazier. I'd love to explore that a little more. I've been wondering whether people are
getting, I think people are getting lazier and it's actually okay because of, you know,
I thought the reaction to AI would be a bunch of people get really good with it and
start to centralize productivity and wealth even further. I don't think that's
actually the case, but I have no proof. But I'd love to talk
about that sometime. Unfortunately, I've got to jump to a call.
Yeah, no, this was a fun hour. Thanks for having me on, guys.
Yeah, thanks, this was a fun hour. Thanks for having me on, guys. Yeah, thanks for tuning in, everyone.
And Nick, of course, thanks for making the time.
It was great chatting with you, as always.
And anything you want to close off with?
No, I think just, yeah, go run some code.
Playing around.
Hit up Teller if you guys need anything.
For sure.
All right.
Keep talking with you, man.
All right.
Catch you guys.
