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Tezos 10 Year Anniversary: An interview with @arthurb
Recorded: Sept. 3, 2024 Duration: 0:50:21Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hello, and welcome to a special edition of Tuesday Tez Day.
Today, we are joined by Arthur Brightman, the visionary who brought Tezos to life.
As we celebrate 10 years since the publication of the Tezos White Paper,
we are taking a moment to reflect on the journey that has shaped not just a blockchain,
but a community and an entire ecosystem.
Over the past decade, Tezos has navigated uncharted waters, introduced revolutionary ideas,
and sparked innovations that continue to influence the blockchain world.
In today's conversation, we'll explore the highs, the challenges, and the enduring vision
that has driven Tezos forward.
So join us as we dive into this remarkable journey with the man who started it all.
So, Kryptonio, my friend, how are you?
Welcome to this special, special edition of Tuesday Tez Day.
How are you, my friend?
Hello, hello.
I'm doing great, man.
Especially, you know, today we have a very, very sunny day here in Greece.
So, and the temperatures aren't too high, so it's kind of put you in the perfect mood.
And yeah, I'm very excited for today's space, actually.
Really looking forward to our conversation with Arthur.
There is so much we will have, we will be discussing today.
I really want to know, you know, how this early years were and the journey,
the whole journey to this point.
So, yeah, very excited.
What about you?
I'll be honest with you, I couldn't sleep last night.
I was kind of super excited, like to the point that I couldn't sleep, you know.
But here we are.
Arthur, welcome to Tuesday Tez Day.
Thank you so much for joining us.
How are you, sir?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm amazing.
Thank you for asking.
All right.
Well, if you're ready, sir, I would love to get started.
I know time is a precious commodity for you.
For everyone, really.
Let's get started.
Fair enough.
All right, sir.
Well, when you hit publish on that white paper 10 years ago,
did you ever think you'd be sitting here now talking about a decade of Tezos?
And what surprised you the most along the way?
Well, the Tezos paper was published by L.M. Goodman.
And, you know, the entity of L.M. Goodman might be Leo Magrassi Goodman.
And he was, you know, the journalist who claimed to have uncovered the entity identity of Satoshi
Nakamoto because she looked in a phone book.
And she was like, well, this guy is named Satoshi Nakamoto, so he's probably Nakamoto.
So I would say our best guess for the Tezos white paper is that it was published by Leo
Magrassi Goodman.
But, you know, looking at the early days of Tezos, yeah, it's been quite a journey.
I can't believe it's already part of my life for 13 years now.
Now, if you had to pick one moment where you thought, wow, we're really doing this, what
would it be?
And on the flip side, was there ever a point where you maybe had some serious doubts?
Well, the two points that were the highest stress for me, I would say, were the one that
involved security risk, like cyber security risk.
So there's two points here.
One was I assisted the Tezos Foundation with its fundraiser in 2017.
So there was a lot of money going through some private keys over different vaults.
And the security of the website in particular, there was a lot of attention put on that.
It was much more, I would say, than any of the project puts in terms of attention to their
security.
So, for example, there was a full domain log, which we, you know, we played with some
relationship with Cloudflare to get a full domain log on the domain name.
The web page to contribute was entirely static.
Like, there was no server, it was served from an S3 bucket from Amazon, behind Cloudflare.
There was a service that was pinging the web page every minute, downloading it, hashing
And if the hash differed from what it expected, it would text a bunch of people.
So lots of security, but it's a very, if you're asking for, like, oh, my God, this is
really happening type of moments.
So that was one of them.
And the second one of them was the proposition of the genesis block when, so that was in June
30th, 2018, when the chain launched.
And, you know, you don't want to get anything wrong in that genesis block.
And it was checked and checked and triple checked.
And there were several implementations of the checks that were run that had to give the
same results and conclude that it was correct.
So lots of stress around here.
I would say those are probably the two biggest time in terms of, like, look what, it's really
happening.
And I'm guessing during those times there was not much sleep and much hair pulling and
wringing of the wrists.
There was not much sleep.
I think I had one laptop at some point which had, like, some of the code for the static web
page.
And it was just, like, I had it under my pillow and I was sleeping on top of it.
Arthur, at that point, especially at the first block, you know, when it launched, I would
assume that you probably were all inside a room, an office or something.
Was there cheering?
How was, like, the vibe at that moment?
Oh, the vibe was, it was very electric.
There were a lot of people.
It was all in Paris, around the ocean.
Of course, there were people outside of Paris who were also connected by video chats.
But, yeah, it was an extremely exciting moment.
So, now, Tezo's governance is often touted as a game changer.
But when you see a heated debate in the community, do you ever think, this is exactly what we
envisioned?
I mean, how has the community surprised you over the years?
Yeah, I mean, I would envision some debates.
But I would say that the governance system of Tezo solves problems that you have when
you're much, much, much bigger than we currently are or that we've ever been.
It's when you have many different computing visions, many different, like, large stakeholders
or users of the chain.
And so, it's been working as intended.
And it's worked very, very well.
And I would say far in excess of, in terms of, like, how reliably it's worked.
Far in excess of what everyone anticipated.
You know, punching governance had a lot of detractors and still does.
But, you know, none of the cartoon vision that people had of punching governance played
out.
In fact, it's been very, very reliable.
But I would say we'd have to see it at a much bigger scale to see the type of thing
that I envision.
Specifically, for one example would be proposals with significant invoices.
Saying, like, look, I'm coming here.
And instead of, like, launching a new chain, which is, you know, what people still do,
I'm going to actually propose a modification of that chain.
And that modification by itself, I can capture some of the value of that modification.
But to do that, I think that works if you are in a very, very dominant position.
And that's a lot of, you know, a lot of the design of Tezos assumes that.
Because that's the entire point, right?
If you're not capable of succeeding in this position, you're not capable of succeeding at all.
That does make sense.
So, after all these years, how has your personal philosophy around blockchain evolved?
Has there been any aha moments where your perspective on the tech maybe shifted?
Yes, I think there has been.
I would say that I got a lot more comfortable with subjectivity around the blockchain.
So, you know, when I was working early on on proof-of-stake, one of the biggest problems
everyone was trying to tackle were long-range organizations.
And there was this idea that, you know, people were saying proof-of-stake is impossible
because I could simulate a proof-of-stake chain and I could present that to a new node connecting
to the network.
And that new node would be confused and they would not know which one is the real chain.
And therefore, proof-of-stake is impossible because you have to solve that problem.
And you can't really, you know, the argument is correct.
You can't really solve that problem.
But the problem is not really a problem at all.
That's the thing is, like, in practice, it's just not the case that you have people connecting
out of the blue with zero information and, oh, my goodness, how, you know, however shall
I know which chain to connect to?
It is, like, one property of proof-of-work that you cannot replicate.
But who cares?
Like, you have so much better properties in terms of proof-of-stake in terms of the cost
of security, in terms of the level of security, in terms of how you recover from attacks.
Like, proof-of-stake dominates in almost all dimensions.
But this one.
And I would say I had a tendency at the beginning to kind of take the problems of the space from
the outside.
You know, accept what people were saying as, like, these are the problems you have to
solve.
As opposed to physically starting even more from scratch.
Even more from first principles and say, like, wait a second.
Why do I care about this property?
Why do I care about this property?
You know, what really matters?
And there was a lot of that put into the design also on the governance of CISOs.
Like, it had to be entirely automated.
And, I mean, I'm glad that it is.
But I would say I would have put less focus on the automation of it all, on being able to
essentially have an answer to every possible criticism that people had, which were not necessarily
pragmatic criticism.
And actually focus on, like, rethinking and say, like, okay, what are deep down the properties
that we care about?
And what is it that we actually need for these properties?
And what is it that we don't actually need for these properties?
And it took me a little longer to get there.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So now at the point we are now, when you see other projects borrowing ideas from Tezos,
how does that make you feel?
Do you see it like a validation?
Does it push you to innovate even further?
Yeah, I mean, I don't need a push to innovate.
I mean, I love innovation.
I love new ideas.
And, yeah, it's vindication, you know?
I mean, one of my motivations working on Tezos early on was that, I've said it before,
people were wrong on the internet.
And seeing people saying proof of stake is impossible, and it just sounded very silly.
And I'm like, no, it's possible.
So I'll show you.
And, you know, seeing that essentially proof of stake has won, clearly, and a lot of other
ideas that I put forward have won, you know, that, you know, that doesn't make me very proud.
It would be nice to get more credits, but at the end of the day, I'm still very happy
to see all of this being, like, adopted and all of this is being validated.
Yeah.
I mean, I personally, you know, start seeing even using the terms of delegations,
delegates being used around in other chains.
We see, obviously, on-chain governance being chased so much.
But delegation didn't start with Tezos.
So I would say, like, you have delegation in, like, the early Dan Larimer, D-Boss type
of systems, the first one being, I think, B-Chairs.
And I don't think it's a good delegation model.
So it's a delegation model that generally collapses into, basically, like, two validators.
And it's happened in, like, most of his projects.
But it is, you know, there is a notion of delegation already in there.
So Tezos borrowed a lot of ideas from, like, interesting projects that were around at the time.
I think they were interesting.
And that often don't get stacked that much credit.
I think there was a lot of innovative ideas in B-Chairs.
I think there were a lot of innovative ideas in NXT as well.
And it doesn't really, like, they don't really get discussed as pioneers.
But they really had some ideas that were unusual for the time and were very, very early.
Yeah.
And, I mean, taking ideas and implementing it and actually merging them into our ecosystem
is also one of our strengths, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you know, a lot of the scaling ideas for Tezos and a lot of, like,
all of that came from some of the ideas in the Ethereum community around what they used
to call the roll-up-centric roadmap, which they have kind of somewhat abandoned now,
unless, you know, like, you can have a centralized L2 that they're scaling solution.
That was a really good model.
That's, you know, the first model that I saw and I thought that can actually scale.
That actually works.
Yeah.
So following from this one, you know, they say no plan survives contact with reality.
So looking back, how has Tezos path diverged from what you initially imagined for better
or worse?
Well, I think, you know, the space changed a lot.
I would say one of the, okay, so if I look at some of the, some of the misfires, obviously,
you know, there were a lot of, you know, organizational issues for the first, for the first couple
years and even, even longer than that.
But if I look at some of the misfires, I would say Tezos early on is really designed
mostly as cryptocurrency store of value and sure, it has some smart contracts.
So the smart contracts are not central because part of my thesis at the time is that really
the main use case is money store of value.
And yes, there may be some dApps, but like dApps are not, dApps are not like really at the
center of Tezos very early on.
And I would say today, if you look at how people value tokens, it's still largely based
on this like store of value, memes, and money.
Like, this is still how it's valued, but people have still built impressive applications,
impressive smart contract ecosystem and applications.
And they actually like, you know, did consume a meaningful amount of fees.
I'm not sure if that will last, but at some point they did do that.
And so a lot of the early work in Tezos was retrofitting it so that it could be more efficient
at running applications.
So you could like write smart contracts, but you didn't have, you know, this compiled
language that would compile them to Mikkelsen.
Mikkelsen was more the type of language that you would use to build a multisig or that you
would use to build an attachment point for an L2.
And the idea was that you would write something like Plasma, for example, and you would connect
to a Mikkelsen contract.
So it was really meant to orchestrate L2s more so than build like applications.
Even, you know, like until the very end, the ability to have efficient like tokens on Tezos
that came, that was very early, that was removed, and then that was reintroduced only like
shortly before the launch.
So that was, I think, one of the misfire.
And another misfire was not focusing on scalability early on.
And I think that came from the same idea, which was, look, at the end of the day,
the main, you know, use case of this thing is to be a form of digital gold.
And if you're digital gold, you don't necessarily need a lot of transactions.
Most of these transactions can happen potentially on second layers.
And so even then, you don't really need to focus all that much on scalability.
They will either come from things like Lightning Network type of systems, Plasma type of systems.
And that didn't happen.
So the focus on scaling came, I would say, starting in 2021.
And the focus on, like, let's really make smart contract work comes more in 2019.
Yeah.
And I was going to ask you when you think that the shift happened, you know,
and the focus went towards scaling.
Because I remember, especially in 2021, 2022, that there were a lot of, like,
institutions and companies kind of testing the waters, you know, checking, like, blockchain technology.
But at that point, I think that none of them were, like, scaled enough to maybe, yeah,
to be able to build some of the applications they wanted to build.
I think it happened late 2017, early 2018, with Scripler Kitties.
Like, that's a watershed moment for people to say, like, oh, wow, people are spending a lot of money on this.
And yet, you know, it crumbles and it gets very, very expensive because there's no scaling.
I mean, you have it a little bit before, right?
You have it in the block size wars in Bitcoin.
And it gets pretty heated in 2016, in early 2017.
But the real topic about, like, smartphone track scaling, that becomes very, very much on people's mind in 2018.
Gotcha, gotcha.
All right.
And Tezos has always been, you know, ahead with innovations like self-adventment,
on-chain governance, formal verification.
I remember it was a big thing when it was first introduced.
And even now with smart roll-ups, is there a feature or upgrade that you're particularly proud of?
Maybe something that's flown under the radar for most people?
I would say there's a couple.
So I forgot, was it in a, was it, it was not in a hang-ju.
Was it in Iska that we got Tenderbake, removing the consensus algorithm?
Let's see, Tenderbake has been, which protocol?
I think it's around this time.
It wasn't Tenderbake.
Yeah, it's around the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So because it had been a long time coming, and it was turning a corner in terms of, like, being able to ship it.
Because it's, we had had smaller upgrades, you know, smaller tweaks to the chain,
and not a big change, like changing the consensus algorithm.
So that was, I would say, one of the biggest, I think it was, maybe, underappreciated.
Because it was not just a big change for Tezos.
I think it was also a big change for how work was happening in the development teams working on Tezos.
And the other one would be Mumbai, which introduced the smart roll-ups.
That was also, like, a bit of a moment in terms of the protocol development.
But maybe that, at the time, wasn't appreciated as such.
Now, Arthur, when you see Tezos being used in unexpected places or ways, what's your reaction?
And have there been any use cases that have made you think,
I never saw that coming, but that's awesome.
I mean, I'm always happy to see Tezos being used.
And, of course, you know, one of the most fun use cases I've seen of Tezos is, like, being adopted by the art community.
I mean, it's not the only use case of Tezos, and I think it's great that we have many other use cases in gaming and DeFi and all of that.
But I do love the art I expect, because in a world where a lot of the applications on blockchains are basically, you know, scams or pumps and dumps,
it's very nice to see something awesome and meaningful.
And, you know, surely there's more to blockchain and there's more to Tezos than this,
but it's great to have something like this on Tezos.
But I did see it coming.
So early on, one of my ideas was, like, this, around, like, 2011, I was thinking of putting e-books, putting, like, authors' sites,
you know, like, signed copies of e-books by authors, like putting the author's signature on a Bitcoin blockchain.
That was a 2011 little product that they had.
The idea would be, like, as a lot of things become digital and if we want to connect with the artist,
how do you own an original when everything is digital?
In some sense, in the 80 ways, like, well, a blockchain is actually a good place to put a signature.
So I had this idea around NFTs fairly early, early on, which I think is also why, when these things started popping up,
I think I recognized the value that was there.
So can we dive into the NFT explosion on Tezos for a second?
Can you describe this time from your perspective?
What have been maybe some of the favorite, a few of your favorites, maybe projects or collaborations?
Well, you know, you can't think of your favorite kids like this, otherwise you get people upset.
But only one, so I really loved the Tethered Collection when it dropped, and I loved the spirit of it.
And this was at a time where all the people doing PFPs were doing, you know, there was some bullshit around PFP saying,
like, no, no, we're not just selling your PFP, we are selling an ecosystem, and we have a roadmap,
and we're going to do this and that.
And, of course, you know, none of the things that pan out.
And I loved the brutal honesty and, like, cheekiness of the Tezos, which is saying, like,
there's no roadmap, you're just getting a Tezos.
And, yeah, so I have a promise for it.
Okay, that's fun.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to put you on the spot there.
Thank you for that.
Now, we'll move to a different angle here.
About keeping a blockchain secure is sort of like a never-ending game of chess.
What's been the most challenging move you've had to make keeping Tezos ahead of the curve?
Well, that's the thing.
It's like, if you want to be ahead of the curve, you need to move fast.
If you're moving fast, you might break things.
So there's always a balance between how fast you can move and how much you can compromise
and how much you risk compromising the security of the chain.
And you want to strike a good balance.
You don't want to be, you know, the optimal number of bugs is not zero.
So, like, the optimal strategy is not to go and say, let's entirely do a formal verification
of the entire code base and then keep iterating on that.
I think there's a point in time where that becomes a strategy, but, you know, that's not
the point.
So you're trying to strike a balance.
And there's been a move in the industry, which I think is great, which has been a move
for transforming safety faults into liveness faults.
And so typically in consensus, you'll have, like, your safety faults and your liveness
faults.
So your safety fault means, like, a transaction happened that shouldn't happen.
Like, maybe you take someone's money or maybe a transaction is reverted or you saw that
the transaction happened and didn't happen.
That's a safety fault in the consensus.
A liveness fault is the chain stops.
And as bad as it is that the chain stopped, one thing that people have figured out over the
years, which was not obvious, you know, this was not mainstream view in 2017.
And it still isn't, is that it's better for your chain to stop than to do wrong things.
It's much, much better to have liveness faults than security faults.
And Bitcoin will sell you the opposite.
It says, oh, Bitcoin is great.
It never stops.
If you have a network split, then Bitcoin will continue.
Yeah, but then you'll have a massive reorg.
And that's a lot worse to have a massive reorg than to have a pause.
And again, this is like, you go back to the argument that people are making at the time
against, like, the consensus algorithm and say, ah, you know, that can't work because
you're not going to have liveness.
And then people, like, desperately try, you know, scramble to, like, fix liveness when
in reality you're like, well, you know, this thing almost never happened.
And if they happen, you know, we can figure it out.
You can recover from liveness faults.
It's not the end of the world.
And, you know, this realization took a while to get there.
So a lot of techniques are about transforming potential safety faults into liveness faults.
Even censorship detection.
So, for example, there are censorship detection techniques, which can transform censorship
into liveness faults, where people say, oh, we'll just stop the chain.
Same thing with data availability sampling.
If the data is misheld, you don't really have a way of, like, making sure that the data
stays there, but you can still, like, make it so that the chain stops.
So, like, you basically let the, you know, you basically, like, constrain the bad guys
so that the only thing they can do is stop the chain.
So that's, why am I talking about this?
I would say there's just, like, general design principles, where, you know, it's not about,
like, eliminating every single bug or making sure that you can't have any possible bug.
It's making sure that, you know, if things fail, they're likely to fail in a certain way
as opposed to failing in another way.
And you're going to err on the side of failing towards liveness, which is why, you know,
it's, you know, it's fun to make fun of Solana, which has a beta product, which has, like,
stopped all of the time.
But, you know, in general, it's, like, I've refrained from making fun of their liveness faults
because I think it's, like, it's an indication when you have a lot of liveness faults that
you basically, like, push out your design so that by default you're going to have, like,
liveness problems as opposed to have safety problems, which I think is good practice.
Sorry, as a follow-up, because you talked about pushing things fast.
We also, at Tezos, been pushing, at one point we had an upgrade, like, every three months,
which is, like, too fast for the space, right, in general.
Do you see us keeping that kind of pace, like, forever, or do you see it, like, slowing down
in the future?
What's your point of view there?
No, I see the slowing down, but for me, it's not, like, how often you have a grade.
It's also how big the upgrade is.
You could have an upgrade every three months, but the upgrade is minor.
And so it's not very disruptive.
I would also like to move to a position where we don't have to, you know, we don't upgrade
the node as often, the node shouldn't need to be upgraded every single time, and I don't
like that.
It's convenient, but I think we need to, at some point, go back to a system where the
node only gets updated once in a while.
And, yeah, I would say there's, if you look at the roadmap, for example, like, the proposed
roadmap for Tezos X, at some point, a lot of the development moves towards layer two, as
opposed to layer one, and layer one starts ossifying.
And so I think we'll see some modification of layer one.
There's a few things that we see on layer one that, like, would benefit from evolving.
First is, like, a full integration of the data web layer, reduction of latency, simplification
of baking writes and baking cycles.
Like, there's a lot of code here that's basically is only meaningful when you have reorgs, and
that can be, a lot of it can be cleaned up, and also, you know, so, yeah, so, so, so, so
some efficiency seeing around, around making latency, but then a lot of, like, development
moves to L2, and it's a mod, it's much nicer to develop on, to develop an L2 than to develop
a blockchain, because you don't have to develop consensus, you don't have to deal with peer-to-peer
networking, you don't have to deal with a lot of things, you're purely in a negotiation environment.
So, it's also easier to, uh, to perform upgrades.
Now, right now, it seems like everyone is talking about the multi-chain future.
In your view, uh, where does Tezos fit into the puzzle, and what role do you see it playing
in connecting the dots?
I'm not sure there's a multi-chain future, um, because why would you use, you know, why would
you use multiple chains?
And the answer, typically, is, um, you use multiple chains if, if they each have some
advantages and drawbacks, and, like, one is better for something you want to do, and the
other one is better for something you want to do.
Um, and so, the question is, where does that differentiation come from?
And I don't think the differentiation is going to come primarily from technology, because there's
not that many trade-offs, in the sense of, like, the best blockchain you can build for application
X, and the best blockchain you can build for application Y are the same blockchain, right?
There's, it's almost never the case that you're like, oh, man, if you wanted to do a blockchain
for gaming, we'd have to design it this way.
If you want to do a blockchain for finance, you have to design it that way.
At the end of the day, all these applications, they want the same thing.
They want security, resiliency, high throughput, low latency.
And yes, some things are, like, sometimes in tension, but they're not, like, they're not
massive tension.
So, by and large, I would say the best designs for blockchains are the same regardless of the
application.
So, it's not like you're going to have blockchains with technology tailored to certain applications.
Now, you can still have ecosystems tailored to applications, right?
You can look at blockchains not just as technology, but as platforms.
And it would simply be that you're going to use a blockchain because that's where all a
certain, you know, like, a certain, you know, a certain exchange was built there, and it
stays there.
And that's why you use this chain, because the application is there, and it's not moving
anywhere else.
And that's what you're going to be using.
So, you could crystallize into a future where there's many blockchains, and I think it will
happen.
I don't think we could crystallize in the future with a single blockchain.
But the lowest energy point, I think, is a single blockchain.
There's nothing that prevents, there's nothing, like, fundamental that prevents that from
happening.
If we don't end up with a single blockchain, I would say it's just a matter of friction and
not a matter of, like, there's something fundamental about the technology of the markets that
favors having multiple chains.
One chain to rule them all.
I love it.
Well, yes, ideally.
Which is why I think it's important that early on, you have the ability to solve problems
that you get when you are at a very high, you know, like, you have this very high scale.
So, watching the ecosystem grow must be like seeing a child grow up.
What's one development or project that made you go, this is exactly why we built Tezos?
Not yet, I would say.
I think the ambition is very, very large, because there's a ton of projects that I'm super happy.
I guess, let me take this back, because I see some projects, and yes, you know, it's partly
why we built Tezos, but I wouldn't say this as, like, a single thing where it's like, oh, yeah, that one thing, that is one.
It's like, yeah, it was built for many different things, and I'm glad that there's many different things out there.
But, like, you know, if I had to, like, if I had built it for one thing, it would be digital gold, and we're not there yet.
That's fair.
That's very fair.
Now, navigating regulations must feel like walking a tightrope at times.
How do you keep Tezos innovative while staying compliant, and what's your approach to dealing with the unpredictable nature of global regulation?
Well, you know, Tezos is a product, and I can't really affect how regulation is going to, you know, how regulators are going to, regulators can regulate the use of a product, and that I don't really have, you know, it's not something I can affect directly.
What we can do in terms of innovation is ensuring that the product can give, you know, it can have the right features while being compatible, you know, without sacrificing the product to the product, try to be compatible with regulations whenever possible.
So, and, you know, it can be simple things, but, like, the way in which you design, the way in which, you know, staking is designed compared to delegation in the new staking model for adaptability assurance,
you don't want to sacrifice any of the efficiency of it, but you'll, you know, there's some details of implementation which should be irrelevant in terms of the regulation with ARIN.
So, regulators very often will tell you that they are technology neutral, right?
They regulate the substance of activities, not the form.
But, of course, that's not true.
And you can see it, for example, when the SEC goes after OpenSea, it's because they're on a, you know, they're using a blockchain.
If they were not using a blockchain, if all of this was conducted using physical pieces, they wouldn't go after it.
So, they're not technology neutral.
There's even some regulations that have been passed by Treasury which are not technology neutral.
They say that if you receive something on a cryptographic ledger, then you have to do a FinCEN declaration.
That's not technology neutral because the thing that you receive might, it might be a piece of art.
You might be, you might receive a stock.
You might receive a bond.
You might receive a commodity.
So, there's many things you can be receiving, and the regulation should focus on the nature of the thing that you receive and not on the form.
But, in practice, regulars do, you know, contrary to what they say, is they do actually, like, care of the form.
And so, being careful here in the design can be, can make it for a better experience for users.
That's one aspect.
The other aspect, of course, that regulars have been concerned with entities that work in the blockchain space.
So, exchanges, for example, they've created regulatory regimes for VSP, which are virtual asset service provider.
Where, in general, the space for developers has remained fairly open.
But we've seen encroachments where regulars have tried to hold developers liable or responsible for some of the activities of blockchain.
That's, of course, always worrying.
And, of course, we've had, you know, some of the theories of US regulators around tokens and their relationship to people that are deemed to be issuers.
So, you have to be careful about all that.
It's very hard to navigate because it's an evolving landscape.
And it's been a bit of a, I would say, political land rush where people were trying to claim it.
It's starting to, I think, it's starting to shake out more positively.
We're seeing courts, for example, in any states, apply a little more common sense to the situations than they have in the past.
And start to give less deference to the thesis of regulators as they start to understand the technology more.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I do remember, like, being the discussion of if technologies should follow regulations or if regulation should follow technology.
And, obviously, there needs to be some sort of balance there, right?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I would say technology doesn't follow anything.
The question is people who follow regulation.
So, you want a technology that your users can, you know, you don't want your users to go to jail for using your technology, ideally.
That's pretty bad if, like, you know, if people have to go to prison to use your technology, that's not a great technology.
And there are people, especially, like, sometimes in the Bitcoin space, they will say, like, no, we need to ignore all of that.
You know, let the government bat it all.
It'll be great.
And, you know, it is not actually great if people are forced into anonymity and secrecy to use this protocol as much as possible.
If you don't, you know, you should try to get the outcomes you want without sacrificing the nature of these systems while still making it possible for people to do this legally.
Because most people don't want to, you know, run afoul of the law.
It's dangerous.
And, you know, it's a terrible, we already have bad enough user experience having private keys.
Imagine having the bad user experience of asking people to bring a lot of user products.
That's terrible.
So, if you want to make it as much as possible, possible for normal people to use a product without, you know, doing anything that puts them in danger, that's very important.
And also, you don't want to put yourself in danger by, if you are regulated as a developer.
Yeah, yeah.
That makes sense.
So, with Insight being 2020, is there a moment or decision in Tezos' journey that you'd want to do over on?
Or are you, like, a no regrets kind of person?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm very much, like, well over every single decision.
I'm like, oh, man, oh, my God, if I had, if only I had done this differently.
Oh, my God, if only I had done this or that or that or that.
So, yeah.
But, you know, everything's kind of overdetermined.
It's like a lot of turning points.
But, you, what's important is, like, trying to draw general lessons, right?
You can't just say, like, if only I had played exactly those lottery numbers last time.
You're trying to say, like, okay, what, you know, what did I learn?
What was, what's the important lessons here?
I mean, a lot of this for me have been around, like, organizations and how organization functions.
And I would say, like, how information circulates through information and how people act on it.
I see.
Okay.
Great.
Do you mean that, like, in terms of, like, narratives or elaborating that?
No, just, just, just execution.
Sometimes, you know, like, it's, when I was working with, like, a small team of developers,
it was, it was one thing.
And, like, changing the scale of organization changes a lot of the way you work.
Ah, gotcha, gotcha.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, that's fair.
Okay.
So, when you look at the blockchain landscape today, how do you think that the original white
paper has left its mark?
Any specific areas where you see its influence?
Yeah, I was, I mean, I think more than the white paper, it's really, first, the position
paper, I would say, of Tezos is the one that is the more provocative one.
And the white paper is more about, like, implementation details.
But really, what changed was the launch of Tezos.
Like, people saying that you could actually, people saying that you could actually do, like,
workable proof of stake.
Like, proof of stake that worked with actual economic incentives in place.
That hadn't been done, that hadn't been done before.
This was done by Tezos.
You know, it was, like, by that I mean the possibility of slashing that was absent before.
And I've convinced a lot of people that you could actually do this, which hadn't been
obvious at all for a while.
But yeah, we should be sure that proof of stake was possible, we should that on-chain governance
was possible.
Yeah, I mean, I do remember that back then, proof of stake was, sounded like a crazy idea.
And, like, I think that in 2014, for example, most of the blockchains were proof of work and
derivatives of Bitcoin and so on, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I get how vindicating it was when it actually launched, you know, the mainnet.
Absolutely.
All right.
All right.
So, Tezos has also a global footprint now.
Are there any regions or communities where its adoption has surprised you?
Like, what's the most unexpected place you've seen Tezos make in Nepal?
Oh, just, I don't, I don't know now.
You know, I expect the, I expect the unexpected.
I was, I was a bit surprised, it's been a while now, early on, that we got a lot of
popularity in Brazil, early on.
I, I, you would, like, constantly show up in analytics and Google searches.
Like, there was a big, uh, uh, uh, and there's, like, Brazilian community around Tezos.
So, that was, uh, that was, uh, that was, that was a bit of a, uh, interesting surprise
when it came up.
Now, I'm going to put you on the spot here, and I do apologize, but maybe not.
I mean, this might be just something that, that you, you have a knack for, which is pretty
cool.
But, uh, if you had a crystal ball, what's one wild prediction for Tezos in the next decade
that you hope will come true?
Um, it's going to be around.
I don't know if it's wild, but I would say that survival, uh, is, is underappreciated in
this space.
Because at the end of the day, you know, if these systems go away, they, they lose most
of their value, right?
You know, you, you want to use this platform for durability, the, the benefits that you have
over, you have several benefits over, like centralized databases, uh, and one is that some
central providers of centralized database may not be comfortable, uh, doing, uh, uh, in
a running application that people could run on blockchains, even though they're illegal.
Um, you know, there's a bit of like a soft form of censorship that happens on centralized
platform.
Uh, so that's one aspect.
But the other aspect is like this, you know, this is meant to last, and this is meant to last
beyond corporate entities.
This is meant to last beyond VC funding rounds and all of that.
Um, and the more time passes, I think the more details proves that, you know, it's been
around and it's there and it's not going anywhere.
And the ability to just keep going and keep going and keep going and just work, uh, and
be there, I think is underappreciated in the space right now.
That's just chasing the leaves fat.
I love that.
I love that a lot.
That's a very real answer.
I appreciate that.
And then, you know, it's not, it's not, if you look at a number of like software projects
and so forth, not that many of them, you know, survive 10 years, uh, and not that many of
them survive 20 years.
And so, you know, for Tezos to, uh, exist for 20 years, that's, that's already like, that's
really a huge achievement.
And you have a bit of a best of curve for this type of things.
You know, if you look at that, you know, the life expectancy of that system, some systems,
the longer their lives are more likely they are to die.
And unfortunately that's biological system.
So, you know, the older you are, the more likely you are to die in a given year, but
other systems have this, you know, limited property, which is like the longer they've
been alive, the longer they're likely to be, uh, uh, to be alive.
And then we see longevity, um, and seriousness can be a big differentiator for Tezos in a
sea of like, let's just burn through some money quickly.
And let's just like try to get, because there's as much hype and then run away.
Um, and that's just not the case for Tezos.
Now, I know we're coming very close to our time with you.
So I'm going to finish up with this last question.
If you could sit down for a coffee with the Tezos community, what would you say to them?
Any advice, words of wisdom, or just something from the heart?
Well, the thing is like, I think the Tezos community is fairly heterogeneous.
So I don't think there's a message that I would like necessarily send to, uh, to the community
as a whole, because I think it's just, you know, it's a patchwork of very different people
with very different, you know, goals, ambitions, and users of shape.
But, you know, if I guess if I had to say one thing, I would say thank you for being here.
That's, that's, that's amazing.
And I think you really do say a lot in that, uh, it's a patchwork, uh, even saying that,
recognizing that this has become something much more than just a line of check boxes on
a sheet of paper.
This is, this is an organic thing.
That's, it's a very powerful statement.
Thanks, uh, if I might sneak in one last question in there.
It's up to Arthur.
Oh, please go ahead.
Yeah.
Great.
Thanks.
Um, so we talked about the past, uh, and I would like to talk a little bit about the
future as well.
Like looking ahead, what should the Tezos community be excited for?
Like, what should we, everybody expect in the next few years?
I will not say 10, because we don't know what will the world look like in 10 years, but
like, what should we all be excited for, for the next years?
I mean, I'm personally, I'm very excited about the Tezos X, uh, roadmap, uh, which is, you
know, there's been a lot of background work going on in the core protocol for the past couple
of years now, uh, to make it very competitive because, you know, the offering of, uh, of
blockchains has exploded.
There's blockchains everywhere.
Everyone's fast.
Everyone's has loyalty and so on and so forth.
So from the position of Tezos, I think this was the most, you know, advanced blockchain
technology when it launched, but that didn't last very long.
Um, you know, soon after we had blockchains, which maybe didn't have all the features of
Tezos, but had, you know, an improvement in some capacity.
So one of the first one that I noticed was, you know, when Cosmos came out, they had
much lower latency than Tezos.
They had finality in like five seconds and I was like, well, we can't just go out and
say like, Oh, our blocks are every 60, you know, 60 seconds.
And by the way, wait for 50 blocks to have finality.
That's not going to work, which is why I think it was so important to, um, early on.
So there's been a lot of background work to make sure that Tezos is, you know, by far on
top of everything that exists from a technical standpoint, and we're not there.
Um, I would say there's a lot of ways in which, uh, maybe not, you know, I, I wouldn't
say that Tezos is dominant, but I would say in every single aspect, there's going to be
a blockchain that has more support, that has like slightly lower latency, that has this
or that, and it's not enough to be a better deal as a whole.
He wants to beat everyone in every single metric.
Uh, and that's been, that's been a long, um, that's been a long project.
That's been a project that has been gone for several years and we're starting to see, to
see, to, to, to seeing it, uh, payouts, uh, both in terms of interoperability.
So now we can attract a lot of the project on top of this link, um, in terms of latency.
Uh, so, you know, on listening again, no latency.
And right now it's something is limited of course to Vm, but it's meant to grow.
It's meant to become a bigger rollup with support for Mikkelsen, of course, but also
mentioned programming languages.
Um, we are working on increasing the throughputs with the diversity layer.
So there's a lot of pieces, which I've been developing now for several years, which are
finally coming together.
And that's what I would be looking for, uh, in the next few years, which is like a
fairly radical transformation of Tezos as a, as a product that I think will make it
much more competitive, um, in the landscape of, uh, of blockchains and
attracting applications.
That was perfect.
Yeah.
Thanks for that.
Well, thank you so much, Arthur, for joining us today.
It has been my honor and privilege to host you today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
And as we wrap up this incredible conversation, it's clear that the journey of Tezos is far
from over.
What began as a bold idea on paper has grown into a thriving, evolving ecosystem, thanks
to the passion and dedication of its community.
And of course, the unwavering vision of Arthur Brightman.
So to everyone listening, thank you for joining us and celebrating this remarkable 10 year
journey to the overall Tezos community.
Thank you for sharing the vision and being here all these years.
Thank you for constantly building and staying strong through the ups and downs of this journey.
The future of Tezos is bright and we can't wait to see where it leads next.
Stay tuned, stay engaged, and as always, keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Until next time on Tuesday, Tuesday, take care.
