Transcription
Oh, okay. I'm the All right. Uh, Vitalik, maybe you want to start with um, you know, explaining uh, you had a tweet a few days ago in which you kind of like reset Ethereum. uh you know the way I remember it is like the original dream is in danger and so you feel is like uh the need for a return to the original values. Maybe can you give a bit of context to that first?
So if um I always find it helpful to look back to some of the really early days of Ethereum and the kinds of things that people were excited about, the kinds of things that people were building like different toy demo versions of, right? And uh like especially that time you know like before about 2019 or so and even before 2017 there were just a lot of really interesting and special things happening right there were people in experimenting with you know like different kind of financial uh tools also and you know there were things like maker dowo that eventually were kind of the forefathers of modern defi you know like things like augur um also there was a lot of this work in DAOs, right? These like decentralized autonomous organizations, which like as time goes on more and more, it's clear that like it's a a big misnomer, right? And you know, the DAOs are definitely not autonomous. Uh but uh they're this idea that like we can use onchain logic to try to create new forms of government governance uh to try to create new different uh ways to organize how we manage access to resources. And uh there are a lot of uh also just people trying to like create more decentralized and more whether Uber or whether it's like insurance or a whole bunch of different industries and uh there was a lot of this enthusiasm right around uh like can we make like can we use some of these kind of digital tools and cryptography and blockchains to really come up with uh like better and um like more more effective ways for us to or to organize ourselves and to organize you know like how we interact with the world with the resources in the world and a lot of that spirit I think it got kind of overwhelmed by like first the excitement around DeFi and then some of the more general excitement that we saw back in 2020 2022 and uh I mean I I think a lot of the DeFi here has obviously stuck around and it's been positive. Uh but you know, we also saw things like Luna and Terra. Um then we also saw you know like the digital monkeys that were worth $3 million and then now they're like down like 10 to 50x. I think we saw a I mean a lot of these like onchain games where they it like seemed for a little bit of time that they were like fun games. Uh but then like once prices went down and all the users uh like left it just became obvious that people were like in it for the speculation not because the game was fun, right? And then like 2025 was just a a very hard year, right? Because like I think the really big thing we saw is like the Trump memecoin, right? And uh the thing with the Trump memecoin is like once Trump launches a memecoin, like that's already the king, right? Like you can't have a bigger meme coin than that. And so it's just obvious that like, okay, this is the end of the journey, right? And then since then, you know, we saw the Trump memecoin go down by 95%. And so we saw, okay, the king of all meme coins that possibly could happen has arrived. And then the king of all memecoins has dropped by 20x and it's just a complete failure, right? And uh that like so it it feels like the kind of condition that the space is in psychologically is like reacting to a lot of a lot of those things, right? and really yeah asking the question well you know what is the place of crypto in this world right and 10 years ago it was an easier question to ask because 10 years ago there were just much fewer other things that were happening right but now there's AI there is people going to like like starship uh ship is actually working we might be going to to the moon or to Mars soon there's a lot of biotech and so if the thing that you're after is you're after a tech scene that just is impressive, then like crypto has a a huge amount of competition, right? And so if you're like and so the thing that crypto has to do now is like it can't just like be this standard bearer of like all impressive technology as a as a category, right? Like it has to stand for something more specific. And I think uh the thing that it has to stand for basically uh is some of these kind of more social and even more political questions right of uh you know how do we relate to each other as a world um especially in the context of all of this growing mistrust and uh between countries within countries between different companies in different countries and uh asking like is there a version of modernity that is not that is not saying give up on technology and is also not saying you know give uh so um Silicon Valley and uh you know London and Hjo and a couple of other cities all over the power and uh that's uh like we have know I think we as a space have to like figure like figure out and articulate more what that is and actually yeah execute on it.
>> Uh thank you Vitalik. Um, I'd like to go back maybe to what I remember of your origin story. Uh and what I mean with this is that uh I think before you created Ethereum or maybe just after uh you traveled in Spain and you stayed sometime with the Catalan Integral Cooperative which was kind of like a radical left libertarian anarchist uh experiment which I think didn't end so well at the end. Then on the other hand, you had Bitcoin, which is kind of the expression of the other side uh of the anarcho capitalist uh libertarian uh ethos. Um and so my feeling has always been that you've been a bit between those polarities and that uh decentralized accelerationism uh was is a kind of a okay I know it's probably not the right metaphor but you know kind of a kind of a social democratic compromise uh applied to the digital world where you kind of in between uh those two options um and so recently uh Benjamin life uh well I don't know him personally but we've been communicating quite a while online and we kind of operating in the same space. Uh he launched a new idea of regenerative accelerationism. So here's the way I see it. um you know acceleration originally was a kind of neihilistic uh philosophy like capitalism has its contradiction so let's just go and make it even faster so that it kind of collapses and then we can have a chance for something new which is a very uh neilistic uh point um decentralized accelerationism is kind of what you just explained this kind of middle way uh around technological development Um I kind of agree with uh Benjamin that it's uh the the speed at which the world is actually disintegrating at the very moment at least the world order is kind of disintegrating uh and is so we have this very dangerous transition time is maybe you know we should uh accelerate the acceleration of alternatives right and I think that's what's being expressed by regenerative accelerationism Um and so my then I will add my critique is that Ethereum has been working basically on the field of the representation of value uh and you know moving uh value around and uh being able to do that without the control of the state and so many many many things around uh basically uh you know digital representation of monetary value and I I kind of think that we should go a level down because there's many many people in the that try to um operate in regenerative productive ways, you know, like healthier food, renewable energy and those um kinds of things. Um and I don't think crypto has been that useful for them as yet. So I was just wondering if you have any general reaction to these kinds of ideas uh of using crypto and kind of embedding it more in the productive sector of society and with that I don't mean you know kind of uh the traditional financial investment but actually >> uh many of the grassroots communities are trying to um have a better life. Mhm.
Yeah. I I I definitely think we uh should do more of those things. I guess maybe one question I would then ask you is like what is an example of something that's uh either in crypto or that is uh somewhere like close to crypto that you think comes the closest to that kind of idea.
>> Well, yeah, I can give some examples of things that I'm interested right now. So, one is called Gaia OS. Um there's a man called Rory Tools and a team around him. And so that's a project that created a uh like a full common stack to create commonly uh owned and commonly managed resources on a planetary scale. So it's not specifically just crypto, but it's kind of like a digital uh enablement of like property and investment. So kind of imagine fractal ownership and that you can basically appeal to global uh crowd lending, crowdfunding uh and that can then kind of settle down at a local level but on the conditions of the local people >> uh and then also represented in legal form. So what they did it's a bit like materium you know they studied the legal systems in many in like maybe 60 countries and so they know how to make trusts and those kinds of institutions so that's for me it's a a good example um another example um is Indie Johar's project called civilizational options um and so what is what is that is about his thesis is civilizations only die when they have no options But the problem is that as we are actually nearing a lot of very serious um you know thermodynamic climate and other types of crisis that there's no easy financial mechanism uh again to sustain those alternative solutions. So here's the way I understand it. Um is you know imagine for example you have a problem uh Spain is drying up which is a real case right there's a drying up of uh Spain and Portugal so they are going to have very serious water supply issues. Um well some people are you know going back to medieval practices they're going back in the mountains creating gullies so that the water stays in the mountains and doesn't get lost in the valley. Um you know other uh people are working on micro dams. So today there's no kind of investment vehicle to sustain these types of ecosystems of solutions. like if you know if you don't have one simple entity it's very hard to get investment. So how to do this kind of distributed investment in an easy way. So that's what India is working on. Again he's very crypto aware. Uh another example that I really like um is will radic with sarafu.network. Um I don't know if you're familiar with that uh project. I really like it. So it's based on first of all 1,000 groups of local saving communities. So it's called u rotating savings and loans associations. They're in the global south very common. My own wife is member of three different ones. So this is also very famous in in Thailand. So basically people save money together and then the pool allows people to to do bigger investments on a personal level like buying a motorcycle or a fridge. So we took one ton of these communities, asked them to put 25 20% of their um savings in a common pool, created an alternative currency with a um how do you call that? Um fractional reserve of uh eight. So eight times more value in put it on the blockchain so that it became visible so that now people can actually invest in them and see that a million dollars becomes $8 million for these poor communities. Now on top of that he has created the commitment pool system and very soon is is actually will be called cosmolocal credit. So commitment pool is basically allowing the thousands of members of these communities to offer uh uh services and goods beforehand to have that valued in some way and so create that value uh so I think it's called multi multilateral uh credit or something like that. Anyway, so these are projects for me that use technology but directly impact uh basically you know real communities. uh and so yeah so the kind of idea would be that there's more stress on these kinds of solutions rather than working on the you know spec speculative side moving money around faster and with more privacy which of course I think is very important as well. Um but I think that Ethereum could go you know like levels deeper >> in its effect on actually changing the productive logic of our world.
One of the things that uh I've noticed when observing like people trying to do different kind of mechanisms is that it's it's it's hard to convince people to participate in something that they're not already used to, right? And so like in Ethereum for example, you know, we keep we see a lot of people do trying to do experiments like uh people keep trying to make harbor tax NFTs. Uh people keep trying to make assets that have like different kinds of conditions attached to to them. And uh like the thing that you notice again and again, right, is that it's like very hard to get people out of the box of uh like just wanting in ERC20 because an ERC20 is familiar. And even within ERC20s, it's like an uphill battle to get people to be interested in something that's not the US dollar, right? Like even something like rye which like almost is the US dollar except you know like it has this extra factor which is somewhere around three right now and it goes up or down by a couple of percent every year like even that is a challenge and I suspect the reason why some of these onchain rascas and like the similar ideas might be more successful in places like Thailand or in the global south is because those are the environments in which people are used to doing those kinds of structures already, right? And so I guess I wonder then uh like might it be that you know like we would actually have to try to figure out different structures for different different regions. Um like the like do we just need more people in crypto who are more aware of how different parts of people in the world already operate and give people uh like different options that map onto things that they like kind of already understand instead of just saying like here we invented something that's completely new.
>> Uh maybe I can echo that because I think that's actually a really good point. Uh so kind of my critique on the way that things are funded and this is not just for Ethereum but it's a general critique al also you know NGO funding and stuff is that uh so you make money available and then you create conditions to compete for the funding and so almost automatically this will attract people with ideas but it's particularly I think strong in the web 3 world you know I've been to quite a few of these meetings things where um you know basically geeks imagine how they would uh change the world um and then they get funded like in funding the comments. Uh but what you just said I think is very important because I the way I understand what you said is that actually looking at what people are already doing and that is different in different regions of the world. Um and so um so I I will take a slightly different interpretation of what I see happening. I think actually that millions of people are already engaged in alternative practices. But they stay marginal because of uh fundamental uh issues around funding. Um and so that's kind of my dream is you have you know the five trillion which is floating in crypto and um you know if even a percentage of that could be used to create these kind of regenerative feedback loops that would make a huge difference on what is possible in the world. Um I don't know about the timing. Uh so maybe I can ask you uh so I think you probably agree with this that we live in a transitional time that uh things are quite heating up and you maybe in connection with what you just wrote a few days ago about you know rejigging Ethereum um how do you see the role of Ethereum in um let's say the next five years because I'm I my feeling is it's going to be pretty crucial uh the next few years.
>> I think um we can we can >> Sorry, I think it's echoing. Um I think we can see Ethereum like I wants to see Ethereum like in something close to the kind of web 3 vision that Gavin Wood was talking about like 10 years ago, right? where we're basically saying that the core is that we want to have these like high value high guarantee decentralized applications and uh the uh uh and that the big challenge that Ethereum is solving is basically creating this kind of shared compute and shared memory uh so that like they can remember shared facts that uh which you know could be token balances it could also be a lot of other things that are relevance to their community and uh I think that's something which is usable for representing currencies. It's also useful for representing many other kinds of assets. I think it's even useful for representing things where like ultimately you still have to rely on some community to continue to recognize it and provide value to it. Um and uh I think the u the goal of uh if of the Ethereum blockchain should be to just like existence to provide that functionality for applications that need it and at a level of like high enough scale and high enough convenience that uh it it actually makes sense for people to use it that way. And I actually think that with the work in scalability that we're doing now, like it's we're actually getting there. And uh like transaction fees are under one one cent for a lot of things. I expect it will continue to become cheaper over the next like one to three years. And uh like at some points I would want to be able to look at the Ethereum blockchain as like just being a layer of the uh of the decentralized internet and you know like similar to how you know like there's like the you know like DNS system there's uh like communication networks there's email and have this uh protocol so that these uh structures that people wants to build can be built and uh they can inter um interoperate with each other and like I hope that you know the L1 over the next 10 years that's like how I see the role of Ethereum itself I think for the role of uh like on top of this there is this uh whole separate question of uh like what actually are the right things that it makes sense to build and uh how and how do you actually build them, right? Because I mean like if you build something like the way that a lot of these things tends to traditionally be built is basically you have a server and then the server just has a database. I mean often it's not even very sophisticated, right? And it's like a Google spreadsheet and uh it's uh there's a lot of trust involved. there isn't uh too much like there is not that much accountability there also is not much interoperability and like here with the blockchains like we're talking about a very different paradigm right and so what we saw with DeFi as we saw a lot of thinking about composability about what it means for like two different DeFi projects that interoperate with each other of uh you know flash loans and like transactions that like jump through five different onchain automated market makers within the same transaction and uh like we saw a lot of this kind of thinking start to emerge organically and uh and so I feel like a similar thing needs to happen for basically everything except for money and I think we even took some wrong turns right so like I think one of the biggest wrong turns that we took is that the Dows that we saw so far they were really optimized for like I think really they were not optimized for effectiveness. So they were probably not even optimized for decentralization. I think they were optimized for um maximizing legal safety under the regime of Gary Gendler. So like for example people like I notice like I often talk to people who wants to put loyalty points on chain and when I ask them why they say well they want loyalty points to be more funible but like loyalty and fungeibility are fundamentally opposites right and so like I think if you even say you want loyalty points to be funible like there's a certain confusion of goals that you have there right and like there's a fundamental difference between encouraging people to stay within a particular community whether it's an egalitarian community or a corporate community um and uh do and do more things in that community versus uh kind of breaking down barriers and encouraging everything to intersect with everything else more and uh like it would be like I still think there's a lot of uh need to like really think through some of the some of the finer details and like what you actually want and like basically yeah so so like for example one of the definitions I give of finance is like finance is the set like it's a set of features that are common to formalized point systems that don't try to prevent collusion and I have an article that basically talks about like why I use this definition right and like I compare dollars to like say voting on Twitter, right? And uh you know, if we vote on Twitter, then like votes on Twitter, they're like liking and retweeting, they're also a point system. Like I can give you a like and then you can see how many likes you have and it feels good to have more likes. Uh but uh at the same time, like if we start colluding and we say, "Well, I'm we're going to have a ring and I'm going to like all of your tweets and you like and you like all of mine." Then within the context of like the logic of voting, like that counts as abuse, right? But within the context of money, I give you a dollar. If you give me a euro, that's not abuse. That's just FX. And like to me, you know, like that's and so if you want to start moving away from finance, then like you have to have these big concepts of like well I mean like what type of interoperability do you actually not want? Um and so like like I want to also start to see some more of this and like a deeper thought on the application layer. So like we understands better like what is uh what are the things that makes the most sense to build >> um you know V3M so many years ago and and it's amazing what it has become >> and I also want to thank 4C's uh for the huge impact that they're having on Mai and you know making a dynamic cultural and technological life here and I hope we can see you one day uh in Mai probably already came and I didn't know about it. Uh it would be great to see you here. Um so I'm not sure about the time because I don't have a watch with me. Um I have a feeling Oh, we have five more minutes. Okay, that's good. Uh >> yeah, actually I want to ask a question to you. Um, so I I mean I feel like I've always uh you know over the at this point like almost two decades that I've seen your name pop up generally associated you with the P2P foundation and P2P I think is an interesting term right because uh on the one hand I think uh a lot of people who talk about P2P talking about it as something that's not just anti-hirarchical in the sense of like the hierarchy of government but that's like also like even like critical of corporate hierarchy and uh at the same time I I also remember there was this one time I was uh listening to this speech at Foudan University and uh someone was talking about like a his vision of like the evolution of internet protocols and his vision is like like the three that he gave was it was going from SMTP to HTTP to Uber And I thought it was like funny, right? Because it's this uh you know very different kind of drawing of boundaries of like what P2P or even like what protocols are. Um and so I'm curious uh like how has your view of uh what peer-to-peer means uh and also not just technologically but like economically and socially and uh like why this is something that we need like evolved over the last decades. Right.
>> Very good question. Thank you. Um so basically I think from the very beginning uh the you know and so you know sometimes people ask me why Satoshi publishes white paper on our site. Uh and so I'm thinking that he also recognized something uh of a family affair. I think so the difference is that once you have peer-to-peer in computing you have peer-to-peer in humans. And I so so there is a way to interpret peer-to-peer as a technological system, but what I've always done with a peer-to-peer peer-to-peer foundation is to interpret as a human system. And so what then peer-to-peer means is essentially a new capacity for humankind for translocal self-organizing. So the capacity to create common projects to organize to organize value production and distribution without being in the same locality. So peer-to-peer for me means it's almost like an ethical thing is if I decide to have a common project with somebody who is on the other side of the world doesn't necessarily pay me to and I don't have to obey him that creates a totally different ethical field of human relationships. something that was only possible in small groups at the dawn of time in you know in small tribal groups now becomes possible at a planetary scale and so uh another aspect of peer-to-peer will be would be that capacity for stigmic coordination right so instead of needing market signals uh or command and planning we and we now have this vast planetary open ecosystems where people can self um dedicate their time and labor to common projects based on the signaling of other human beings. And so if you look at the history of coordination systems, you can say well we started in a physical peer-to-peer in tribal communities expressed as gifting and commoning as the main uh coordination systems. Then we move to complex civilization with market pricing and state uh commands. And I think we are now moving to situation where stigmary becomes the main coordination form. So peer-to-peer and digital commons together. And then if you ask me what is AI? Well AI is stigm basically. Um, and so I think we are actually at this kind of cusp of a new civilizational system because if you define civilization as a relationship between basically the city and the country, it's geographic and now we're creating this new non-geographic layer or kind of a new geography that is not physical. And so that means a new civilization. And then I look at DAO and and the stuff that you do by the way and all of that stuff as people building institutions for that future like prefigurative institution building for the next phase of human civilization.
>> I think that makes a lot of sense. H um what I mean I guess uh a uh a question from you is uh like what are the sorts of things that like you would wish to see for seas and the the hackers that Chung might um accomplish over let's say the next two years.
>> All right. Um um well you know Chiang Mai is really peculiar um because it's a real Thai city so it's not an artificial construct like you know uh Suzalu Montenegro where you know people come in from the outside and and and create which you know is a great experience I was there but Chiang Mai has really the unique u reality that is both a real Thai city and it has this amazing room for other people like digital nomads. Um uh but I don't think it was culturally very dynamic until a few years ago. And if you know that Shanghai is in the middle of 2/ird of the world population, if so, if you take 4,000 kilometers uh around it, you have China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, uh the Philippines, Indonesia, uh I mean it's amazing. Um so I think Chiang Mai has the potential to be kind of like a hub uh for this shift in the world to you know multipar uh which will you know largely be u more Eurasian than more Asian than than European in the in the next few years. So I think uh yeah forces has kind of given an extra push to this kind of uh potential that we have here. And if I can add one more thing, this is my personal wish. So I think we need to move from an extractive economy to a generative economy. So now value is created by extraction. We extract a commodity is a supply demand. Tension gives it a price. We make a profit. And maybe if we're lucky, we tax it or we give it and we can do some regenerative uh work with that value. What if we turn it around? What if we recognize what is already happening in open-source communities, which is that value is actually visibly a contributory value. Ethereum is valuable first of all because of the the thousands of people who contribute to the common pool to the open-source digital commons that Ethereum represent and that attracts market investment but the the value is created through contribution and if we can extend that vision that values created through contribution to more than human beings and then recognize ize that nature and web of life is creating value. I think this is the kind of key of the transition today.
>> Mhm. Yeah. No, I think that uh makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think it's an interesting question to ask uh like what is also the future of Chiang Mai going to be in this upcoming world, right? because like every time I come there it's just obvious that it's uh at this uh like already at this intersection of you know at least three uh you know like major cultures right if you uh include you know the the local uh you know like Thailand and even like like my regional culture which itself is diverse if you see then if you see the you know the Chinese and of course the western and the uh huge numbers of you know digital nomads with their avocado toast that have that have already been uh so deeply rooted there that uh it's uh you know like all and it already feels like like at least all three of those and I think probably more that like I'm just completely uh completely missing or there already right and uh at the same time like when I uh like when I think of global centers where a lot of people interact. I think uh the ones that people think about they tend to be places more like you know Dubai or Singapore or places that have this like very financial focus to them. And Chiang Mai feels unique in that it's like an inter that kind of intersection place but it doesn't have that financial side and it doesn't have that like highly artificial side to it. And that's like interesting and it's uh unique and I mean I'm definitely interested to see how that continues to evolve over the next uh decades and also I mean like what kind of role our community can Nice. [music]