Silvio Micali: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Algorand, Bitcoin & Ethereum

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Silvio Micali,

00:00:02.800 | a computer scientist at MIT, winner of the Turing Award,

00:00:06.800 | and one of the leading minds in the fields of cryptography,

00:00:10.300 | information security, game theory,

00:00:12.760 | and most recently, cryptocurrency

00:00:15.060 | and the theoretical foundations of a fully decentralized,

00:00:19.260 | secure, and scalable blockchain and Algorand,

00:00:22.980 | a company of cryptographers, engineers, and mathematicians

00:00:26.360 | that he founded in 2017.

00:00:29.400 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

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00:00:44.420 | and to support this podcast.

00:00:46.220 | As a side note, let me say that I will be having

00:00:48.600 | many conversations this year on the topic of cryptocurrency.

00:00:52.440 | I'm reading and thinking a lot on this topic.

00:00:55.440 | I just recently finished reading "The Bitcoin Standard,"

00:00:58.900 | a book I highly recommend.

00:01:01.020 | As always with this podcast,

00:01:02.740 | I'm approaching it with an open mind,

00:01:04.860 | with compassion, with as little ego as possible,

00:01:08.900 | and yes, with love.

00:01:11.240 | I hope you go along with me on this journey

00:01:13.500 | and don't judge me too harshly on any likely missteps.

00:01:18.500 | As usual, I will play devil's advocate.

00:01:21.120 | I will, on purpose, sometimes, ask simple,

00:01:25.000 | even dumb questions, all to try and explore

00:01:27.800 | the space of ideas here with as much grace as I can muster.

00:01:31.880 | I have no financial interests here.

00:01:33.760 | I only have a simple curiosity and a love for knowledge,

00:01:37.380 | especially about a set of technologies

00:01:39.800 | that may very well transform

00:01:41.840 | the fabric of human civilization.

00:01:44.560 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

00:01:47.140 | review on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify,

00:01:50.140 | support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter

00:01:52.940 | at Lex Friedman.

00:01:54.420 | And now, here's my conversation with Silvio Macaulay.

00:01:58.300 | Let's start with the big and the basic question.

00:02:02.180 | What is a blockchain, and why is it interesting,

00:02:05.680 | why is it fascinating, why is it powerful?

00:02:08.100 | - All right, so a blockchain, think of it,

00:02:10.560 | is really a common database distributed.

00:02:15.080 | Think about it as a ledger

00:02:16.600 | in which everybody can write an entry in a page.

00:02:20.840 | You can write, I can write,

00:02:22.900 | and everybody can read,

00:02:24.980 | and you have a guarantee that everybody

00:02:27.560 | has the same copy of the ledger that is in front of you.

00:02:30.980 | So whatever you see on page seven,

00:02:33.060 | anyone else sees on page seven.

00:02:34.900 | So what is extraordinary about this

00:02:39.580 | is this common knowledge thing

00:02:42.620 | that I think is a really a first for humanity.

00:02:46.000 | I mean, if you look at communication,

00:02:48.960 | like right now, you can communicate very quickly

00:02:53.100 | images of photos, but do you have the certainty

00:02:57.440 | that whatever you have received

00:02:59.280 | has been received by everybody else?

00:03:01.440 | Not really.

00:03:02.480 | And so there's a commonality of knowledge

00:03:04.860 | and the certainty that everybody can write,

00:03:07.620 | nobody has been prevented from writing whatever they want,

00:03:10.620 | nobody can erase, nobody can tear a page of a ledger,

00:03:14.380 | nobody can swap page, nobody can change anything,

00:03:17.840 | and that is immutable common record is extremely powerful.

00:03:22.840 | - And there's something fundamental

00:03:26.540 | that is decentralized about it,

00:03:28.020 | so at least in spirit, some degree,

00:03:30.920 | or against maybe a resistance to centralization.

00:03:34.220 | - Absolutely.

00:03:35.060 | If it is not decentralized,

00:03:37.900 | how can it be common knowledge?

00:03:40.040 | If only one person or a few people have a ledger,

00:03:43.520 | the only, you don't have a ledger,

00:03:45.500 | you have to ask, you know, what is on page seven,

00:03:47.780 | and how do you know that whatever they tell you

00:03:50.400 | is on page seven, they tell the same thing to everybody else.

00:03:54.060 | And so this commonality is extremely powerful.

00:03:59.060 | Just to give you an example,

00:04:02.100 | assume that you do an auction, okay?

00:04:05.420 | You have worked very hard, you build a building,

00:04:08.960 | and now you want to auction off.

00:04:10.960 | Makes sense because you want to auction worldwide,

00:04:14.980 | better yet, you want to tokenize the building

00:04:17.100 | and sell it in parcels.

00:04:19.040 | Now, everybody sees the bids,

00:04:23.860 | and you know that everybody sees the bids.

00:04:25.620 | You and I see the same bid, and so does everybody else.

00:04:28.380 | So you know that a fair price has reached,

00:04:30.820 | and you know who owns what and who has paid how much.

00:04:34.340 | And if you do it instead of a wise,

00:04:38.140 | you know, in a centralized system,

00:04:39.580 | I put a bid, say, "Oh, congratulations, Alex, you won,

00:04:42.820 | "and your price is $12,570."

00:04:46.060 | How do you know? (laughs)

00:04:47.940 | So if instead of a set,

00:04:50.460 | common knowledge is a very powerful tool for humanity.

00:04:55.460 | - So we return to it from a bunch of different perspectives,

00:04:59.300 | including like a technical perspective,

00:05:01.020 | but you often talk about blockchain

00:05:04.980 | and some of these concepts of decentralization,

00:05:09.180 | scalability, security, all those kinds of things,

00:05:12.540 | but one of the most maybe impactful, exciting things

00:05:17.540 | that leverage the blockchain,

00:05:20.860 | this kind of ledger idea of common knowledge,

00:05:24.100 | is cryptocurrency in the financial space.

00:05:27.900 | So is there, can you say in the same kind of basic way,

00:05:31.540 | what is cryptocurrency in the context of this

00:05:33.980 | common knowledge and in the context of the blockchain?

00:05:37.100 | - Great.

00:05:38.060 | Cryptocurrency, that is a currency that is on such a ledger.

00:05:42.100 | So imagine that on the ledger, right,

00:05:45.220 | initially, you know that somehow, say,

00:05:48.220 | you and I are the only owner of each one.

00:05:51.620 | Let's give it ourselves a billion each

00:05:55.700 | or whatever this unit.

00:05:57.500 | Then I start writing on the ledger.

00:06:01.220 | I give 100 of these units to my sister.

00:06:03.860 | I give this much to my aunt,

00:06:06.580 | and then now, because it's written on the ledger

00:06:09.820 | and everybody can see, my sister can give 57 of these units

00:06:13.620 | that she received from me to somebody else.

00:06:16.100 | And so, and that is money.

00:06:18.300 | And that is money because you can see

00:06:21.740 | that somebody who tenders your payment

00:06:24.580 | has really the money there, right?

00:06:26.620 | You don't have any more of a doubt

00:06:28.100 | when you want to sell an item.

00:06:29.860 | If I write you a check, is the check covered?

00:06:32.380 | If I write, or do I have the money

00:06:35.820 | at the moment of a transaction?

00:06:37.540 | You really see, because the ledger is always updated,

00:06:40.460 | what you see is what I see,

00:06:41.980 | and what the merchant sees, you know that the money.

00:06:45.180 | So it's the most powerful money system there is

00:06:50.140 | because it is totally transparent,

00:06:52.140 | and so you know that you have been paid,

00:06:54.820 | and you know that the money is there.

00:06:57.060 | You have not to second-guess anything else.

00:06:58.860 | - So the common knowledge applied there

00:07:01.180 | is you're basically mimicking the same kind of thing

00:07:04.460 | you would get in the physical space,

00:07:06.060 | which is if you give 100 bucks,

00:07:09.220 | or 100 of that thing, whatever,

00:07:11.660 | of that cryptocurrency to your sister,

00:07:14.340 | the actual transfer is as real

00:07:18.140 | as you giving a basket of apples to your sister.

00:07:23.140 | Because, so in the case in the physical space,

00:07:27.680 | the common knowledge is in the physics.

00:07:31.060 | - Right. - Of the atoms.

00:07:32.900 | And in its digital space,

00:07:34.420 | the common knowledge is in this ledger.

00:07:36.900 | And so that transfer holds the same kind of power,

00:07:41.900 | but now it's operating in the digital space.

00:07:45.200 | - Correct.

00:07:46.040 | - Again, I apologize for a set of ridiculous questions,

00:07:50.420 | but you mentioned cryptocurrencies and money.

00:07:55.300 | What is money?

00:07:57.980 | Why do we have money?

00:07:59.300 | Do you think about this

00:08:01.020 | kind of from this high philosophical level at times

00:08:05.300 | of this tool, this idea that we humans

00:08:09.340 | have all kind of came up with

00:08:11.100 | and seem to be using effectively to do stuff?

00:08:13.920 | - Money is a social construct, okay, in my opinion.

00:08:20.060 | And this has been somehow,

00:08:22.300 | people always felt that somehow money

00:08:24.860 | is a way to allow us to transact,

00:08:28.620 | even though we want different things.

00:08:30.700 | So I have two sheep,

00:08:35.300 | and then you have one cow,

00:08:37.580 | and I want the cow,

00:08:38.900 | but you are looking for blankets instead.

00:08:41.780 | So to have money, it really simplifies this.

00:08:44.780 | But at the end of, and that's why a bit was invented,

00:08:47.820 | and you start with gold,

00:08:49.260 | you start with corniage,

00:08:51.220 | then you start with check.

00:08:52.780 | But at the end of the day,

00:08:54.340 | money is essentially a social construct

00:08:57.260 | because you know that what you receive,

00:08:59.980 | you can actually spend it with somebody else.

00:09:02.460 | And so there is a kind of a social pact

00:09:04.820 | and social belief that you have.

00:09:07.980 | At the end of the day,

00:09:09.700 | even a barter requires

00:09:13.460 | this beliefs that other people are going to accept

00:09:18.020 | the quote unquote currency you offer them.

00:09:21.100 | Because if I'm a mason,

00:09:22.900 | and you ask me to build a wall in your field,

00:09:27.740 | and I did, and you, in exchange,

00:09:30.820 | you give me a thousand sheep,

00:09:32.700 | what am I going to do, eat them all?

00:09:34.300 | No, I have to feed them.

00:09:36.340 | And if I don't feed them, they die,

00:09:37.580 | and my value is zero.

00:09:39.180 | So in receiving this livestock,

00:09:42.260 | I must believe that somebody else

00:09:45.100 | will accept them in return for something else.

00:09:48.780 | So money is this social belief,

00:09:51.820 | social shared belief system that makes people transact.

00:09:56.500 | - That's fascinating.

00:09:57.340 | I didn't even think about that.

00:09:59.100 | That you're actually,

00:10:00.540 | you have a deep network of beliefs

00:10:04.980 | about how society operates.

00:10:06.860 | So the value is assigned even to sheep,

00:10:09.500 | based on that everyone will continue operating

00:10:12.100 | how they were previously operating.

00:10:14.500 | Somebody will feed the sheep.

00:10:15.940 | (laughing)

00:10:17.500 | I didn't even think about that.

00:10:19.260 | That's fascinating.

00:10:20.380 | So that directly transfers to the space of money,

00:10:25.420 | and then to the space of digital money, cryptocurrency.

00:10:27.820 | Okay, does it bother you, sort of intellectually,

00:10:32.340 | when this money that is a social construct

00:10:34.820 | is not directly tied to physical goods,

00:10:38.620 | like gold, for example?

00:10:41.420 | - Not at all, because after all,

00:10:43.820 | gold has some industrial value,

00:10:47.620 | nobody delights, it's a metal,

00:10:50.020 | it doesn't oxidate, it has some good things about it.

00:10:53.380 | But does this industrial value really represent

00:10:57.100 | the value to which it now is traded?

00:10:58.780 | No.

00:10:59.620 | So gold is another way to express our belief.

00:11:02.700 | I give you an ounce of gold,

00:11:04.260 | you treat it like, oh, somebody else will want this

00:11:07.380 | for doing something else.

00:11:09.580 | So it is really this notion of this,

00:11:12.540 | money is a mental construct,

00:11:14.660 | is really, and is a shared, is a social construct,

00:11:18.620 | I really believe.

00:11:20.060 | And so some people feel that it's physical,

00:11:22.060 | so therefore gold exists.

00:11:24.100 | But then, as you know now,

00:11:25.940 | countries, most sophisticated countries right now,

00:11:31.900 | they print their own money,

00:11:33.620 | and you believe that they are not going to exaggerate it

00:11:36.300 | with inflation, not everybody believes it,

00:11:38.820 | but I'm saying there is at least,

00:11:41.380 | they are not going to exaggerate it blatantly,

00:11:44.900 | and therefore you receive it,

00:11:46.980 | because you know that somebody else will accept it,

00:11:50.540 | will have faith in the currency, and so on and so forth.

00:11:53.060 | But whether it's gold, whether it's livestock,

00:11:55.860 | whatever it is, money is really a shared belief.

00:11:59.780 | - So there is something,

00:12:01.700 | and I've been reading more and more

00:12:03.300 | about different cryptocurrencies,

00:12:05.220 | there is a kind of belief that the scarcity

00:12:12.020 | of a particular resource, like Bitcoin,

00:12:14.380 | has a limited amount,

00:12:17.820 | and it's tied to physical, to proof of work,

00:12:21.540 | so it's tied to physical reality

00:12:24.100 | in terms of how much you can mine effectively, and so on,

00:12:28.180 | that that's an important feature of money.

00:12:30.980 | Do you think that's an important feature

00:12:32.820 | to be part of whatever the money is?

00:12:35.780 | - That is certainly a very useful part.

00:12:38.380 | So at some point in time,

00:12:40.940 | assume that money is something that all of a sudden

00:12:44.220 | we say this is our money, our currency.

00:12:46.860 | Then I offer you 10 daisies in payment

00:12:50.220 | of whatever goods and services you want to provide,

00:12:53.420 | but at the end of the day,

00:12:55.260 | if you know that you can cultivate it

00:12:57.700 | and generate them at will,

00:13:00.380 | then perhaps you should not accept my payment.

00:13:04.380 | Here is a bouquet of daisies.

00:13:08.460 | So you need some kind of a scarcity,

00:13:10.660 | the inability to create it suddenly out of nothing

00:13:14.660 | is unimportant.

00:13:16.620 | And it's not an intrinsic necessity,

00:13:21.620 | but it's much easier to accept

00:13:24.740 | once you know that there is a fixed number of units

00:13:27.540 | of whatever currency there is,

00:13:29.540 | and therefore you can mentally understand

00:13:32.900 | I'm getting this much of this piece of pie,

00:13:36.500 | and therefore I consider myself paid.

00:13:39.020 | I understand what I'm receiving.

00:13:41.460 | - You described the goals of a blockchain.

00:13:43.860 | You have a nice presentation on this.

00:13:45.420 | As scalability, security, and decentralization.

00:13:49.820 | And you challenged the blockchain trilemma

00:13:53.020 | that claims you can only have two of the three.

00:13:55.660 | So let's talk about each.

00:13:58.140 | What is scalability in the context

00:14:00.500 | of blockchain and cryptocurrency?

00:14:02.140 | What does scalability mean?

00:14:03.780 | - So remember, we said that the blockchain is a ledger,

00:14:08.780 | and each page receives, gets some transaction,

00:14:12.460 | and everybody can write in these pages of a ledger.

00:14:16.060 | Nobody can be stopped from writing,

00:14:17.540 | and everybody can read them.

00:14:18.740 | Okay, scalability means how fast can you write?

00:14:22.340 | Just imagine that you can write an entry

00:14:25.180 | in this special shared ledger once every hour.

00:14:29.300 | Well, what are you going to do

00:14:31.020 | if you have one transaction per hour?

00:14:33.580 | The world doesn't go around.

00:14:35.220 | So you need to have scalability means here

00:14:38.220 | that you can somehow write a lot of transaction,

00:14:42.860 | and then you can read them,

00:14:45.100 | and everybody can validate them.

00:14:47.100 | And that is the speed,

00:14:49.300 | and the number of transactions per second,

00:14:53.180 | and the fact that they are shared.

00:14:54.940 | So you want to have this speed,

00:14:58.540 | not only in writing, but in sharing,

00:15:00.860 | and in inspection for validity.

00:15:04.620 | This is scalability.

00:15:05.940 | The world is big.

00:15:07.620 | The world wants to interact.

00:15:09.300 | The people want to interact with each other,

00:15:11.220 | and you better be prepared to have a ledger

00:15:13.700 | in which you can write lots and lots and lots of transactions

00:15:16.460 | in this special way very, very, very quickly.

00:15:18.900 | - So maybe from a more mathematical perspective,

00:15:21.660 | or can we say something about how much scalability is needed

00:15:26.620 | for a world that is big?

00:15:28.980 | - Well, it really depends how many transactions you want,

00:15:32.220 | but remember that I think right now

00:15:36.500 | you have to go into at least thousands of transactions

00:15:39.540 | per second, even if you look at credit cards, right?

00:15:46.020 | We are going to go from an average of 1,600

00:15:49.540 | to peaks of 20,000, 40,000, something like this.

00:15:54.540 | But remember, it's not only a question

00:15:57.900 | of the transaction per se,

00:15:59.700 | but the value is that the transaction

00:16:03.540 | is actually being shared and visible to everybody,

00:16:06.900 | and the certainty that that is the case.

00:16:09.340 | I can print on my own printer way more transactions,

00:16:13.900 | but nobody has the time to see or to inspect,

00:16:16.700 | and that doesn't count, right?

00:16:18.220 | So you want scalability at this common knowledge level,

00:16:22.540 | and that is the challenge.

00:16:24.100 | - I also meant from a perspective

00:16:25.700 | of like a complexity analysis.

00:16:28.340 | So does it, you know,

00:16:30.540 | when you get more and more people involved,

00:16:33.020 | doesn't it just scale in some kind of way that,

00:16:35.620 | do you like to see certain kind of properties

00:16:40.380 | in order to say something is scalable?

00:16:42.740 | - Oh, absolutely.

00:16:43.700 | I took a little bit implicitly

00:16:45.380 | that the people transacting are actually very different.

00:16:49.260 | So if there is two people who can do

00:16:51.660 | thousands of transactions per second with each other,

00:16:54.460 | this is not so interesting.

00:16:56.020 | What we really need is to say there are billions of people

00:16:58.820 | at any point in time, you know,

00:17:00.420 | thousands and thousands of them

00:17:02.020 | want to transact with each other,

00:17:04.340 | and you want to support that.

00:17:06.460 | - So Algorand, it solves,

00:17:09.860 | so that's the company, the team of cryptographers,

00:17:14.100 | and mathematicians, engineers, and so on,

00:17:16.140 | that challenged the blockchain trilemma.

00:17:18.180 | So let's break it down in terms of achieving scalability.

00:17:23.540 | How do we achieve scalability in the space of blockchain,

00:17:26.900 | in the space of cryptocurrency?

00:17:28.860 | - Okay, so scalability, security,

00:17:31.900 | remember, and decentralization, right?

00:17:33.940 | So that's what you want.

00:17:35.540 | - What's the best way to approach?

00:17:36.620 | Can we break it down?

00:17:37.660 | Let's start with scalability

00:17:39.060 | and think about how do we achieve it.

00:17:41.140 | - Well, to achieve it one at a time is perhaps an easy,

00:17:46.140 | even security, if nobody transacts, nobody loses money.

00:17:50.140 | So that is secure, but it's not scalable.

00:17:53.860 | So let me tell you, I'm a cryptographer,

00:17:56.300 | so I try to fight the bad guys,

00:17:59.420 | and what you want is that a vessel ledger,

00:18:03.060 | that we discussed before, cannot be tampered with.

00:18:07.140 | So you must think of it as a special ink

00:18:10.140 | that nobody can erase.

00:18:11.900 | Then it has to be, everybody should be able to read,

00:18:16.900 | and not to alter the pages or the content of the pages.

00:18:22.540 | That's okay.

00:18:23.700 | But you know what, that is actually easy cryptographically.

00:18:27.860 | Easy cryptographically means you can use tools

00:18:30.740 | invented 50 years ago,

00:18:32.060 | which in cryptographic time is prehistory, okay?

00:18:35.340 | We are cavemen working around

00:18:38.060 | and solve our problem in cryptography land.

00:18:40.660 | But there is really a fundamental problem,

00:18:43.420 | which is really almost a social,

00:18:45.020 | it seems a political problem, is to say,

00:18:47.140 | who the hell chooses or publishes

00:18:53.100 | the next page on the ledger?

00:18:54.940 | I mean, that is really the challenge.

00:18:58.300 | This ledger, you can always add a page,

00:19:00.780 | 'cause more and more transactions have to be written on there

00:19:03.820 | and somebody has to assemble this transaction,

00:19:07.180 | put them on a page, and add the next page.

00:19:10.260 | Who is the somebody who chooses the page and adds it on?

00:19:13.300 | - Who can be trusted to do it.

00:19:14.740 | - Exactly.

00:19:15.900 | Assume it is me, for the time being,

00:19:17.860 | not that I want to volunteer for the job,

00:19:19.660 | but then I would have more power

00:19:21.980 | than any absolute monarch in history,

00:19:24.620 | because I would have tremendous power to say,

00:19:27.180 | these are the transactions that the entire world should see,

00:19:31.660 | and whatever I don't write,

00:19:33.460 | this transaction will never see the light of day.

00:19:36.540 | I mean, no one had any such power in history.

00:19:39.820 | So it's very important to do that.

00:19:43.420 | And that is the quintessential problem in a blockchain,

00:19:47.340 | and people have thought about it to say,

00:19:49.700 | it's not me, it's not you,

00:19:50.860 | but for instance, in proof of work,

00:19:54.420 | what people say is they say,

00:19:55.580 | okay, it's not me, it's not you, you know what it is?

00:19:58.140 | We make a very difficult,

00:20:00.820 | we invent a cryptographic puzzle, very hard to solve.

00:20:04.540 | The first one to solve it has the right

00:20:07.300 | to add one page to the ledger on behalf of everybody else.

00:20:11.180 | That's now seems okay, because sometimes I solve a puzzle,

00:20:17.300 | before you do, sometimes you solve it before I do,

00:20:20.020 | or before somebody else, somebody else solves it, it's okay.

00:20:22.740 | - And presumably the effort you put in

00:20:26.180 | is somehow correlated with how much trust

00:20:28.660 | you should be given to add to the ledger.

00:20:33.580 | - Yeah, so somehow you want to make sure that,

00:20:36.020 | you need to work because you want to prevent,

00:20:39.500 | you want to make sure that you get one solution

00:20:43.100 | every 10 minutes, say,

00:20:44.380 | like in particular example of Bitcoin.

00:20:47.780 | So that is very rare that two pages are added

00:20:50.660 | at the same time, because if I solve a puzzle

00:20:53.740 | at the same time you do, it could happen that,

00:20:57.540 | if it happens once or twice, we can survive it.

00:21:00.020 | But if it happens, every other page is a double page,

00:21:04.500 | then which of the two is the real page,

00:21:06.940 | it becomes a problem.

00:21:08.380 | So that's why in Bitcoin, it is important

00:21:11.940 | to have a substantial amount of work

00:21:14.020 | so that no many, how many people try on earth

00:21:17.300 | to solve a puzzle, you have one solution

00:21:20.780 | out of how many people are trying every 10 minutes.

00:21:23.620 | So that you have, you distanciate these pages

00:21:26.980 | and you have the time to propagate

00:21:28.780 | for the network a solution and the page attached to it.

00:21:32.660 | And therefore there is one page at a time that is added.

00:21:36.340 | And you say, well, why don't we do it?

00:21:38.780 | We have a solution.

00:21:39.940 | Well, first of all, a page every 10 minutes

00:21:44.580 | is not fast enough.

00:21:45.940 | It's a question of scalability.

00:21:47.900 | And second of all, to ensure that no matter

00:21:50.980 | how many people try, you get one page every 10 minutes,

00:21:55.820 | one solution to the riddle every 10 minutes.

00:21:58.780 | This means that the riddle becomes very, very hard.

00:22:03.100 | And to have a chance to solve it within 10 minutes,

00:22:07.740 | you must have such an expensive apparatus

00:22:11.380 | in terms of specialized computers,

00:22:13.620 | not one, not two, but 1,000 and 1,000 of them.

00:22:16.140 | And they produce tons of heat, okay?

00:22:18.100 | These dissipate heat like a maniac.

00:22:20.220 | And then you have to refrigerate them too.

00:22:22.380 | And so then now you have air conditioning galore

00:22:25.980 | to add to the thing.

00:22:26.980 | It becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer people

00:22:31.780 | can actually compete in order to add to the page.

00:22:35.700 | And the problem becomes so crucial

00:22:40.700 | that in Bitcoin, depending on which day of the week

00:22:46.140 | you look at it, you are going to have

00:22:48.980 | two or three mining pools are really the ones

00:22:53.100 | capable of controlling the chain.

00:22:56.060 | - So you're saying that's almost like

00:22:59.540 | leads to centralization.

00:23:01.740 | - Right, it started being decentralized.

00:23:05.380 | And but the expenses become higher and higher and higher.

00:23:08.700 | When the cost becomes higher and higher,

00:23:11.020 | fewer and fewer people can afford them.

00:23:12.860 | And then it becomes de facto centralized, right?

00:23:17.100 | - Yeah.

00:23:18.380 | - And the different type of approach is instead,

00:23:22.820 | for instance, a delegated proof of stake,

00:23:25.500 | which is also very easy to explain.

00:23:29.220 | Essentially boils down to say,

00:23:31.220 | well, look at these 21 people say, okay?

00:23:35.300 | Don't they look honest?

00:23:36.820 | Yes, they do.

00:23:37.820 | In fact, I believe that they're going to remain honest

00:23:41.180 | for the foreseeable future.

00:23:42.540 | So why don't we do ourselves a favor?

00:23:44.580 | Let's entrust them to add the page

00:23:48.860 | on behalf of all of us to the ledger, okay?

00:23:51.820 | Okay, but now we are going to say,

00:23:55.140 | is this centralized or decentralized?

00:23:57.260 | Well, 21 is better than one, I have to say, is very little.

00:24:01.140 | So if you look at when people rebelled to centralized power,

00:24:05.140 | I don't know, the French revolutions, okay?

00:24:07.260 | There was a monarch and the nobles.

00:24:09.100 | - Yes.

00:24:09.940 | - Were there 21 nobles?

00:24:11.660 | No, there were thousands of them,

00:24:13.660 | but there were millions and millions

00:24:15.500 | of disempowered citizens.

00:24:17.900 | So one is centralized, 21 is also centralized, right?

00:24:22.180 | - So that's delegated proof of stake.

00:24:24.100 | - Delegated proof of stake.

00:24:24.940 | - Kind of like representative democracy, I guess.

00:24:27.180 | - Yes, which is good.

00:24:29.740 | - It's working great, right?

00:24:30.740 | - It's working great.

00:24:32.620 | Well, it's better than--

00:24:34.060 | - It's better than a monarch, right?

00:24:36.660 | And, but--

00:24:37.980 | - There's problems.

00:24:40.460 | - There are problems.

00:24:41.940 | And so we were looking for a different,

00:24:46.940 | when thinking about Algorand, for a different approach.

00:24:50.980 | And so we have an approach in that,

00:24:54.980 | it's really, really decentralized

00:24:56.820 | because essentially it works as follows.

00:25:01.820 | You have a bunch of tokens, right?

00:25:03.900 | These are the tokens that have equal power.

00:25:07.100 | And you have, say, 10 billions of tokens

00:25:08.860 | distributed to the entire world.

00:25:13.100 | And the owners, each token has a chance to add the ledger,

00:25:18.100 | equal probability to everybody else.

00:25:21.860 | In fact, actually, if you want, here is how it works.

00:25:26.900 | So think about, by some magic cryptographic process,

00:25:31.580 | which is not magic, it's mathematics,

00:25:33.220 | but think of it as magic.

00:25:34.860 | Assume that you select 1,000 tokens,

00:25:38.580 | and so sometimes at random, okay?

00:25:42.820 | And you have a guarantee that the random selected.

00:25:45.340 | And then the owners of these 1,000 tokens

00:25:49.500 | somehow agree on the next page, they all sign it,

00:25:52.860 | and that is the next page, okay?

00:25:56.780 | So it is clear that nobody has the power,

00:25:59.940 | but once in a while, one of your tokens is selected

00:26:04.940 | and you are in charge of this committee

00:26:09.020 | to select the next page.

00:26:10.540 | But this goes around very quickly.

00:26:13.820 | So and if you look at this,

00:26:15.420 | the question really is that it's not really centralized,

00:26:19.500 | and because for agreeing on the same page,

00:26:22.940 | it is important that the 1,000 tokens

00:26:27.180 | that you randomly selected are in honest hands,

00:26:30.540 | the majority of them.

00:26:32.300 | So which, if the majority of the tokens are in honest hands,

00:26:36.140 | that is essentially true,

00:26:37.820 | because if the majority of the tokens are in honest hands,

00:26:40.500 | if you select, say, 90% of the people are,

00:26:44.980 | 90% of the tokens are in honest hands,

00:26:48.460 | so can you randomly select 1,000,

00:26:51.220 | and in this 1,000, you find the 501 tokens in bad hands.

00:26:56.940 | Very, very improbable.

00:26:58.540 | - So basically, when a large fraction of people are honest,

00:27:03.100 | then you can use randomness as a powerful tool

00:27:06.100 | to get decentralization.

00:27:08.460 | - Correct.

00:27:09.300 | - So what does honesty mean,

00:27:10.580 | and now we're into the social side of things,

00:27:14.820 | which is how do we know that,

00:27:19.820 | like, a large fraction of people

00:27:23.780 | or participating parties are honest?

00:27:26.180 | - That is an excellent question.

00:27:28.020 | So by the way, first of all, we should realize

00:27:30.620 | that the same thing is for every other system.

00:27:33.700 | When you look at proof of work,

00:27:35.260 | you rely that the majority of the mining power

00:27:39.660 | is in honest hands.

00:27:41.180 | When you look at delegated proof of stake,

00:27:44.180 | you rely that the majority of these 21 people are honest.

00:27:48.420 | What is the difference?

00:27:49.700 | The difference is that in these other systems,

00:27:53.940 | you should say the whole economy is secure

00:27:57.420 | if the majority of this small piece of economy are honest.

00:28:02.420 | And that is a big question.

00:28:05.260 | But instead, in Algorand, in our approach, we say,

00:28:09.220 | the whole economy is secure

00:28:12.020 | if the majority of the economy is honest.

00:28:14.580 | In other words, who can subvert Algorand?

00:28:16.980 | It's not a majority of a small group,

00:28:19.380 | but it is a majority of the token holders

00:28:21.580 | have to conspire with each other

00:28:23.300 | in order to sink the very economy

00:28:25.380 | for which they own the majority of.

00:28:28.020 | That I think it is a bit harder to--

00:28:29.780 | - Like a self-destructive majority, essentially.

00:28:32.540 | And you're also making me realize that basically,

00:28:36.780 | every system that we have in the world today

00:28:39.900 | assumes that the majority of participants is honest.

00:28:44.900 | - Yes, the only difference is the majority of whom.

00:28:48.180 | And in some cases, the majority of a club,

00:28:51.140 | and in our case, it's the majority of the whole system.

00:28:53.660 | - The whole system.

00:28:54.900 | Okay, so that's, so through that kind of random sampling,

00:28:59.900 | you can achieve decentralization.

00:29:04.380 | You can achieve, so the scalability, I understand.

00:29:10.140 | And then the security that you're referring to,

00:29:14.060 | basically, the security comes from the fact

00:29:15.980 | that the sample selected would likely include honest people.

00:29:21.180 | So it's very difficult to, so by the way,

00:29:23.980 | the security, as you mentioned,

00:29:26.260 | that you're referring to is basically

00:29:29.220 | security against dishonesty, right?

00:29:32.460 | Or manipulation or whatever.

00:29:33.740 | - Yes, yes.

00:29:35.100 | So essentially, what you're going to do

00:29:37.620 | is to the following, say,

00:29:38.860 | "Well, Silvio, I understood what you're saying,

00:29:41.500 | "but somebody has to randomly select these tokens,

00:29:43.980 | "and I believe you, so then who does this random selection?"

00:29:47.380 | And in our ground, we do something a little bit unorthodox.

00:29:52.380 | Essentially, it's the token choose themselves at random.

00:29:57.900 | And you say, "If you think about it,

00:30:00.620 | "that seems to be a terrible idea."

00:30:02.660 | Because if you want to say, "Choose yourself at random,

00:30:05.300 | "and whoever chooses himself is a 1,000 people committee,

00:30:08.500 | "you choose the page for the rest of us."

00:30:12.340 | And because if I'm a bad person,

00:30:13.820 | I'm going to select myself over and over again

00:30:16.460 | because I want to be part of the committee

00:30:18.020 | every single time.

00:30:19.700 | But not so fast.

00:30:21.180 | So what do we do in our ground?

00:30:23.580 | What does it mean that I select myself?

00:30:25.260 | That each one of us,

00:30:27.180 | in the privacy of our own computer, actually a laptop,

00:30:30.460 | what you do is that you execute your own individual lottery.

00:30:35.460 | And think about it, that you pull a lever

00:30:40.460 | of a slot machine.

00:30:41.820 | You can only pull the lever once,

00:30:44.340 | until you win, not enough times until you win.

00:30:46.820 | And when you pull the lever, case one,

00:30:48.940 | either you win, in such a case you have a winning ticket,

00:30:51.940 | or you lose, you don't get any winning ticket.

00:30:55.980 | So if you don't have a winning ticket,

00:30:58.860 | you can say anything you want about the next page

00:31:01.460 | in the ledger, nobody pays attention.

00:31:04.020 | But if you have a winning ticket,

00:31:07.140 | people say, "Oh, wow, he's one of the 1,000 winning tickets,

00:31:10.340 | "we better pay attention to what he or she says."

00:31:13.380 | And that's how it works.

00:31:14.900 | And the lottery is a cryptographic lottery,

00:31:18.940 | which means that even if I am an entire nation,

00:31:22.740 | extremely powerful, with incredible computing powers,

00:31:26.300 | I don't have the ability to improve even minimally

00:31:29.220 | my probability of one of my token winning the lottery.

00:31:32.500 | And that's how it happens.

00:31:34.940 | So everybody pulls the lever,

00:31:37.660 | the 1,000 random winners say,

00:31:40.580 | "Oh, here is my winning ticket,

00:31:42.740 | "and here is my opinion up or down about the block."

00:31:45.980 | These are the ones that count.

00:31:47.500 | And if you think about it, while this is distributed,

00:31:52.020 | because there is, in the case of Algon,

00:31:53.900 | there is 10 billion tokens,

00:31:55.780 | and you select 1,000 of them,

00:31:57.700 | more distributed than this, you cannot get.

00:32:00.820 | And then why is this scalable?

00:32:04.020 | Because what do you have to do?

00:32:05.620 | Okay, you have to do the lottery.

00:32:07.300 | How long the lottery takes?

00:32:09.420 | It takes actually one microsecond.

00:32:12.420 | Whether you have one token or two tokens

00:32:14.660 | or a billion tokens is always one microsecond of computation,

00:32:18.140 | which is very fast.

00:32:20.060 | We don't hit the planet with a microsecond of computation.

00:32:24.100 | And finally, why is this secure?

00:32:27.140 | Because even if I were a very evil

00:32:31.540 | and very, very powerful individual,

00:32:34.340 | I'm so powerful that I can corrupt anybody I want

00:32:37.500 | instantaneously in the world.

00:32:39.140 | Who would I want to corrupt?

00:32:42.500 | The people in the committee,

00:32:43.980 | so that I can choose the page of the ledger.

00:32:46.780 | But I do have a problem.

00:32:48.740 | I do not know whom I should corrupt.

00:32:52.100 | Should I corrupt this lady in Shanghai,

00:32:54.460 | this other guy in Paris?

00:32:56.500 | Because I don't know.

00:32:57.980 | The winners are random,

00:32:59.380 | so I don't know whom I should corrupt.

00:33:01.420 | But once the winner come forward and say,

00:33:04.180 | "Here is my winning ticket,"

00:33:05.620 | and you propagate your winning ticket across the network

00:33:09.060 | together with your opinion about the bloc,

00:33:11.860 | now I know who they are.

00:33:13.860 | For sure, I can corrupt all thousand of them

00:33:15.940 | given to my incredible powers.

00:33:18.500 | But so what?

00:33:19.340 | Whatever they said, they already said,

00:33:22.820 | and their winning tickets and their opinions

00:33:25.060 | are violently propagated across the network.

00:33:28.020 | And I do not have the power,

00:33:30.020 | no more than the US government

00:33:31.740 | or any government has the power

00:33:33.300 | to put back in the bottle a message

00:33:36.620 | violently propagated by Wikileaks.

00:33:38.780 | - So everything you've just described

00:33:42.340 | is fascinating set of ideas.

00:33:45.860 | And online I've been reading quite a bit,

00:33:48.900 | and people are really excited about those set of ideas.

00:33:51.300 | Nevertheless, it is not the dominating technology today.

00:33:56.300 | So Bitcoin in terms of cryptocurrency

00:34:00.580 | is the most popular cryptocurrency

00:34:04.180 | and then Ethereum and so on.

00:34:06.060 | So it's useful to kind of comment.

00:34:08.020 | We already talked about proof of work a little bit,

00:34:10.540 | but what in your sense does Bitcoin get right,

00:34:14.580 | and where is it lacking?

00:34:16.700 | - Okay, so the first thing that Bitcoin got right

00:34:19.820 | is to understand that there was the need

00:34:22.980 | of a cryptocurrency.

00:34:24.500 | And that, in my opinion,

00:34:26.180 | Trumps, they deserve all the success

00:34:29.100 | because they say that the time is right for this idea.

00:34:31.940 | Because very often it's not enough to be right,

00:34:34.180 | you have to be right at the right time,

00:34:36.100 | and somebody got it right there.

00:34:38.420 | So hat off to Bitcoin for that.

00:34:41.460 | And so what they got right

00:34:44.260 | is it is hard to subvert and change the ledger,

00:34:51.020 | to cancel a transaction.

00:34:53.460 | It's not impossible, but it is very hard.

00:34:56.340 | What they did not get right is somehow

00:35:00.060 | that is a great store of value, currency-wise,

00:35:03.900 | but money is not only a question that you store it

00:35:07.860 | and you put under the mattress.

00:35:09.460 | Money wants to be transacted.

00:35:11.340 | And the transaction in Bitcoins are very little.

00:35:14.540 | So if you want to store value,

00:35:16.420 | everybody needs to store value,

00:35:17.780 | might as well use a Bitcoin.

00:35:20.140 | I mean, it's the plan,

00:35:21.300 | but if you don't look at that for a moment,

00:35:26.380 | at least it's a great store of value,

00:35:28.940 | and everybody needs a store of value.

00:35:30.580 | But most of the time we want to transact,

00:35:32.540 | we want to interact.

00:35:33.380 | We don't put the money under the mattress, right?

00:35:35.300 | So we want to, and that, they didn't get it right.

00:35:38.700 | That is too slow to transact.

00:35:41.740 | Too few transactions.

00:35:42.940 | - There's a scalability.

00:35:44.020 | - The scalability issue.

00:35:45.700 | - Is it possible to build stuff on top of Bitcoin

00:35:48.820 | that sort of fixes the scalability?

00:35:52.620 | I mean, this is the thing,

00:35:53.660 | you look at, there's a bunch of technologies

00:35:55.660 | that kind of hit the right need at the right time,

00:36:00.660 | and they have flaws,

00:36:03.980 | but we kind of build infrastructures on top of them

00:36:07.260 | over time to fix it,

00:36:09.300 | as opposed to getting it right from the beginning.

00:36:12.620 | Or is it difficult to do?

00:36:14.980 | - Well, that is difficult to do.

00:36:16.660 | So you are talking to somebody

00:36:18.340 | that when I decided to throw my hat in the arena,

00:36:22.860 | and I decided, first of all, as I said before,

00:36:25.500 | I very much admire my predecessors.

00:36:27.740 | I mean, they got it right a lot of things,

00:36:29.780 | and I really admire for that.

00:36:33.820 | But I had a choice to make.

00:36:36.420 | Either I patch something that has holes all over the place,

00:36:39.580 | or I start from scratch.

00:36:40.820 | I decided to start from scratch,

00:36:42.180 | because sometimes there's a better way.

00:36:43.620 | - So what about Ethereum, which looks at proof of stake,

00:36:47.580 | and a lot of different innovative ideas

00:36:50.180 | that kind of improve, or seek to improve,

00:36:53.380 | on some of the flaws of Bitcoin?

00:36:55.220 | - Ethereum had another great idea.

00:36:56.820 | So they figured out that money and payments

00:37:01.420 | are important as they are.

00:37:03.060 | They are only the first level, the first stepping stone.

00:37:07.140 | The next level are smart contracts.

00:37:10.340 | And they were at the vision to say,

00:37:12.540 | the people will need smart contracts,

00:37:15.660 | which allow me and you to somehow to transact securely

00:37:20.300 | without being shopper owned by a trusted third party,

00:37:23.180 | by a mediator.

00:37:24.500 | By the way, because mediators are hard to find,

00:37:27.660 | and in fact, maybe even impossible to find.

00:37:30.140 | If you live in Thailand, and I live in New Zealand,

00:37:33.500 | maybe we don't have a common person that we know and trust.

00:37:36.780 | And even if we find them, guess what?

00:37:39.980 | They want to be paid.

00:37:41.140 | So much so that 6% of the world GDP

00:37:45.620 | goes into financial friction,

00:37:48.660 | which is essentially third party.

00:37:50.420 | So the head of the right of the world needed that.

00:37:54.100 | But again, the scalability is not there.

00:37:58.940 | And the system of smart contracts in Ethereum

00:38:03.500 | is slow and expensive.

00:38:06.300 | And I believe that is not enough to satisfy the appetite

00:38:11.300 | and the need that we have for smart contracts.

00:38:14.540 | - Well, what do you make of,

00:38:15.620 | just as a small sort of aside in human history,

00:38:19.140 | perhaps it's a big one, is NFT, the non-fungible tokens.

00:38:22.660 | Do you find those interesting technically,

00:38:24.780 | or is it more interesting on the social side of things?

00:38:28.180 | - Well, both.

00:38:29.580 | I think it's, NFTs are actually great, right?

00:38:33.600 | So you have this, you're an artist to create a song,

00:38:38.020 | or it could be a piece of art.

00:38:43.020 | He has many unique representation of unique piece,

00:38:50.180 | whether it's an artifact or something dreamed up by you,

00:38:54.500 | and as unique representation, but now you can trade.

00:38:57.900 | And allow, and the important part is that now you have this,

00:39:02.060 | not only the NFTs themselves,

00:39:04.660 | but the ability to trade them quickly, fast, securely,

00:39:09.660 | knowing who owns which rights.

00:39:13.220 | And that gives a totally new opportunity

00:39:16.940 | for content creators to be remunerated

00:39:19.220 | for what they do.

00:39:20.900 | - So, but ultimately you still have to have

00:39:23.420 | that scalability, security, and decentralization

00:39:28.420 | to make it work for bigger and bigger applications.

00:39:33.500 | - Correct, yeah.

00:39:35.060 | - Yeah, I still wonder what kind of applications

00:39:37.140 | are yet to be enabled by it, because so much,

00:39:41.540 | the interesting thing about NFTs,

00:39:44.980 | if you look outside of art, is just like money,

00:39:49.980 | you can start playing with different social constructs.

00:39:54.420 | Is you can start playing with the ideas.

00:39:57.940 | You can start playing with even like investing,

00:40:02.940 | somebody was talking about almost creating an economy

00:40:07.220 | out of like creative people or influencers.

00:40:12.940 | Like if you start a YouTube channel or something like that,

00:40:15.900 | you can invest in that person

00:40:18.020 | and you can start trading their creations.

00:40:20.860 | And then almost like create a market out of people's ideas,

00:40:24.540 | out of people's creations, out of the people themselves

00:40:29.060 | that generate those creations.

00:40:31.460 | And there's a lot of interesting possibilities

00:40:33.260 | of what you can do with that.

00:40:34.260 | I mean, it seems ridiculous,

00:40:35.500 | but you're basically creating a hierarchy of value,

00:40:40.540 | maybe artificial in the digital world

00:40:44.260 | and they're trading that.

00:40:46.060 | But in so doing are inspiring people to create.

00:40:49.940 | So maybe as a sort of our economy gets better

00:40:54.940 | and better and better,

00:40:55.780 | where actual work in the physical space

00:40:59.580 | becomes less and less in terms of its importance,

00:41:02.180 | maybe we'll completely be operating in a digital space

00:41:04.900 | where these kinds of economies have more and more power.

00:41:10.620 | And then you have to have this kind of blockchains

00:41:13.700 | to the scalability, security and decentralization.

00:41:17.660 | And then decentralization is of course the tricky one

00:41:21.060 | because people in power start to get nervous.

00:41:25.140 | - Absolutely.

00:41:26.140 | Once in power, you're always nervous

00:41:29.500 | that you'll be supplanted by somebody else.

00:41:31.580 | But this is your job.

00:41:33.020 | So you've got relations, you've got a job, a top job,

00:41:35.700 | but now everybody wants it.

00:41:37.500 | Well, what is your sense about our time

00:41:41.020 | and the future hope about the decentralization of power?

00:41:46.020 | Do you think that's something that we can actually achieve

00:41:49.660 | given that power corrupts

00:41:53.740 | and absolute power corrupts absolutely

00:41:55.660 | and it's so wonderful to be absolutely powerful?

00:41:59.020 | - Well, good question.

00:42:01.100 | So first of all, I believe by the way,

00:42:04.500 | there is a complex questions, Lex,

00:42:07.860 | like all the rest of your questions.

00:42:12.380 | (laughing)

00:42:14.180 | - I'm so very sorry.

00:42:15.540 | - It's okay, I am enjoying it.

00:42:18.820 | So there are two things.

00:42:21.220 | First of all, power has been centralized

00:42:24.860 | for a variety of reasons.

00:42:26.260 | When you want to get it, it's easier for somebody,

00:42:29.460 | even a single person to grab power.

00:42:32.540 | But there is also some kind of a technology,

00:42:35.620 | lack thereof, that justified having power

00:42:40.460 | because in a way, in a society in which even communication,

00:42:43.820 | nevermind blockchain, which is common knowledge,

00:42:46.540 | but even simple unilateral communication is hard,

00:42:50.580 | it is much easier to say, you do as I say,

00:42:54.540 | because the alternative is.

00:42:56.380 | But as, so there is a little bit of a technology barrier,

00:42:59.860 | but I think of it,

00:43:00.700 | and now to get to this common knowledge,

00:43:03.180 | it is a totally different story.

00:43:04.820 | Now we have finally the technology for doing this.

00:43:07.380 | So that is one part.

00:43:09.100 | But I really believe that by having a distributed system,

00:43:12.780 | not only you don't have,

00:43:14.060 | you have to actually much more stable and durable system,

00:43:19.980 | because not only for corruption,

00:43:21.780 | but even for things that go astray,

00:43:23.540 | and you give it a long enough time

00:43:25.220 | by strange version of Murphy's law,

00:43:29.020 | whatever goes wrong, goes wrong.

00:43:31.980 | And so, and if the power is diffused,

00:43:35.340 | you actually are much more stable.

00:43:37.600 | If you look at any living,

00:43:41.780 | complex living being is distributed.

00:43:45.140 | I mean, I don't have somebody is,

00:43:47.940 | okay, tell Sylvia now it's time to eat.

00:43:50.700 | - You have millions of cells in your body,

00:43:52.780 | you have billions of bacteria.

00:43:54.340 | - Exactly, help me in the guts,

00:43:56.220 | but I think we are in a soup of it somehow.

00:43:59.180 | It keeps us alive.

00:44:00.180 | - It's a fear mess.

00:44:01.020 | - It is, and so strange enough,

00:44:04.140 | however, when we design systems,

00:44:06.980 | we design them centralized.

00:44:08.620 | We ourselves are distributed beings,

00:44:11.540 | and when we plan to say,

00:44:12.980 | okay, I want to create an architecture,

00:44:15.900 | how about I make a pyramid,

00:44:18.540 | I put this on the top,

00:44:21.020 | and the power flows down.

00:44:22.980 | And so again, it's a little bit perhaps

00:44:25.860 | of a technology problem,

00:44:27.780 | but now the technology is there,

00:44:29.380 | so it is a big challenge to rethink

00:44:31.900 | how we want to organize power in very large system,

00:44:35.980 | and distributed system, in my opinion,

00:44:39.620 | are much more resilient.

00:44:41.500 | Let's put it this way.

00:44:42.580 | There was a mine,

00:44:43.860 | or my Italian compatriots, right,

00:44:47.700 | you know, Machiavelli,

00:44:48.700 | who looked at the time,

00:44:50.580 | there was a big,

00:44:51.860 | there was a bunch of small state,

00:44:53.820 | Democratic Republic of Florence,

00:44:55.620 | of Venice, and the other thing,

00:44:57.260 | and there was the Ottoman Empire,

00:44:58.740 | but at the time, it was an empire,

00:45:00.300 | and a certain was very centralized,

00:45:02.460 | and he made a political observation

00:45:05.900 | that goes roughly to say,

00:45:07.380 | whenever you have such a centralized thing,

00:45:08.980 | it's very hard to overtake

00:45:11.860 | that former government is centralized,

00:45:14.700 | but if you get it,

00:45:16.100 | it's so easy to keep the population.

00:45:19.220 | When instead, with other things,

00:45:21.860 | much more resilient,

00:45:25.700 | when the power is distributed,

00:45:27.540 | it's going to be lasting for much longer time.

00:45:30.900 | - And ultimately, maybe the human spirit

00:45:33.340 | wants that kind of resilience,

00:45:34.740 | wants that kind of distribution.

00:45:36.020 | It's just that we didn't have technology

00:45:37.780 | throughout history.

00:45:38.860 | Machiavelli didn't have the computer,

00:45:41.020 | the internet, and--

00:45:42.100 | (laughing)

00:45:43.220 | - That is certainly part of the reason, yes.

00:45:46.300 | - You've written an interesting blog post,

00:45:48.580 | if we take a step out of the realm of bits

00:45:53.340 | and into the realm of governance.

00:45:56.100 | You wrote a blog post

00:45:57.420 | about making Algorand governance decentralized.

00:46:00.180 | Can you explain what that means,

00:46:02.620 | the philosophy behind that?

00:46:04.620 | How you decentralized basically all aspects

00:46:08.340 | of this kind of system?

00:46:10.700 | - Well, the philosophy,

00:46:12.820 | and how, let's start with the philosophy.

00:46:14.860 | So I really believe

00:46:16.340 | that nothing fixed lasts very long.

00:46:21.260 | And so I really believe that life

00:46:24.300 | is about intelligent adaptation.

00:46:27.300 | Things change,

00:46:28.540 | and we have to be nimble

00:46:31.060 | and adjust to change.

00:46:32.980 | And when I see a lot of

00:46:37.060 | a crypto project,

00:46:41.020 | actually very proud to say it's fixed in stone,

00:46:45.820 | right, code is law, law is code,

00:46:47.980 | I verify the code, it will never change.

00:46:50.020 | You go, wow, when I'm saying this is a recipe to me

00:46:52.900 | of disaster, not immediately, but soon.

00:46:55.740 | Just imagine you take a notion liner,

00:46:58.180 | and you want to go, I don't know,

00:46:59.900 | from Lisbon to New York,

00:47:04.380 | and you set a course,

00:47:06.580 | iceberg, no iceberg,

00:47:08.660 | tempest, no tempest,

00:47:10.300 | and it doesn't matter.

00:47:11.660 | That is not the way.

00:47:13.500 | You need a till,

00:47:14.820 | you need to correct,

00:47:15.940 | you need to adjust.

00:47:18.340 | And so, by the way,

00:47:21.380 | we design an algorithm with the idea

00:47:23.460 | that the code was evolving as the needs.

00:47:28.460 | And of course, the way there is a system

00:47:30.580 | in which every time there is an adjustment,

00:47:32.980 | you must have essentially a vote

00:47:34.820 | that right now is orchestrated

00:47:38.220 | with 90% of the stake.

00:47:39.700 | They say, okay, we are ready,

00:47:41.020 | we agree on the next version,

00:47:42.980 | and we pick up this version,

00:47:44.940 | so we are able to evolve

00:47:46.300 | without losing too many components left and right.

00:47:49.460 | But I think without evolving,

00:47:51.100 | any system essentially become masophistic,

00:47:53.660 | and is going to shrivel and die sooner or later.

00:47:57.260 | And so that is needed.

00:48:00.180 | And what you want to do on the blockchain,

00:48:03.180 | you have a perfect platform

00:48:05.700 | in which you can log your wishes,

00:48:09.380 | your votes, your things,

00:48:10.740 | so that you have a guarantee

00:48:12.060 | that whatever vote you express

00:48:14.180 | is actually seen by everybody else.

00:48:15.980 | So everybody sees really the outcome,

00:48:19.100 | call it a referendum, of a change,

00:48:21.820 | and that is, in my opinion,

00:48:24.980 | a system that wants to live long has to adapt.

00:48:27.620 | - There's an interesting question about leaders.

00:48:30.740 | I've talked to Vitalik Buterin,

00:48:32.820 | I'll probably talk to him again soon.

00:48:34.700 | He's one of the leaders,

00:48:38.140 | maybe one of the faces of the Ethereum project.

00:48:40.940 | And it's interesting,

00:48:41.820 | you have Satoshi Nakamoto,

00:48:44.500 | who's the face of Bitcoin, I guess,

00:48:47.460 | but he's faceless.

00:48:48.820 | He, she, they.

00:48:50.540 | It does seem like in our,

00:48:54.700 | whatever it is, maybe it's 20th century,

00:48:57.540 | maybe it's Machiavellian thinking,

00:48:59.740 | but we seek leaders.

00:49:01.860 | Leaders have value.

00:49:03.060 | Linus Torvald, the leader of Linux,

00:49:08.060 | the open source development a lot.

00:49:10.260 | I mean, there's no, it's not,

00:49:12.460 | it's not that the leadership is sort of dogmatic,

00:49:15.700 | but it's inspiring.

00:49:17.420 | And it's also powerful in that,

00:49:22.260 | through leaders, we propagate the vision.

00:49:25.300 | Like the vision of the project is more stable.

00:49:28.460 | Maybe not the details, but the vision.

00:49:30.780 | And so do you think there's value to,

00:49:33.820 | 'cause there's a tension between decentralization

00:49:36.740 | and leadership, like, and visionary.

00:49:39.380 | - Yes.

00:49:40.740 | - What do you make of that tension?

00:49:42.580 | - Okay, so I really believe that,

00:49:44.380 | that's another great question.

00:49:45.860 | I think of it, you know,

00:49:47.860 | I really believe in the power of emotions.

00:49:49.940 | I think that emotion are of a creative impulse

00:49:52.660 | of everybody else.

00:49:53.980 | And therefore, it's very easy for a leader

00:49:56.980 | to be a physical person, a real being,

00:50:00.820 | and that interprets our emotions.

00:50:04.180 | And by the way, this emotion has to resonate.

00:50:07.260 | And what is good is that the more intimate

00:50:10.700 | our emotions are, the more universal they are,

00:50:13.300 | paradoxically.

00:50:14.500 | The more personal, the more everybody else

00:50:17.980 | somehow magically agrees and feels a bit of the same.

00:50:21.060 | And so, and it's very important to have a leader

00:50:24.620 | in the initial phase that generates out of nothing

00:50:27.900 | something, that is important leadership.

00:50:30.340 | But then the true test of leadership

00:50:32.780 | is to disappear after you led the community.

00:50:35.940 | So in my opinion, the quintessential leader,

00:50:38.340 | according to my vision, is George Washington.

00:50:45.660 | He served for one term, he served for another term,

00:50:48.980 | and then all of a sudden, he retired

00:50:51.060 | and became a private citizen.

00:50:53.020 | And 200 and change years later, we still are,

00:50:57.460 | with some defects, but we have done a lot of things right.

00:51:00.820 | And we have been able to evolve.

00:51:02.220 | That, to me, is success in leadership.

00:51:05.500 | But instead, you contrast our experiment

00:51:07.940 | with a lot of experiment.

00:51:08.980 | I've done so much, so well, that I want another four years.

00:51:12.660 | And why should I be only a four, and I have another eight?

00:51:16.780 | Why should be another eight?

00:51:18.020 | Give me 16, I will fix all your problem.

00:51:20.460 | And now, then is the type, in my opinion,

00:51:22.820 | of failed leadership.

00:51:24.620 | Leadership ought to be really lead, ignite, and disappear.

00:51:29.420 | And if you don't disappear, the system is going to die

00:51:32.060 | with you, and it's not a good idea for everybody else.

00:51:35.780 | - Is there, so we've been talking a little bit

00:51:37.500 | about cryptocurrency, but is there spaces

00:51:40.020 | where this kind of blockchain ideas that you're describing,

00:51:44.300 | which I find fascinating, do you think they can

00:51:47.980 | revolutionize some other aspects of our world?

00:51:51.180 | That's not just money?

00:51:53.340 | - A lot of things that are going to be revolutionized

00:51:56.220 | is independent of finance.

00:51:59.340 | By the way, I really believe that finance

00:52:04.340 | is an incredible form of freedom.

00:52:07.100 | I mean, if I'm free to do anything I want,

00:52:09.500 | but I don't have the means to do anything,

00:52:11.060 | that's a bad idea.

00:52:11.900 | So I really think financial freedom is very, very important.

00:52:15.420 | But just again, say that against censorship,

00:52:20.260 | you write something on the chain,

00:52:21.780 | and now nobody can take it out.

00:52:24.340 | That is a very important way to express

00:52:27.780 | our view.

00:52:30.460 | And then the transparency that you give,

00:52:35.220 | because everybody can see what's happening

00:52:37.940 | on the blockchain.

00:52:39.100 | So transparency is not money, but I believe

00:52:42.580 | that transparency actually is a very important ingredient

00:52:47.020 | also of finance.

00:52:48.940 | Let's put it this way, as much as I'm enthusiastic

00:52:51.980 | about blockchain and decentralized finance,

00:52:56.060 | and we have actually, our expression,

00:52:59.540 | we're creating this future five,

00:53:01.940 | as much as we want to do, we must agree

00:53:04.740 | that the first guarantee of financial growth

00:53:09.220 | and prosperity are really the legal system, the courts.

00:53:14.220 | Because we may not think about them and say,

00:53:16.260 | oh, the courts are a bunch of boring lawyers,

00:53:19.500 | but without them, I'm saying, there is no certainty.

00:53:22.220 | There is no notion of equality.

00:53:25.780 | There is no notion that you can resolve your disputes.

00:53:28.900 | Think, that's what drives commerce and things.

00:53:31.580 | And so what I really believe, that the blockchain

00:53:34.260 | actually makes a lot of this trust essentially automatic,

00:53:37.820 | but make it impossible to cheat in very way.

00:53:41.420 | You don't even need to go to court

00:53:43.700 | if nobody can change the ledger.

00:53:46.140 | So it essentially is a way of,

00:53:51.020 | you cannot solve an illegal system

00:53:52.860 | that reduces to a blockchain,

00:53:54.300 | but what I'm saying, a big chunk of it

00:53:56.540 | can actually be guaranteed, and there is no reason

00:54:00.060 | why technology should be antagonistic

00:54:02.260 | to legal scholarship.

00:54:05.260 | It could be actually coexisting,

00:54:07.020 | and one should start to doing the interesting things

00:54:10.180 | that the technology alone cannot do,

00:54:12.140 | and then you go from there.

00:54:13.500 | But I think that is essentially is,

00:54:19.140 | blockchain can affect all kinds of our behavior.

00:54:24.140 | - Yes, in some sense, the transparency,

00:54:26.620 | the required transparency ensures honesty,

00:54:30.500 | prevents corruption.

00:54:31.340 | So there's a lot of systems that could use that,

00:54:33.220 | and the legal system is one of them.

00:54:35.060 | There is a little bit of a tension

00:54:37.340 | that I wonder if you can speak to

00:54:39.740 | where this kind of transparency,

00:54:42.560 | there's a tension with privacy.

00:54:45.020 | Is it possible to achieve privacy

00:54:48.660 | if wanted on a blockchain?

00:54:52.980 | Do you have ideas about different technologies

00:54:55.180 | that can do that?

00:54:56.020 | People have been playing with different ideas.

00:54:58.220 | - So absolutely.

00:54:59.220 | The answer is yes,

00:55:01.380 | and by the way, I'm a cryptographer.

00:55:05.020 | - Right.

00:55:06.020 | - So I really believe in privacy,

00:55:08.020 | and I believe in, and I have devoted

00:55:11.540 | a big chunk of my life to guarantee privacy,

00:55:16.300 | even when it seems almost impossible to have it.

00:55:19.180 | And it is possible to have it also in the blockchain too.

00:55:23.140 | And however, I believe in timing as well.

00:55:27.700 | And I believe that the people have the right

00:55:30.500 | to understand their system they live in.

00:55:36.940 | And right now, people can understand the blockchain

00:55:42.540 | to be something that cannot be altered,

00:55:47.540 | and is transparent, and that is good enough.

00:55:51.460 | And right now, any way to add,

00:55:53.420 | and there is a pseudo privacy for the fact that

00:55:56.820 | who knows if this key belongs,

00:55:58.660 | public key belongs to me or to you, right?

00:56:01.220 | And I can, when I want to change my money

00:56:03.420 | from one public key, I split it to other public keys,

00:56:06.180 | go and figure out which one is Silvio,

00:56:07.980 | are all of them of Silvio, or only one of Silvio?

00:56:10.380 | Who knows?

00:56:11.220 | That's some vanilla privacy, not the one I could talk.

00:56:14.980 | And I think it's good enough because,

00:56:16.780 | and it's important for now that we absorb this stage.

00:56:20.420 | Because the next stage, we must understand the privacy tool

00:56:23.980 | rather than taking on faith.

00:56:25.580 | When the public starts saying,

00:56:27.140 | I believe in the scientists, and whatever they say,

00:56:29.740 | I swear by them, and therefore,

00:56:31.220 | if they tell me it's private, it's private,

00:56:33.020 | and nobody understands it very well,

00:56:34.620 | we need a much more educated about the tools we are using.

00:56:40.060 | And so I look forward to deploying more and more privacy

00:56:44.580 | on the blockchain, but we are not,

00:56:48.580 | I will not rush to it until the people understand

00:56:52.900 | and are behind whatever we have right now.

00:56:55.120 | - So you build privacy on top of the power of the blockchain,

00:56:59.620 | you have to first understand the power of the blockchain.

00:57:02.380 | - Yes.

00:57:03.220 | - Yes, so Algorand is like one of the most exciting,

00:57:06.460 | technically at least, from my perspective,

00:57:09.580 | technologies, ideas in this whole space.

00:57:12.380 | What's the future of Algorand look like?

00:57:15.220 | Is it possible for it to dominate the world?

00:57:18.020 | - Let's put it this way, I certainly working very hard

00:57:23.020 | with a great team to give the best blockchain

00:57:26.580 | that one can demand and enjoy.

00:57:31.260 | And that said, I really believe that there is going to be,

00:57:35.940 | it's not a winner takes them all,

00:57:37.540 | so it's going to be a few blockchains,

00:57:40.540 | and each one is going to have its own brand,

00:57:44.940 | and it's going to be great at something.

00:57:47.820 | And sometimes it's scalability, sometimes it's your views,

00:57:51.780 | sometimes it's a thing.

00:57:53.620 | And it's important to have a dialogue between these things.

00:57:56.940 | And I'm sure, and I'm working very hard to make sure

00:58:00.100 | that Algorand is one of them.

00:58:01.620 | But I don't believe that it is even desirable

00:58:05.660 | to have a winner takes all,

00:58:08.860 | because we need to express different things,

00:58:12.820 | but the important thing is going to have

00:58:14.900 | enough interoperability with various systems

00:58:17.740 | so that you can transfer your assets

00:58:21.220 | where you have the best tool to service them,

00:58:23.900 | whatever your needs are at the time.

00:58:25.820 | - So there's an idea, I don't know,

00:58:28.300 | they call themselves Bitcoin maximalists,

00:58:31.460 | which is essentially the bet that,

00:58:34.460 | the philosophy that Bitcoin will eat the world.

00:58:39.460 | So you're talking about it's good to have variety.

00:58:42.740 | Their claim is it's good to have

00:58:45.340 | the best technology dominate the medium of exchange,

00:58:50.340 | the medium of store value, the money,

00:58:54.100 | the digital currency space.

00:58:58.100 | What's your sense of the positives

00:59:01.020 | and the negatives of that?

00:59:03.420 | - So I feel people are smart,

00:59:06.300 | and it's going to be very hard for anybody

00:59:09.340 | and Bitcoin to win,

00:59:12.060 | and because people want more and more things.

00:59:15.140 | There is an Italian saying that goes,

00:59:18.700 | translates well, I think.

00:59:20.900 | It goes, "The appetite grows while eating."

00:59:23.700 | Okay?

00:59:24.540 | I think you understand what I mean.

00:59:26.580 | So I say, "I'm not hungry."

00:59:27.940 | "Oh, okay, food, let me try this."

00:59:30.700 | So we want more and more and more.

00:59:32.700 | And when you find something like a Bitcoin,

00:59:35.460 | which I already had very good things to say,

00:59:37.980 | but it does something very well,

00:59:39.900 | but it's static.

00:59:41.900 | I mean, store of value, yes, I think is a great,

00:59:46.900 | for the rest, it would be a sad world

00:59:49.940 | if the world in which we are so anchoring down,

00:59:52.580 | so defensive, that we want to store value

00:59:55.740 | and hide it under the mattress.

00:59:57.100 | I long for a world in which it is open,

01:00:00.020 | people want to transact and interact with each other.

01:00:02.900 | And therefore, when you want to store value,

01:00:06.500 | one, perhaps one chain,

01:00:08.220 | where you want to have to transact, maybe is another.

01:00:11.740 | I'm not saying that one chain cannot be store of value

01:00:15.820 | or another thing, but I really believe that,

01:00:18.020 | I believe in the ingenuity of people

01:00:21.140 | and in the innovation that is intrinsic to the human nature.

01:00:25.220 | We want always different things.

01:00:26.820 | So how can it be something invented,

01:00:29.020 | whatever it is, decades ago,

01:00:30.820 | is going to fulfill the needs of our future generations.

01:00:33.620 | I'm not going to fulfill my needs,

01:00:37.340 | let alone my kids or their kids.

01:00:40.620 | We are going to have a different world

01:00:44.180 | and things will evolve.

01:00:46.740 | - So you believe, yeah, so you believe that life,

01:00:49.540 | intelligent life is ultimately about adaptability

01:00:53.100 | and evolving, so static is,

01:00:55.580 | static loses in the end.

01:00:58.940 | - Yes.

01:00:59.780 | - Let me ask the, well, first the ridiculous question.

01:01:04.980 | Do you have any clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is?

01:01:08.300 | Is that even an interesting question?

01:01:11.260 | - Well, like your questions are very interesting.

01:01:16.340 | So, and I think that I,

01:01:18.580 | so I would say, first of all, it's not me.

01:01:21.100 | And I can prove it because, you know,

01:01:23.660 | if I were Satoshi Nakamoto,

01:01:25.260 | I would have not found an algorithm

01:01:26.980 | which also takes totally different principle

01:01:29.660 | to approach to the system.

01:01:31.820 | But the other thing, with Satoshi Nakamoto,

01:01:33.980 | you know what the right answer is?

01:01:36.060 | It's not him or her or them.

01:01:39.420 | Satoshi Nakamoto is Bitcoin.

01:01:42.620 | Because to me, he's such a coherent proof of work

01:01:46.620 | that at the end, the creator

01:01:48.980 | and the creation identify themselves.

01:01:51.300 | So, you say, okay, I understand Michelangelo,

01:01:54.780 | okay, he did the Sistine Chapel, fine.

01:01:56.740 | He did the St. Peter's dome, fine.

01:01:58.820 | He did the Moses of the Pietra statue, fine.

01:02:03.420 | But besides this, who was Michelangelo?

01:02:05.660 | That's the wrong question.

01:02:07.420 | It's his own work that is Michelangelo.

01:02:10.260 | So I think that when you look at the Bitcoin,

01:02:13.820 | is a piece of work that, as it affects,

01:02:18.340 | yes, like anything human,

01:02:19.820 | but it was captivated the imaginations

01:02:23.340 | of millions of people

01:02:25.140 | as subverted by status quo.

01:02:28.180 | And I'm saying, whoever this person or people are,

01:02:32.980 | he's living in this piece of work.

01:02:35.700 | I mean, it is Bitcoin.

01:02:37.340 | That's my--

01:02:38.780 | - The idea of the work is bigger.

01:02:41.780 | We forget that sometimes.

01:02:43.500 | It's something about our biology,

01:02:44.940 | once likes to see a face

01:02:46.900 | and attach a face to the idea,

01:02:48.780 | when really the idea is the thing we love.

01:02:51.020 | The idea is the thing that impact ideas,

01:02:53.340 | the thing that ultimately,

01:02:55.380 | Steve Jobs or somebody like that,

01:02:56.820 | we associate with the Mac, with the iPhone,

01:03:00.180 | with just everything he did at Apple.

01:03:02.500 | Apple, actually, the company, is Steve Jobs.

01:03:05.380 | Steve Jobs, the man,

01:03:06.700 | is a pales in comparison to the creations of the man.

01:03:10.980 | - Correct, and the sense of aesthetics

01:03:13.100 | that has brought to the daily lives.

01:03:15.300 | And very often, aesthetic wins in the long game.

01:03:20.500 | And these are very elegant design product.

01:03:24.620 | And when you say, oh, elegance,

01:03:26.140 | a very few people care about it.

01:03:27.500 | Apparently, millions and millions and millions

01:03:31.540 | and millions of people do,

01:03:32.540 | because we are attracted by beauty.

01:03:34.380 | And these are beautifully designed products.

01:03:37.140 | And they've, in addition to the technological aspect

01:03:44.580 | of everything, and I think, yes, that is--

01:03:47.260 | - Yeah, as Dostoevsky said,

01:03:49.780 | beauty will save the world.

01:03:51.020 | So I'm with you on that one.

01:03:52.780 | - Great.

01:03:53.620 | - It currently seems like cryptocurrency,

01:03:58.820 | all these different technologies,

01:04:01.300 | are gathering a lot of excitement.

01:04:05.060 | Not just in our discourse,

01:04:07.180 | but in their scale of financial impact.

01:04:11.100 | A lot of companies are starting to invest in Bitcoin.

01:04:14.700 | Do you think that the main method

01:04:18.100 | of store of value and exchange of value,

01:04:22.860 | basically money, will soon,

01:04:25.820 | or at some point in the century,

01:04:27.380 | will become cryptocurrency?

01:04:28.900 | - Yes.

01:04:31.020 | So mind you, as I said,

01:04:32.420 | that the notion of cryptocurrency,

01:04:34.620 | like any other fundamental human notion,

01:04:37.220 | has to evolve, but yes.

01:04:39.580 | So I think that it has a lot of momentum behind it.

01:04:46.180 | It's not only static, as this programmable money,

01:04:50.300 | as I think--

01:04:51.780 | - Smart contracts, all the--

01:04:52.620 | - Smart contracts, it allows peer-to-peer interaction

01:04:57.340 | among people who don't even know each other, right?

01:05:00.700 | And they don't even, therefore,

01:05:02.060 | cannot even trust each other,

01:05:03.580 | just because they never saw each other.

01:05:06.420 | So I think it's so powerful that it's going to do.

01:05:11.060 | That said, again, a particular cryptocurrency

01:05:15.580 | should develop, and cryptocurrency will all develop,

01:05:19.220 | but the answer is yes, we are going towards a much more,

01:05:23.540 | unless we have a society, a sudden crisis

01:05:27.660 | for different reasons, which nobody hopes.

01:05:30.460 | - There's always an asteroid,

01:05:31.820 | there's always something, a nuclear war,

01:05:35.460 | and all the existential crisis that we kind of think about,

01:05:38.700 | including artificial intelligence.

01:05:41.220 | Okay, it's funny you mention that

01:05:44.340 | Michelangelo and Steve Jobs' set of ideas

01:05:49.300 | represents the person's work.

01:05:50.540 | So we talked about Algorand,

01:05:52.100 | which is a super interesting set of technologies,

01:05:55.340 | but he did also win the Turing Award.

01:06:00.180 | You have a bunch of ideas that are seminal ideas.

01:06:06.420 | So can we talk about cryptography for a little bit?

01:06:11.660 | What is the most beautiful idea in cryptography,

01:06:14.620 | or computer science, or mathematics in general?

01:06:17.980 | Asking somebody who has explored the depths of all.

01:06:22.040 | - Well, there are a few contenders.

01:06:27.020 | (both laughing)

01:06:29.680 | - Either your work or other work.

01:06:34.300 | - Let's leave my work aside.

01:06:39.220 | But one powerful idea,

01:06:42.900 | and is both an old idea in some sense,

01:06:46.860 | and a very, very modern one,

01:06:49.260 | and in my opinion, is this idea of a one-way function.

01:06:52.180 | So a function that easy to evaluate,

01:06:57.580 | so given x, you can compute f of x easily,

01:07:00.680 | but given f of x, it's very hard to go back to x.

01:07:05.980 | Okay, think like,

01:07:08.380 | breaking a glass, easy, reconstruct the glass harder.

01:07:13.380 | Frying an egg, easy,

01:07:16.860 | from the fried egg to go back to the original egg, harder.

01:07:20.420 | If you want to be extreme, killing a living being,

01:07:24.740 | unfortunately easy, the other way around, very hard.

01:07:29.180 | And so the fact that the notion of a function,

01:07:32.060 | which you have a recipe that is in front of your eyes

01:07:34.740 | to transform an x into f of x,

01:07:37.660 | and then from f of x,

01:07:39.460 | even though you see the recipe to transform it,

01:07:41.660 | you cannot go back to x,

01:07:43.780 | that in my opinion is one of the most elegant

01:07:47.860 | and momentous notions that there are.

01:07:52.700 | And it's a computational notion

01:07:54.860 | because of the difficulties in a computational sense,

01:07:58.140 | and it's a mathematical notion

01:07:59.540 | because we are talking about function,

01:08:02.020 | and it's so fruitful

01:08:04.380 | because that is actually the foundation

01:08:06.220 | of all cryptography.

01:08:07.380 | And let me tell you, it's an old notion,

01:08:10.620 | because very often in any mythology that we think of,

01:08:16.700 | the most powerful gods or goddesses

01:08:19.260 | are the ones of x and the opposite of x,

01:08:22.860 | the gods of love and death.

01:08:25.300 | And when you take opposite,

01:08:28.140 | they don't just erase one another,

01:08:30.780 | you create something way more powerful.

01:08:33.140 | And this one-way function is extremely powerful

01:08:37.500 | because essentially becomes something that is easy

01:08:41.580 | for the good guys and hard for the bad guys.

01:08:46.580 | So for instance, in pseudo-random number generation,

01:08:50.340 | the easy part of the function corresponds,

01:08:52.580 | you want to generate bits very quickly,

01:08:55.180 | and hard is predicting what the next bit is.

01:08:58.740 | This doesn't look the same.

01:09:00.900 | One is xf of x going from x of x to xr,

01:09:03.700 | what does it do predicting bits?

01:09:06.060 | By a magic of reductions and mathematical apparatus,

01:09:10.500 | this simple function morphs itself

01:09:15.420 | into pseudo-random number generation.

01:09:17.300 | This simple function morphs itself

01:09:19.140 | in digital signature scheme,

01:09:21.060 | in which digitally signing should be easy

01:09:24.020 | and forging should be hard.

01:09:25.620 | Again, a digital signature is not going from x to f of x,

01:09:29.860 | but the magic and the richness of this notion is met

01:09:33.020 | that it is so powerful that it morphs

01:09:36.820 | in all kinds of incredible constructs.

01:09:39.980 | And in both, these two opposites coexist,

01:09:43.860 | the easy and the hard,

01:09:44.860 | and in my opinion, it is a very, very elegant notion.

01:09:48.900 | - That simple notion ties together cryptography,

01:09:52.980 | and like you said, pseudo-random number generation.

01:09:56.220 | You have work on pseudo-random functions.

01:10:00.220 | What are those?

01:10:01.340 | What's the difference between those and the generators,

01:10:06.980 | pseudo-random number generators?

01:10:09.140 | - Okay, let's-- - How do they work?

01:10:11.420 | - Let's go back to pseudo-random number generation.

01:10:14.500 | - Yes.

01:10:15.660 | - First of all, people think

01:10:16.500 | that the pseudo-random number generation

01:10:17.980 | generates random number.

01:10:19.220 | Not true, because I don't believe

01:10:21.540 | that from nothing you can get something.

01:10:26.540 | So nothing from nothing.

01:10:28.620 | But randomness, you cannot create it out of nothing,

01:10:33.260 | but what you could do is that it can be expanded.

01:10:37.700 | So in other words, if you give me somehow 300 random bits,

01:10:41.980 | truly random bits, then I can give you 300,000,

01:10:45.660 | 300 million, 300 trillions, 300 quadrillions,

01:10:48.700 | as many as you want, random bits,

01:10:51.340 | so that even though I tell you the recipe

01:10:54.380 | by which I produce these bits,

01:10:56.900 | but I don't tell you the initial 300 random numbers,

01:11:00.100 | I keep them secret,

01:11:01.620 | and you see all the bits I produce so far,

01:11:05.180 | if you were to bet, given all the bits produced so far,

01:11:09.300 | what is the next bit in my sequence?

01:11:11.500 | Better than 50/50.

01:11:13.540 | Of course, 50/50, anybody can guess, right?

01:11:15.900 | But to be inferring something, you have to be a bit better.

01:11:19.220 | Then the effort to do this extra bit is so enormous

01:11:24.220 | that it's de facto random.

01:11:26.740 | So that is a pseudo-random generator,

01:11:28.660 | are these expanders of secret randomness,

01:11:33.220 | which goes extremely fast.

01:11:36.000 | Okay, this said, what is--

01:11:37.500 | - Expanders of secret randomness, beautifully put.

01:11:40.220 | Okay, so every time somebody, if you're a programmer,

01:11:44.300 | is using a function that's not called pseudo-random,

01:11:47.820 | it's called random usually in all these programming languages

01:11:50.700 | and is generating different,

01:11:52.300 | that's essentially expanding the secret randomness.

01:11:57.340 | - But they should.

01:11:58.660 | In the past, actually, most of library,

01:12:00.620 | they used something pre-modern cryptography, unfortunately.

01:12:05.620 | Will be better served to take a 300 real seed random number,

01:12:13.980 | and then expand them properly, as we know now.

01:12:17.340 | But that has been a very old idea.

01:12:22.460 | In fact, one of the best philosophers have debated

01:12:25.900 | whether the world was deterministic or probabilistic.

01:12:30.620 | Very big questions, right?

01:12:32.380 | - Does God play dice?

01:12:33.580 | - Exactly, Einstein says it does, he doesn't.

01:12:36.940 | But in fact, now we have a language of it,

01:12:40.260 | even at Albert time, it was not around,

01:12:43.260 | but it was this complexity theory,

01:12:44.700 | modern complexity-based cryptography.

01:12:47.020 | And now we know that if the universe has 300 random bits,

01:12:52.020 | whether it is random or probabilistic or deterministic,

01:12:57.100 | it doesn't matter, because you can expand

01:12:59.500 | this initial seed of randomness forever,

01:13:02.460 | in which all the experiments you could do,

01:13:05.220 | all the inferences you could do,

01:13:06.820 | all the things you could do,

01:13:08.340 | you will not be able to distinguish them from truly random.

01:13:11.900 | So if you are not able to distinguish truly random

01:13:15.700 | from this super-duper pseudo-randomness,

01:13:18.620 | are they really different things?

01:13:21.500 | That's what I'm saying.

01:13:22.620 | So I'm ready to become a real philosopher.

01:13:24.460 | So for things to be different,

01:13:26.380 | but I don't have in my lifetime,

01:13:28.300 | in the lifetime of the universe,

01:13:29.780 | any method to set them aside,

01:13:32.620 | well, I should be intellectually honest, say,

01:13:35.100 | well, pseudo-random in this special function

01:13:39.140 | is as good as random.

01:13:41.180 | - Do you think true randomness is possible?

01:13:45.860 | And what does that mean?

01:13:47.060 | So practically speaking, exactly as you said,

01:13:51.620 | if you're being honest,

01:13:53.020 | the pseudo-randomness approaches true randomness

01:13:57.620 | pretty quickly.

01:13:58.520 | But is it, maybe this is a philosophical question.

01:14:02.860 | Is there such a thing as true randomness?

01:14:04.900 | - Well, the answer is actually maybe,

01:14:08.660 | but if it exists, most probably it's expensive to get.

01:14:13.660 | And in any case, if I give you one of mine,

01:14:19.960 | random string, you'll never tell them apart.

01:14:23.780 | By any other shape, no matter how much you work on it.

01:14:26.660 | So in some sense, if it exists or not,

01:14:29.340 | it really is a quote philosophical sense

01:14:32.380 | in the colloquial way to say that

01:14:35.820 | we cannot somehow pin it down.

01:14:38.340 | - Do you ever, again, just to stay on philosophical

01:14:41.380 | for a bit, for a brief moment,

01:14:43.580 | do you ever think about free will

01:14:46.020 | and whether that exists?

01:14:48.540 | Because ultimately, free will is this experience

01:14:53.540 | that we have, like we're making choices,

01:14:57.340 | even though it appears that the world

01:15:01.300 | is deterministic at the core.

01:15:03.580 | I mean, that's against the debate,

01:15:05.620 | but if it is in fact deterministic

01:15:07.980 | at the lowest possible level, at the physics level,

01:15:12.900 | how do you make, if it is deterministic,

01:15:17.100 | how do you make sense of the difference

01:15:19.820 | between the experience of us feeling

01:15:21.940 | like we're making a choice

01:15:23.100 | and the whole thing being deterministic?

01:15:25.340 | - So first of all, let me give you a gut reaction

01:15:27.860 | to my question.

01:15:28.940 | And a gut reaction is that it is important

01:15:34.660 | that we believe that there exists free will.

01:15:38.060 | And second of all, almost by weird logic,

01:15:43.060 | if we believe it exists, then it does exist, okay?

01:15:46.860 | - Yeah.

01:15:47.700 | - So it's very important for our social apparatus,

01:15:50.660 | for our sense of the day of ourselves,

01:15:53.180 | that it exists.

01:15:54.180 | And the moment in which we so want it,

01:15:57.340 | we almost, we conjure it up in existence.

01:16:00.100 | But again, I really feel that if you look at some point,

01:16:04.180 | the space of free will seems to shrink.

01:16:07.300 | We realize how much of our, say, genetic apparatus

01:16:13.620 | dictates who we are, why we prefer certain things

01:16:17.580 | than others, right?

01:16:18.660 | And why we react to noises of music,

01:16:22.260 | we prefer poetry, and everything else.

01:16:24.140 | We may explain even all this.

01:16:26.500 | But at the end of the day,

01:16:29.220 | whether it exists in a philosophical sense or not,

01:16:32.540 | it's like randomness.

01:16:33.660 | If you can, if pseudo-random is as good as random,

01:16:37.940 | vis-a-vis lifetime of the universe, our experience,

01:16:41.100 | then it doesn't really matter.

01:16:42.580 | - Yeah.

01:16:43.580 | So, we're talking about randomness.

01:16:47.300 | I wonder if I can weave in quantum mechanics

01:16:50.700 | for a brief moment.

01:16:52.220 | There's a lot of advancements on the quantum computing side.

01:16:57.220 | So leveraging quantum mechanics

01:17:01.580 | to perform a new kind of computation,

01:17:03.460 | and there's concern of that being a threat

01:17:06.700 | to a lot of the basic assumptions

01:17:08.660 | that underlie cryptography.

01:17:10.180 | What do you think?

01:17:12.620 | Do you think quantum computing will challenge

01:17:15.500 | a lot of cryptography?

01:17:17.740 | Will cryptography be able to defend?

01:17:20.100 | All those kinds of things.

01:17:22.140 | - Okay, great.

01:17:23.020 | So first of all, for the record,

01:17:25.020 | because I think it matters,

01:17:26.460 | but it's important to set the record,

01:17:27.980 | there are people who continue to contend

01:17:30.780 | that quantum mechanics exists,

01:17:33.740 | but it has nothing to do with computing,

01:17:35.020 | it's not going to accelerate it,

01:17:36.620 | at least in a very basic,

01:17:42.260 | kind of, hard computation.

01:17:44.660 | That is a belief that you cannot take it out.

01:17:48.660 | I'm a little bit more agnostic about it,

01:17:52.060 | but I really believe, going back to whatever I said

01:17:54.540 | about the one-way function.

01:17:56.660 | So one-way function, what is it?

01:17:59.700 | That is a cryptography.

01:18:01.100 | So does quantum computing challenge--

01:18:03.700 | - The one-way function.

01:18:04.740 | - Essentially, you can boil it down to,

01:18:06.820 | does quantum computing follow one-way function?

01:18:08.700 | What is one-way function?

01:18:09.860 | Easy in one direction, harder than the other.

01:18:12.940 | Okay, but if quantum computing exists,

01:18:15.740 | when you define what it is easy,

01:18:17.940 | it's not easy by a classical computer

01:18:21.260 | and hard by a classical computer,

01:18:23.100 | but easy for a quantum computer, that's a bad idea.

01:18:26.300 | But once easy means it should be easy

01:18:29.380 | for a quantum and hard for also quantum.

01:18:33.620 | Then you can see that you are, yes, it's a challenge,

01:18:36.820 | but you have hope because you can absorb,

01:18:39.220 | if quantum computing really realizes

01:18:41.220 | and becomes available according to the promises,

01:18:46.140 | then you can use them also for the easy part.

01:18:49.260 | And once you use it for the easy part,

01:18:51.460 | the choices that you have a one-way function,

01:18:54.340 | they multiply.

01:18:55.180 | So, okay, so they particularly candidates

01:18:58.420 | of one-way function, they not be one way anymore,

01:19:03.420 | but quantum one-way function may continue to exist.

01:19:07.860 | And so I really believe that for life

01:19:10.860 | to be meaningful with one-way function had to exist

01:19:20.340 | because just imagine that anything

01:19:23.060 | that becomes easy to do.

01:19:27.580 | I mean, what kind of life is it?

01:19:29.460 | I mean, so you need, and if something is hard,

01:19:33.500 | but it's so hard to generate,

01:19:35.260 | you'll never find something which is hard for you.

01:19:38.100 | You want that there is abundance,

01:19:40.060 | that it is easy to produce hard problem.

01:19:42.780 | That's my opinion is why life is interesting

01:19:45.100 | because hard problem pop up at a really relative speed.

01:19:49.420 | So in some sense, I almost think

01:19:51.860 | that I do hope they exist.

01:19:54.300 | If they don't exist, somehow life is way less interesting

01:19:57.860 | than it actually is.

01:19:59.580 | - Yeah, it does.

01:20:00.940 | That's funny.

01:20:01.780 | It does seem like the one-way function

01:20:03.500 | is fundamental to all of life,

01:20:06.140 | which is the emergence of the complexity

01:20:09.460 | that we see around us seem to require the one-way function.

01:20:12.940 | I don't know if you play with cellular automata.

01:20:17.020 | That's just another formulation of--

01:20:19.220 | - I know, but yes, that is--

01:20:21.020 | - It's a very simple,

01:20:22.140 | it's almost a very simple illustration

01:20:24.700 | of starting out with simple rules in one way,

01:20:29.460 | being able to generate incredible amounts of complexity,

01:20:33.020 | but then you ask the question, can I reverse that?

01:20:35.640 | And it's just surprising

01:20:40.340 | how difficult it is to reverse that.

01:20:42.460 | It's surprising even in constrained situations,

01:20:47.020 | it's very difficult to prove anything.

01:20:50.140 | That it almost, I mean, the sad thing about it,

01:20:53.940 | well, I don't know if it's sad,

01:20:57.220 | but it seems like we don't even have the mathematical tools

01:21:00.920 | to reverse engineer stuff.

01:21:03.100 | I don't know if they exist or not,

01:21:05.200 | but in the space of cellular automata,

01:21:06.780 | where you start with something simple

01:21:08.300 | and you create something incredibly complex,

01:21:10.940 | can you take a small picture of that complex

01:21:14.100 | and reverse engineer?

01:21:15.940 | That's kind of what we're doing as scientists.

01:21:18.500 | You're seeing the result of the complexity

01:21:20.580 | and you're trying to come up with some universal law

01:21:23.300 | that generate all of this.

01:21:25.060 | What is the theory of everything?

01:21:27.380 | What are the basic physics laws

01:21:29.020 | that generate this whole thing?

01:21:30.780 | And there's a hope that you should be able to do that,

01:21:33.280 | but it's difficult.

01:21:35.820 | - Yeah, but there is also some poetry

01:21:37.540 | on the fact that it's difficult,

01:21:39.140 | because it gives us some mystery to life,

01:21:43.300 | without which, I mean, it's not so fun.

01:21:47.340 | Life would be less fun.

01:21:48.700 | - Can we talk about interactive proofs a little bit,

01:21:51.220 | and zero-knowledge proofs?

01:21:52.700 | What are those?

01:21:54.020 | - Okay. - How do they work?

01:21:55.180 | - So interactive proof, actually,

01:21:58.260 | is a modern realization and conceptualization

01:22:05.340 | of something that we knew was true,

01:22:08.340 | that it's easy to go to lecture.

01:22:11.340 | In fact, that's my motivation.

01:22:12.920 | We invented schools to go to lecture.

01:22:15.020 | We don't say, "Oh, I'm the minister of education.

01:22:16.940 | "I publish this book, you read it.

01:22:19.140 | "This is book for this year, this book for this year."

01:22:22.420 | We spend a lot of our treasury in educating our kids,

01:22:27.420 | and in person, educating, go to class,

01:22:31.020 | interact with the teacher,

01:22:32.020 | on the blackboard and chalk up my time.

01:22:34.700 | Now we can have a whiteboard,

01:22:37.100 | and presumably, you're going to have, actually,

01:22:38.980 | these magic pens and a display instead.

01:22:42.460 | But the idea is that, interactively,

01:22:46.300 | you can convey truth much more efficiently.

01:22:49.940 | And we knew this psychologically.

01:22:52.820 | It's better to hear an explanation

01:22:54.380 | than just to belabor some paper, right?

01:22:57.700 | Same thing.

01:22:58.540 | So interactive proofs is a way to do the following.

01:23:02.300 | Rather than doing some complicated, very long papers,

01:23:05.780 | and possibly infinitely long proofs,

01:23:07.660 | exponentially long proofs, you say the following.

01:23:11.340 | If this theorem is true,

01:23:12.900 | there is a game that is associated to the theorem.

01:23:15.540 | And if the theorem is true, this game,

01:23:19.020 | I have a winning strategy that I can win half of the time.

01:23:23.980 | No matter what you do.

01:23:26.500 | Okay, so then you say, "Well, is the theorem true?

01:23:28.420 | "You believe me, why should I believe you?"

01:23:30.020 | So, okay, let's play.

01:23:31.420 | So, and if I prove that I have a strategy,

01:23:35.500 | and I win the first time, and I win the second time,

01:23:38.260 | then I lose a third time, but I win,

01:23:42.700 | more than half of the time,

01:23:43.740 | or I win, say, all the time if the theorem is true,

01:23:46.620 | and at least, at most, half of the time

01:23:48.500 | if the theorem is false, you statistically get convinced.

01:23:52.500 | You can verify this quickly.

01:23:54.900 | And therefore, is much, when the game,

01:23:58.580 | the game typically is extremely fast,

01:24:01.900 | so you generate a miniature game

01:24:04.700 | in which if the theorem is true, I win all the time,

01:24:07.380 | and the theorem is false, I can win at most half of the time.

01:24:11.540 | And if I win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win,

01:24:13.620 | you can deduce either the theorem is true,

01:24:15.540 | which most probably is the case, so to speak,

01:24:17.900 | or I've been very, very unlucky

01:24:21.820 | because it's like if I had 100 coin tosses,

01:24:25.660 | and I got 100 heads, very improbable.

01:24:29.220 | So that is a way, and so this transformation

01:24:32.060 | from the formal statement of a proof

01:24:35.900 | into a game that can be quickly played,

01:24:40.060 | and you can draw statistics on many times you win,

01:24:42.860 | is one of a big conquest of modern complexity theory,

01:24:47.860 | and in fact, actually has highlighted

01:24:52.620 | the notion of a proof as a really give us a new insight

01:24:56.620 | of what to be true means, and what truth is,

01:24:59.860 | and what proofs are.

01:25:01.180 | - So these are legitimately proofs.

01:25:03.260 | - Yes.

01:25:05.420 | - What kind of mysteries can it allow us to unlock

01:25:10.420 | and prove?

01:25:12.180 | You said truth, so what does it allow us,

01:25:17.180 | what kind of truth does it allow us to arrive at?

01:25:20.420 | - So it enlarges the real moment is provable

01:25:24.300 | because in some sense of the classical way of proving things

01:25:28.740 | was extremely inefficient from the very fire point of view.

01:25:33.740 | - Yes.

01:25:35.020 | - Okay, and so therefore, there is so much proof

01:25:38.660 | that you can take, but in this way,

01:25:41.780 | you can actually very quickly, minutes,

01:25:45.020 | verify something that is the correctness of an assertion,

01:25:50.020 | that otherwise would have taken a lifetime

01:25:52.740 | to belabor and check all the passages

01:25:56.420 | of a very, very, very long proof,

01:25:58.340 | and you better check all of them

01:26:00.420 | because if you don't check one line,

01:26:02.740 | an error can be in that line,

01:26:04.540 | and so you have to go linearly through all the stuff

01:26:07.700 | rather than bypass this.

01:26:09.100 | So you enlarge a tremendous amount what the proof is,

01:26:13.180 | and in addition, once you have the idea

01:26:17.740 | that essentially a proof system is something

01:26:19.980 | that allows me to convince you of a true statement

01:26:24.980 | but does not allow me to convince you of a false statement,

01:26:29.660 | and that advances the rest of proof.

01:26:33.140 | Proof can be beautiful, should be, should be elegant,

01:26:36.100 | but advances is true or false

01:26:38.740 | if you want to be able to differentiate.

01:26:40.540 | It is possible to prove the truth,

01:26:42.300 | and it should be impossible or statistically

01:26:44.940 | extremely hard to prove something false,

01:26:48.060 | and if you do this, you can prove way, way more

01:26:50.380 | once you understand this, and on top of it,

01:26:54.260 | we got some insight, like in Visit Zero Knowledge Proofs,

01:26:57.820 | that is something which you took for granted

01:27:01.620 | were the same, knowledge and verification

01:27:05.540 | are actually separate concepts.

01:27:08.660 | So you can verify that an assertion is correct

01:27:12.820 | without having any idea why this is so,

01:27:16.140 | and so people failed to say,

01:27:18.060 | if you want to verify something, you have to have the proof.

01:27:21.060 | Once you have the proof, you know why it's true,

01:27:23.060 | you have the proof itself,

01:27:25.260 | and so somehow you can totally differentiate knowledge

01:27:31.260 | and verification, validity.

01:27:34.540 | So totally, you can decide if something is true

01:27:36.900 | and still have no idea why.

01:27:37.740 | - Is there a good example in your mind?

01:27:40.540 | - Oh, actually, you know, at the very beginning,

01:27:43.780 | we labored to find the first knowledge,

01:27:46.700 | Zero Knowledge Proof, then we found a second,

01:27:48.820 | then we found a third, and then a few years later,

01:27:52.540 | actually we proved a theorem which essentially says

01:27:55.940 | every theorem, no matter what about,

01:27:59.020 | can be explained in a zero knowledge way.

01:28:02.700 | - Wow. - Okay.

01:28:04.740 | So it's not a class of theorem, but all theorems,

01:28:08.380 | and is a very powerful thing.

01:28:10.340 | So we were really, for thousands of years,

01:28:13.300 | both this identity between knowledge and verification

01:28:18.140 | had to be hand in hand together,

01:28:19.780 | and for no reason at all.

01:28:22.260 | I mean, we had to develop a way of technology.

01:28:24.820 | As you know, I'm very big in technology

01:28:26.580 | because it makes us more human

01:28:28.940 | and make us understand more things than before,

01:28:33.140 | and I think that's a good thing.

01:28:37.860 | - So this interactive proof process,

01:28:40.620 | there's power in games. - Yes.

01:28:43.900 | - And you've recently gotten into,

01:28:46.340 | recently, I'm not sure you can correct me,

01:28:48.380 | mechanism design. - Yeah.

01:28:50.500 | - I mean, first of all, maybe you can explain

01:28:53.580 | what mechanism design is,

01:28:54.980 | and the fascinating space of playing with games

01:28:59.980 | and designing games.

01:29:03.340 | - Mechanism design is that you want a certain behavior

01:29:08.340 | to arise, right?

01:29:09.620 | If you want to organize a societal structure or something,

01:29:13.700 | you want to have some orderly behavior to arise, right?

01:29:17.060 | Because it is important for your goals.

01:29:22.820 | But you know that people, they don't care what my goals are.

01:29:26.420 | They cares about maximizing their utility.

01:29:29.620 | So put it crassly, making money.

01:29:32.180 | The more money, the better, so to speak.

01:29:34.300 | I'm exaggerating.

01:29:36.380 | - Self-interest in whatever-- - Self-interest.

01:29:38.660 | - In whatever way that-- - So what you want to do is,

01:29:41.540 | ideally, what you want to do is to design a game

01:29:47.820 | so that while people play it

01:29:51.940 | so to maximize their self-interest,

01:29:55.100 | they achieve the social goal and behavior that I want.

01:29:59.140 | That is really the best type of thing.

01:30:02.500 | And it is a very

01:30:04.180 | hard science and art to design these games.

01:30:11.360 | And it challenges us to

01:30:17.380 | actually come up with solution concepts

01:30:19.740 | for a way to analyze the games that need to be broader.

01:30:24.620 | And I think game theory has developed

01:30:27.940 | a bunch of very compelling

01:30:29.580 | way to analyze the game.

01:30:32.500 | But if the game has a best property,

01:30:34.940 | you can have a pretty good guarantee

01:30:37.500 | that it's going to be played in a given way.

01:30:39.940 | But as it turns out, and not surprisingly,

01:30:42.460 | these tools have a range of action like anything else.

01:30:46.980 | All these so-called technical solution concepts,

01:30:50.260 | the way to analyze the game,

01:30:51.580 | like dominant strategy equilibrium,

01:30:53.940 | if something comes to mind, would be very meaningful.

01:30:56.760 | But as a limited power, in some sense,

01:31:01.140 | the games that can be,

01:31:03.740 | admit such a way to be analyzed--

01:31:05.780 | - Is a very specific kind of games,

01:31:07.460 | and the rules are set, the constraints are set,

01:31:10.100 | the utilities are all set. - Yes, yes.

01:31:12.380 | So if you want to reason,

01:31:14.020 | if there is a way, say, that you can analyze

01:31:17.340 | a restricted class of games this way.

01:31:20.980 | But most games don't fall into this restricted class.

01:31:24.940 | Then what do I do?

01:31:26.340 | Then you need to enlarge a way

01:31:29.900 | what a rational player can do.

01:31:32.660 | So for instance, in my opinion,

01:31:35.500 | at least in some of my,

01:31:38.020 | I played with this for a few years,

01:31:40.320 | and I was doing some exoteric things, I'm sure,

01:31:45.000 | in the space that were not exactly mainstream.

01:31:49.080 | And then I changed my interest and blockchain.

01:31:52.320 | But what I'm saying, for a while I was doing,

01:31:55.320 | so for instance, to me, is a way in which

01:31:58.160 | I design the game,

01:32:00.100 | and you don't have the best move for you.

01:32:03.160 | The best move is the move that is best for you,

01:32:05.400 | no matter what the other players are doing.

01:32:07.280 | Sometimes a game doesn't have that, okay?

01:32:09.120 | It's too much to ask.

01:32:10.760 | But I can design the game such that,

01:32:13.960 | given the option in front of you, say,

01:32:15.640 | oh, these are really stupid for me, take them aside.

01:32:18.480 | But these, these are not stupid.

01:32:21.320 | So if you design the game so that in any combination

01:32:25.640 | of non-stupid things that the player can do,

01:32:28.920 | I achieve what I want, I'm done.

01:32:31.640 | I don't care to find the very unique equilibrium.

01:32:35.760 | I don't give a damn.

01:32:37.520 | I want to say, well, as long as you don't do stupid things

01:32:40.480 | and nobody else does stupid things,

01:32:42.760 | good social things outcome arise,

01:32:45.600 | I should be equally happy.

01:32:47.400 | And so I really believe that this type of analysis

01:32:52.400 | is possible and has a bigger radius,

01:32:58.160 | so it reaches more games, more classes of games.

01:33:02.960 | And after that, we have to enlarge it again.

01:33:05.840 | And it's going to be, we are going to have fun

01:33:08.960 | because human behavior can be conceptualized in many ways.

01:33:13.440 | And it's a long game.

01:33:15.720 | - Do you have, it's a long game.

01:33:17.120 | Do you have favorite games that you're looking at now?

01:33:19.440 | I mean, I suppose your work with blockchain

01:33:21.920 | and Algorand is the kind of game that you're,

01:33:24.600 | you basically, mechanism design,

01:33:27.360 | design the game such that it's scalable,

01:33:31.080 | secure, and decentralized, right?

01:33:33.520 | - Yes, yes.

01:33:34.480 | And very often you have to say,

01:33:35.760 | and you must also design so that the incentives are,

01:33:39.800 | and then the truth, whatever little I learned

01:33:46.160 | from my venture in mechanism design

01:33:49.720 | is that incentives are very hard to design

01:33:53.280 | because people are very complex creatures.

01:33:56.240 | And so somehow the way we design Algorand

01:33:59.640 | is a totally different way,

01:34:01.560 | essentially with no incentives, essentially.

01:34:04.160 | But technically speaking, there is a notion

01:34:09.720 | that is actually believable, right?

01:34:13.320 | So that to say, people want to maximize their utility.

01:34:18.000 | Yes, up to a point.

01:34:19.640 | Let me tell you.

01:34:20.800 | Assume that if you are honest, you make 100 bucks.

01:34:25.800 | But if you are dishonest, no matter how dishonest you are,

01:34:30.840 | you can only make 100 bucks and one cent.

01:34:33.720 | What are you going to be?

01:34:35.480 | I'm saying, you know what?

01:34:36.800 | Technically speaking, even that one cent,

01:34:40.480 | nobody bothers and say,

01:34:42.120 | how much am I going to make by being honest 100?

01:34:44.080 | If I am devious and if I'm a criminal,

01:34:46.760 | 100 bucks and one cent.

01:34:48.120 | You know, I might as well be honest, okay?

01:34:50.040 | So that essentially is called epsilon utility, equilibrium,

01:34:55.040 | but I think it's good.

01:34:57.360 | And that's what we design.

01:35:00.280 | Essentially means that having no incentives

01:35:05.280 | is actually a good thing because it prevent people

01:35:08.680 | from reasoning how else I'm going to gain the system.

01:35:11.960 | But why can we achieve in Algorand to have no incentives?

01:35:15.640 | And in Bitcoin instead, you have to pay the miners

01:35:18.440 | because they do tremendous amount of work.

01:35:20.040 | Because if you have to do a lot of work,

01:35:24.720 | then you demand to be paid accordingly.

01:35:27.440 | But if I'm going to say,

01:35:29.920 | you have to add two and two equal to four,

01:35:31.960 | how much you want me to pay for this?

01:35:33.600 | If you don't give me this, I don't add the two and two.

01:35:36.040 | I would say, you can add two and two in your sleep.

01:35:39.040 | You don't need to be paid to add the two and two.

01:35:40.720 | So the idea is that if we make the system so efficient

01:35:44.400 | so that generating the next block is so damn simple,

01:35:49.120 | it doesn't hit the universe, let alone my computer,

01:35:52.120 | let alone take some microsecond of computation,

01:35:54.840 | I might as well not being received incentives

01:35:58.360 | for doing that and try to incentivize

01:36:00.600 | some other part of the system,

01:36:02.280 | but not the main consensus, which is a mechanism

01:36:04.840 | for generating and adding block to the chain.

01:36:07.120 | - Since you're Italian, Sicilian,

01:36:11.700 | I also heard rumors that you are a connoisseur of food.

01:36:16.440 | (laughing)

01:36:18.600 | What, you know, if I said today's the last day

01:36:22.600 | you get to be alive, I'm rushing.

01:36:24.400 | You shouldn't have trusted me.

01:36:25.760 | (laughing)

01:36:26.600 | You never know with a Russian

01:36:27.440 | whether you're gonna make it out or not.

01:36:29.080 | Well, if you had one last meal,

01:36:31.880 | you can travel somewhere in the world.

01:36:34.040 | Either you make it or somebody else makes it,

01:36:36.960 | what's that gonna look like?

01:36:38.360 | - All right, if it's one last meal,

01:36:41.200 | I must say, in this era of COVID,

01:36:45.120 | I've not been able to see my mom.

01:36:51.480 | My mom was a fantastic chef, okay?

01:36:54.480 | And had this very traditional food.

01:36:57.720 | And as you know, the very traditional food

01:36:59.480 | are great for a reason, 'cause they survived

01:37:03.080 | hundreds of years of culinary innovation.

01:37:05.440 | So, and there is one very laborious thing,

01:37:08.680 | which is, you heard the name, which is this parmigiana.

01:37:13.680 | But to do it is a piece of art.

01:37:17.040 | It requires so many hours that only my mom could do it.

01:37:19.800 | If we have one last meal, I want a parmigiana, okay?

01:37:23.080 | - What is, what's the laborious process?

01:37:26.440 | Is it the ingredients?

01:37:28.200 | Is it the actual process?

01:37:31.720 | Is it the atmosphere and the humans involved?

01:37:35.000 | - The latter.

01:37:37.600 | The ingredient, like in any other,

01:37:40.280 | in Italian cuisine, believes in very few ingredients.

01:37:46.520 | If you take, say quintessential Italian recipe

01:37:50.680 | that everybody knows, spaghetti pesto, okay?

01:37:53.600 | Pesto is olive oil, very good, extra virgin olive oil,

01:37:58.160 | basil, pine nuts, pepper, a clove of garlic,

01:38:06.080 | not too much, otherwise you--

01:38:08.160 | - Overpower everything.

01:38:10.400 | - And then you have to do either two schools of thought,

01:38:14.040 | parmesan or pecorino or a mix of the two.

01:38:17.400 | I mentioned six ingredients.

01:38:19.080 | That is typical Italian.

01:38:20.640 | That is, I understand that there are other cuisines,

01:38:23.280 | for instance, a French cuisine,

01:38:24.760 | which is extremely sophisticated,

01:38:27.120 | and extremely combinatorial, or some Chinese cuisine,

01:38:30.440 | which has a lot of, many more ingredients than this.

01:38:34.240 | And yet, the art is to put them together, a lot of things.

01:38:38.320 | In Italy, it's really striving for simplicity.

01:38:41.080 | You have to find few ingredients,

01:38:43.360 | but the right ingredients to create something.

01:38:46.120 | So in parmigiana, the ingredients are eggplants,

01:38:48.480 | there are tomatoes, there are basil,

01:38:51.000 | but how to put them together, and the process,

01:38:55.400 | is an act of love, okay, of labor and love.

01:39:00.040 | Is that you can spend the entire day,

01:39:04.760 | I'm not exaggerating, but the entire morning, for sure,

01:39:07.640 | to do it properly.

01:39:10.080 | - Yeah, as a Japanese cuisine, too,

01:39:11.720 | there's a mastery to the simplicity with the sushi.

01:39:14.640 | I don't know if you've seen "Jiro Dreams of Sushi,"

01:39:16.480 | but there's a mastery to that

01:39:17.880 | that's propagated through the generations.

01:39:20.080 | It's fascinating. - It's fascinating.

01:39:21.800 | - You know, people love it when I ask about books.

01:39:25.040 | I don't know if books, whether fiction, nonfiction,

01:39:29.280 | technical, or completely non-technical,

01:39:32.080 | had an impact in your life throughout,

01:39:34.000 | if there's anything you would recommend,

01:39:35.960 | or even just mention as something that gave you an insight,

01:39:39.400 | or moved you in some way.

01:39:41.640 | - So, okay. (Lex laughing)

01:39:43.600 | So I don't know if I recommend,

01:39:45.000 | because in some sense, you almost,

01:39:47.600 | to be Italian, or to be such a scholar,

01:39:49.560 | but being Italian, one thing that really

01:39:54.480 | impressed me tremendously is the "Divine Comedy."

01:39:57.840 | It is a medieval poem, a very long poem,

01:40:00.960 | divided in three parts, hell, purgatory, and paradise, okay?

01:40:05.960 | And that is the non-trivial story

01:40:09.200 | of a middleman man gets into a crisis,

01:40:14.200 | personal crisis, and then out of this crisis,

01:40:20.040 | he purifies, makes a catastrophe,

01:40:23.360 | purifies himself more and more and more

01:40:25.280 | until he's become capable of actually meeting God, okay?

01:40:30.280 | And that is actually a complex story.

01:40:34.640 | So you have to get some very sophisticated language,

01:40:38.280 | maybe Latin at that point,

01:40:39.960 | we're talking about 1200s Italy, right?

01:40:44.320 | And in Florence.

01:40:47.000 | This guy instead, he chose his own dialect,

01:40:50.600 | not spoken outside his own immediate circle, right?

01:40:53.840 | Florentine dialect.

01:40:55.640 | And actually, Dante really made Italian Italian.

01:40:59.360 | He was, and so I said,

01:41:01.080 | how can you express such a sophisticated things?

01:41:03.680 | And so it's, and then the point is that these words

01:41:08.080 | that nobody actually knew

01:41:10.360 | because they were essentially dialect,

01:41:12.240 | and plus a bunch of very intricate rhymes

01:41:15.720 | in which you had to rhyme the things,

01:41:18.280 | and turns out that by getting meaning

01:41:21.960 | from the things that you rhyme,

01:41:23.520 | you essentially guess what the word means,

01:41:27.080 | and you invent Italian,

01:41:28.720 | and you communicate by almost osmosis what you want.

01:41:32.400 | It's a miracle of communication.

01:41:34.520 | In a dialect, a very poor language,

01:41:36.480 | very unsophisticated to express

01:41:38.240 | very sophisticated situation.

01:41:40.520 | I love it.

01:41:42.960 | People love it, and Italians are not Italian,

01:41:46.920 | but what I got of it is that very often,

01:41:50.840 | limitations are our strength.

01:41:55.000 | 'Cause if you limit yourself at a very poor language,

01:41:58.040 | somehow you get out of it,

01:42:00.360 | and you achieve even better form of communication

01:42:03.080 | into using a hyper sophisticated,

01:42:04.920 | literary language of lots of resonance

01:42:07.120 | from the prior books that you can actually

01:42:09.440 | instantaneously quote.

01:42:10.920 | He couldn't quote anything

01:42:11.880 | because nothing was written in Italian before him.

01:42:14.320 | So I really felt that limitations are our strength,

01:42:19.320 | and I think that rather than complaining

01:42:22.520 | about the limitations, we should embrace them

01:42:25.640 | because if we embrace our limitation,

01:42:29.600 | limited as we are, we find very creative solutions

01:42:33.120 | that people with less limitation we have,

01:42:36.600 | we will not even think about it.

01:42:38.560 | - Wow, so limitation's a kind of superpower

01:42:40.880 | if you choose to see it that way.

01:42:42.880 | Is there, since you speak both languages,

01:42:45.400 | is there something that's lost in translation to you?

01:42:49.440 | Is there something you can express in Italian

01:42:51.520 | that you can't in English, and vice versa maybe?

01:42:55.080 | Is there something you could say

01:42:56.680 | to the musicality of the language?

01:42:58.560 | I mean, I've been to Italy a few times,

01:43:00.680 | and I'm not sure if it's the actual words,

01:43:04.360 | but the people are certainly very,

01:43:07.740 | there's body language too.

01:43:10.200 | There's just, the whole being is language.

01:43:13.560 | So I don't know if you miss some of that

01:43:16.800 | when you're speaking English in this country.

01:43:18.960 | - Yes, in fact, actually,

01:43:21.820 | certainly I miss it, and somehow it was a sacrifice

01:43:28.200 | that I made consciously by the time I arrived.

01:43:32.280 | I knew that this I was not going to express myself

01:43:35.880 | at that level, and it was actually a sacrifice

01:43:40.440 | because given to you also your mother tongue is Russian,

01:43:45.040 | so you know that you can be very expressive

01:43:47.440 | in your mother tongue and not very expressive

01:43:50.160 | in your new tongue, in your language.

01:43:52.640 | And then what people think of you in your language,

01:43:54.960 | because when the precise of expression of things,

01:43:58.200 | it generates, it shows elegance,

01:44:02.080 | or it shows knowledge, or it shows us our senses,

01:44:06.960 | or it shows us our caste, or education, whatever it is.

01:44:10.400 | So all of a sudden I found myself on the bottom.

01:44:12.600 | (laughing)

01:44:13.840 | - Yeah, there is--

01:44:14.680 | - So I had to fight all my way up, back up.

01:44:17.320 | And but I'm not saying, I go back to--

01:44:19.440 | - Yeah, that's fascinating, right?

01:44:21.240 | - Their limitations are actually our strength.

01:44:23.400 | In fact, it's a trick to limit yourself to exceed, right?

01:44:28.400 | And there are examples in history.

01:44:30.720 | If you think about Hernan Cortes, right?

01:44:34.600 | Goes to invade Mexico.

01:44:36.640 | He has what, a few hundred people with him?

01:44:40.120 | And he has 100,000 people in arms on the other side.

01:44:44.120 | First thing he does, he limits himself.

01:44:47.400 | He sinks his own ship.

01:44:49.360 | There is no return.

01:44:50.720 | (laughing)

01:44:52.200 | - And I met Borenti, actually, manager.

01:44:54.240 | - That's really profound.

01:44:55.720 | I actually, first of all, that's inspiring to me.

01:44:59.320 | (laughing)

01:45:00.280 | I feel like I have quite a few limitations,

01:45:02.320 | but more practically on the Russian side,

01:45:05.300 | I'm going to try to do a couple of really big

01:45:08.600 | and really tough interviews in Russian.

01:45:11.480 | Once COVID lifts a little bit, I'm traveling to Russia.

01:45:15.040 | And I'll keep your advice in mind

01:45:18.800 | that the limitations is a kind of superpower.

01:45:21.400 | We should use it to our advantage.

01:45:23.160 | Because you do feel less,

01:45:26.800 | like you're not able to convey your wisdom

01:45:30.040 | in the Russian language.

01:45:31.560 | 'Cause I moved here when I was 13.

01:45:33.920 | So you don't, you know, the parts of life you live

01:45:37.440 | under a certain language are the parts of life

01:45:40.240 | you're able to communicate.

01:45:41.360 | You know, I became a thoughtful,

01:45:45.040 | deeply thoughtful human in English.

01:45:50.000 | But the pain from World War II,

01:45:53.600 | the music of the people,

01:45:56.120 | that was instilled with me in Russian.

01:45:58.520 | So I can carry both of those.

01:45:59.960 | And there's limitations in both.

01:46:01.440 | I can't say philosophically profound stuff in Russian,

01:46:05.600 | but I can't in English express like that melancholy feeling

01:46:10.240 | of like the people.

01:46:11.680 | And so combining those two, I'll somehow--

01:46:13.760 | - Oh, beautifully said.

01:46:14.600 | (laughing)

01:46:15.440 | Thanks for sharing.

01:46:16.260 | This is great.

01:46:17.100 | Yes, I totally understand you.

01:46:18.200 | Yes.

01:46:19.040 | You've accomplished some incredible things

01:46:21.720 | in the space of science, in the space of technology,

01:46:26.720 | the space of theory and engineering.

01:46:30.560 | Do you have advice for somebody young,

01:46:33.300 | an undergraduate student, somebody in high school,

01:46:36.240 | or anyone who just feels young?

01:46:38.080 | (laughing)

01:46:39.440 | About life or about career,

01:46:41.800 | about making their way in this world?

01:46:44.080 | - So I was thinking before that I believe in emotion.

01:46:47.080 | And my thing is to be true to your own emotion.

01:46:52.080 | And that I think that if you do that,

01:46:56.080 | you're doing well because it's a life well spent.

01:46:59.360 | And you are going never tired

01:47:02.860 | because you want to solve all these emotional knots

01:47:05.480 | that always intrigued you from the beginning.

01:47:07.960 | And I really believe that to live meaningfully,

01:47:13.440 | creatively, and yet to live your emotional life.

01:47:17.760 | So I really believe that whether you're a scientist

01:47:20.520 | or an artist even more,

01:47:22.080 | but a scientist, I think of them as artists as well.

01:47:24.680 | If you are a human being,

01:47:25.880 | so you are really to live fully your emotions

01:47:28.960 | and to the extent possible.

01:47:31.460 | Sometimes emotions can be overbearing.

01:47:33.840 | And my advice is try to express them

01:47:38.160 | with more and more confidence.

01:47:39.640 | Sometimes it's hard,

01:47:40.760 | but you are going to be much more fulfilled

01:47:43.600 | than by suppressing them.

01:47:46.120 | - What about love?

01:47:47.140 | One of the big ones.

01:47:48.280 | What role does that play?

01:47:49.560 | - That's the bigger part of emotions.

01:47:53.240 | That is a scary thing, right?

01:47:55.800 | It's a lot of vulnerability that comes with love.

01:48:00.480 | But there is also so much energy and power

01:48:05.920 | and love in all senses,

01:48:09.320 | and in the traditional sense,

01:48:11.080 | but also in the sense of a broader sense for humanity,

01:48:16.080 | this feeling, this compassion that makes us one

01:48:21.000 | with other people and the suffering of other people.

01:48:24.080 | I mean, all of this is a very scary stuff,

01:48:28.640 | but it's really the fabric of life.

01:48:33.080 | - Well, the sad thing is it really hurts to lose it.

01:48:38.080 | - Yes, that's why the vulnerability that comes with it.

01:48:41.600 | - That's the thing about emotion is the up and the down,

01:48:45.400 | and the down seems to come always with the up,

01:48:48.800 | but the up only comes with the down.

01:48:52.000 | Let me ask you about the ultimate down,

01:48:57.320 | which is unfortunately we humans are mortal,

01:49:02.800 | or appear to be for the most part.

01:49:05.320 | Do you think about your own mortality?

01:49:07.880 | Do you fear death?

01:49:11.360 | - I hope so, and I do,

01:49:13.960 | because without death there is no life,

01:49:16.720 | so at least there is no meaningful life.

01:49:18.960 | Death is actually in some sense our ultimate motivator

01:49:23.280 | to live a beautiful and meaningful life.

01:49:25.800 | I myself felt as a young man that unless I got

01:49:30.840 | something that I wanted to do,

01:49:32.400 | I don't know why I got the idea of something to say,

01:49:35.640 | if I'm not able to say, I would suicide.

01:49:37.640 | So maybe it was a way to motivate myself,

01:49:40.640 | but you don't need to motivate it,

01:49:42.000 | because in some sense, fortunately, death is there.

01:49:45.120 | So you better get up and do your thing,

01:49:49.120 | and because that is the best motivation to live fully.

01:49:54.120 | - Well, what do you think, what do you hope your legacy is?

01:49:59.440 | (sighing)

01:50:01.600 | - You know, my--

01:50:05.280 | - You mentioned you have two kids.

01:50:07.280 | - Yes, and so I really feel that there is,

01:50:12.560 | on one side is my biological legacy,

01:50:17.720 | and that is my two kids, right,

01:50:21.120 | and their kids, hopefully, and that is one fine.

01:50:26.000 | And the other thing is this common enterprise,

01:50:31.000 | which is society, and I really feel that my legacy

01:50:36.240 | would be better by providing security and privacy.

01:50:41.240 | Actually, for me, are metaphorical to say,

01:50:45.920 | I want to give you the ability to interact more

01:50:48.360 | and take more risks, and reach out more for more people,

01:50:52.880 | as difficult and dangerous as it may seem.

01:50:55.400 | But my all scientific work is about to guarantee privacy

01:51:00.240 | and give you the security of interaction.

01:51:03.840 | And not only in a transaction,

01:51:06.360 | like it would be a blockchain transaction,

01:51:08.320 | but that is really one of the hard core

01:51:11.360 | of my emotional problems,

01:51:14.680 | and I think that these are the problems I want to tackle.

01:51:18.680 | - Yeah, and ultimately, privacy and security is freedom.

01:51:23.480 | - Yes.

01:51:24.520 | - Freedom is at the core of this.

01:51:26.560 | It's dangerous, just it's like the emotion thing.

01:51:28.920 | - The emotion thing, yeah.

01:51:30.600 | - But ultimately, that's how we create

01:51:32.120 | all the beautiful things around us.

01:51:33.640 | Do you think there's meaning to it all,

01:51:36.120 | this life, except the urgency that death provides,

01:51:40.920 | and us anxious beings create cool stuff along the way?

01:51:45.920 | Is there a deeper meaning, and if it is, what is it?

01:51:49.120 | - Well, meaning of life,

01:51:51.760 | actually, there are three meanings of life.

01:51:53.800 | - Great.

01:51:54.640 | - That is great.

01:51:55.480 | One, to seek.

01:51:57.680 | Two, to seek.

01:51:59.280 | And three, to seek.

01:52:01.200 | - To seek what?

01:52:02.120 | Or is there no answer to that?

01:52:04.840 | - There's no answer to that.

01:52:06.200 | I really think that the journey is more and more important

01:52:09.520 | than the destination, whatever that be.

01:52:12.400 | And I think that is a journey,

01:52:16.000 | and is, in my opinion, at the end of the day,

01:52:20.080 | I must admit, meaningful in itself.

01:52:22.800 | And we must admit that maybe whatever your destination

01:52:27.800 | might be, I'd be hanging, you know,

01:52:32.280 | we may never get there, but hell was a great ride.

01:52:36.240 | (laughing)

01:52:38.040 | - Well, I don't think there's a better way to end this.

01:52:40.160 | Silvio, thank you for wasting your extremely valuable time

01:52:44.520 | with me today, joining on this journey

01:52:47.360 | of seeking something together.

01:52:49.840 | We found nothing, but it was very fun.

01:52:53.400 | I really enjoyed it.

01:52:54.240 | Thank you so much for coming.

01:52:55.080 | - Thank you, Alex.

01:52:55.920 | It was really special for me to be interviewed by you.

01:52:59.520 | - Thank you for listening to this conversation

01:53:02.120 | with Silvio Micali, and thank you to our sponsors.

01:53:05.480 | Athletic Greens Nutrition Drink,

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01:53:16.480 | Click the sponsor links to get a discount

01:53:18.760 | and to support this podcast.

01:53:20.760 | And now, let me leave you with some words

01:53:22.960 | from Henry David Thoreau.

01:53:25.240 | Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

01:53:29.240 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

01:53:32.400 | (upbeat music)

01:53:34.980 | (upbeat music)

01:53:37.560 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Silvio Micali: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Algorand, Bitcoin & Ethereum | Lex Fridman Podcast #168

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