Fireside with Joseph Lubin, moderated by Jeff John Roberts - Joseph Lubin

we're thrilled to have one of ethereum's co-founders joe lubin join us here in the flesh um joe what do you make of it all given like where it started and what it is now you've got a city that's half full of ethereum people running around um and it gets bigger and bigger every year did you see this coming once upon a time um so first huge congratulations to to john pallar this did start as a as a tiny little event and uh survived some lean years in our ecosystem but even through the the lean years it uh it grew and grew and it's uh it's a pretty epic event at this point i think john should let the city of denver know um next year that we're going to have the event because it's probably going to be bigger and maybe ubers can be imported from from neighbor states or something like that it's a so it's uh it's always been a beautiful event and it's really uh um taken its place in the firmament of uh a huge or pivotal uh ethereum ecosystem events so congrats john wherever you are he's probably up in his uh uh in his bat cave yeah as a journalist we sort of go to a lot of these and you kind of you know they're crypto conferences but i'm always struck by how different the vibe is at the east ones than the bitcoin ones you know there's less aggression you know people are just nicer what's um what do you think explains that does that kind of stem from vitalik or why is you know why are you people not dicks when a lot of bitcoin people are oh so so first this event is special because it's heavily focused on on hackathon um and so it draws in a huge number of people who are builders and that's probably the answer anyway in a in a more generic sense that uh um bitcoin um was formed by um crypto anarchists and crypto financial heads and uh um they did build a lot of software uh for quite a while but uh um the building or biddling ethic um has never been uh quite so pronounced in the in the bitcoin ecosystem uh the ethereum so bitcoin is cryptocurrency uh ether is a crypto fuel um a crypto commodity that powers transactions and storage on on the network and so ethereum has always been a platform for building and utilizing applications and and that's a very different crowd it's a crowd of builders that like to use each other's tools they like to get together in teams is very different from uh people who just don't trust the system and are trying to protect their assets and i i love those people too but it's a different vibe interesting well speaking of building you gave an interesting keynote last night and the premise you know following me on this this is interesting joe's theory is systems are breaking down our political and economic system are legacy systems and they're they're under strain and they're breaking that's why the world is such a mess right now which is not a good thing but you see some hope in the advent of dowse and that they're going to sort of kind of almost sort of come to replace governments to a degree do you want to kind of unpack that a bit about what exactly is happening and how that's happening yeah so systems are breaking down um i started my talk by saying something like at the end of an 80-year debt and generational super cycle generational as defined by a couple of social scientists named strauss and howe the world is an economic social and political mess and we need a new organizing principle um and um so yeah it's it's painful it's unpleasant um but the old organizing principle top down command and control um centralized trust systems has taken humanity very very far we've built amazing [Music] places like this in amazing cities and uh civilization is impressive but it's also not um it's not what it could be so we can do much better essentially um somewhere in that speech i said something like the power has always been with the people but we just didn't have mechanisms that enabled capital to be gathered from the people and therefore power to be gathered from the people and then utilized in governance and decision making to create new value um the decision-making mechanisms have always been vertical and very narrow and oops we forgot to return all that new value that we created broadly to the people from whence it came and so now with uh with decentralized protocol systems um we can essentially have decision making that's broad in real time um we can have automated and objective trust systems at the base trust layer of the system um and we can have automated mechanisms that uh once new values created it can be disseminated automatically as broadly as as makes sense and so um protocols decentralized organizations so protocols do all that in an automated fashion without reliance on subjective judgment or or human intervention dows bring people into the mix because we're people it's all about people and create mechanisms of staking or transparent voting proposals and voting systems that uh enable us all to participate more broadly and uh and not improperly manipulate systems yeah it's this stuff is fascinating to me i was talking to a big investor yesterday you know one of these kind of like billionaire silicon valley guys and he's betting that that's going to be the you know the next couple years we're going to see this these tools coming to communities of all stripes it might be gamers it might be animal lovers and the difference now we could organize ourselves in the past through social media but now there's an economy built in too which is a very powerful thing and you can finance yourself apart from states and traditional organizations but in looking at taos some of the stories make my skin crawl a little bit in that in theory it's great this is this utopian decentralized community but some of them seem to be devolving into like tyrannies of people like you know slashing each other and you know hearing stories of people working for free and being cut out and stuff like that so you know legacy governments are under strain right now but still there are some base layers of you know democracy and social safety nets and stuff like that so i'm just wondering before we jump with two feet into dow land you know how do we design them in a way so that people will not get screwed over and abused yeah so uh on the internet there isn't much accountability uh for your behavior on planet earth there isn't much accountability uh for your behavior we have we have police we have our friends we have journalists um and these are really soft mechanisms of accountability um um protocols that uh that automate um how something should happen transparently um and guarantee that that's gonna happen happen those are a good mechanisms where you don't even need accountability it's just that's that's almost a law of physics uh in in society um and uh you know on the internet uh it's it's a bunch of primates um who just got out of the the jungle or the cave uh who are are really interested in uh um stealing stealing something from other people or flinging poo at other people just doing what what primates do um and where we're going as a society is setting up these systems that again are transparent that enable the tracking of people's histories um that enable uh uh clarity in in what uh has gone down in in a social context in a dow for instance um and we're just emerging into this era uh where where we can have uh pretty broad deep rigorous accountability for a lot of our actions and and uh uh the mechanisms of daos aren't really there yet uh to bring that sort of expressiveness uh and that level of granularity to to human interactions and so um they're just starting to to enable us to do things like make proposals and vote and establish online persistent identities where we've put a whole lot of stake into those identities like profile pictures like nfts and so right now if i have a profile on the internet it can be anonymous and i can shoot witticisms and nasty statements at people and then i can just end that persona and and do the same thing from another persona and those are actually businesses that uh that people in different industries use they they set up these uh uh these different uh sort of cut out personas and they snipe at different issues and so um in the in the decentralized future uh it's going to cost a lot or you're just not going to have the legitimacy to do that from uh from a bunch of fake personas uh interesting so here let's try this another way give me a dow you think that is doing it right because you know i think models are helpful that's the same with legacy governments you know america had a revolution and founded a new type of government and it you know became a light to the world it sounds cheesy but you know it's a new improved form of government and it seems we're in this very nascent form with dows of various dows trying different things but who's doing it right or if you want to point to a dow that's figuring it out you know granted yeah we're still kind of coming out of the cave as primates and it's messy but you know we're learning fast so point me to a dow or two that's kind of doing it right so i believe it or not don't have time to to spend uh many of my waking hours inside of dao's but i know uh of reputations of people and daos um so um gitcoin is is doing a great job um sort of exiting their centralized business uh to a decentralized dow um the bankless people uh are people of great creativity and integrity and and bankless dow is uh is a favorite of uh of a lot of people uh we actually have a project um at consensus mash called sobel where um we're creating uh interfaces um inside a sort of dashboard to different dows and uh brian peters uh is our dow chortographer so he's mapping some of the the better dows um gnosis is another tremendous project uh that uh um that has essentially taken its treasury um and moved the bulk of the treasury into a dow uh just to to create a uh a more broadly governed ecosystem around uh technologies that they care about well speaking of consensus mash which i think most of you probably know is you know survive yeah we should shouldn't uh we we do a disclosure or something like that yeah by the way yeah i will ask for my owner technically but i don't really have to listen to him because we have i work for decrypt an executive editor and joe has done a fantastic job of uh leaving us alone so kudos so so at consensus we um we try uh in leadership to be servant leaders where we facilitate whatever needs to be facilitated for the people that uh that are um that we're responsible for uh and so i i work for dan yeah and that's appreciated because as a journalist out there right now it's hard because there's a lot of antagonism towards the media and you know the trump era and stuff like that so you know at decrypt we're lucky to have an owner that leaves us alone i can write something joe might absolutely hate and i won't even know that so um you know so kudos to that but you know i'm not here to talk about decrypt um although it's great publication read it um but tell us what else is under the hood at consensus mesh what's kind of the exciting projects or you know what are the sort of star startups coming coming up right now so so consensus mesh is uh it does have a pretty heavy dow focus recently um so there's a project uh that used to be called open law that built online legally enforceable agreements um they started putting together a dow construct or dow operating system a couple of years ago now and they've turned out um a whole bunch of different dows starting with the lao which is a dow that is based or anchored into the laws of delaware uh legal dow there's this concept called a ricardian contract where you can have legally enforceable agreements pointing to a dow pointing to a smart contract on the blockchain and the smart contract on the blockchain points to legally enforcing agreements and uh and it's all put together by uh um a brilliant man named aaron wright who's a professor of law at cardozo and uh and write software and uh so this project has put together the lao and um a liquidity dow and and uh a dow that uh owns lots of nfts like a shocking number of nfts and um a handful of other um ways of either forming capital um or um creating new businesses there's a new one called beats that's uh that's focusing on on the music industry i've asked you some softballs here so i should probably ask you a harder one ethereum gas fees are way too high and they're making it the whole web 3 and accessible to a lot of people um when is that going to sort of be solved you know we know you know the uh you know the new version of ethereum is going to fix that and the layer twos are doing well but currently it's still you know if you want to go tell someone hey try this out the first thing they're going to discover is like oh my god i just got soaked for 50 bucks to do a transaction and remember web3 was supposed to solve this and get rid of transaction fees so what's your roadmap for the kind of the congestion and gas feed crisis to be fixed so um yeah so what you're saying is that ethereum is uh very successful and that it has brought more activity to it than it can handle um without implementing surge pricing so we're we have had some moments of pretty extreme surge pricing where where the cost of a transaction has been 100 or 200 um and in a sense that's a problem uh it's also the the very early days of of the development of a new technology um but we have a whole bunch of other um platforms uh that many of which are good technology other candidate layer ones layer twos that are developing on a theorem and on ethereum proper at layer two or side chains that are quasi layer two um we're bringing hundreds and thousands and soon tens of thousands of transactions uh to satisfy the demand uh meanwhile they're projects like uh binance smart chain and uh uh and solana and avalanche and near um who are um bringing new ways of um building things on blockchain um which are um enabling other people to to onboard themselves into the ecosystem i think that's very valuable the the future architecture of web 3 probably looks like the future modular architecture probably looks like a a base security layer a massively decentralized security layer and ethereum is way in the lead on that um and then a bunch of different modules that are different kinds of execution environments different kinds of programming environments and then since these things these different execution environments need a lot of guaranteed data availability in order to benefit from the full security guarantee of ethereum we need these data and data guarantee modules and it's likely that ethereum will provide a lot of that especially after the merge so um we're seeing ethereum evolve from being a place where you uh run your decentralized applications to a place where you plug in entire blockchain systems like l2s and and even some of the l1s right now are probably going to need for economic reasons to to get their security uh from ethereum so we'll probably see some of those migrate to being l2 so short answer is um prices are already down significantly um in the future when all the applications are running at l2 we're probably going to be talking about second sense or sub penny um costs for transactions but it's it's still early days where we're building out the ecosystem um i'm just going to push you on this a bit i don't know if you're allowed to name a favorite child you probably don't want to but i'll ask you anyways what's your favorite layer 2 or side chain who's doing it best so i don't actually have a favorite and we do provide infrastructure and interfaces in metamask to a bunch of them i think it's really important to explore the solution space so the optimistic versions are really important the zero knowledge versions are really important uh and so um it's it's really early days it hasn't been decided yet uh by anybody and uh um it's just a bunch of good technologies and we we like to work with those companies to facilitate what they're doing um yeah fair enough um we're talking about the future lot here but i actually want to step back into the past because um a book uh by laura shin is going to drop soon that's full of gossip about the early days of ethereum you know some people come out not looking pretty good you come out okay joe um gavin wood charles hoskinson not so good they're not gonna like this book at all but um i'm just bringing this up in so far as it's so interesting thinking of like you eight or twelve people in this small space in switzerland take us back to that time and what are some of your most vivid or favorite memories from then um [Music] we were all drawn to a vision we all essentially read vitalik's white paper about a month after he released the white paper a bunch of us [Music] hung together on skype for a few weeks and then anthony diorio who's one of the named co-founders uh rented a place in miami and we all glommed together um in that house for something like 10 days and it's not like a normal project or a normal company where you do things like interviewing you select uh who you want to to work with for the next few years and so we were all of different backgrounds drawn to a very powerful idea and we all got along really very well i think for about three months four months and then um things started to devolve in terms of some interpersonal relationships bottom line we uh we all believed in how powerful the idea was vitalik at age 19 and 20 was is a brilliant person in many different disciplines and and he was actually a remarkably good leader because he would listen he'd take in the information he'd assimilate and then he would make decisions whenever decisions needed to be made and so there were some high-energy dynamic times they're they're portrayed in a in some different books and i don't think anyone's really gotten it right um and the reasons why people were removed from the project weren't actually um publicly stated accurately and so uh i think we all know what happened and uh the only thing that's really important is that a bunch of people got together uh to give life to a really powerful idea and that powerful idea may end up becoming the economic social and political foundation for the planet for for a bunch of years yeah and that's how it goes right like i like that you know you did it and big ideas attract smart people who have fiery personalities and any startup any new government there is going to be that sort of tension and you know explosion stuff remember vitalik tweeted a few months ago like oi eight founders if i could have done it differently but obviously it worked out all the same can you do it differently well yeah i mean um when a society gets to a certain point of development it's not going to be the investment bankers that are going to try to change things it's going to be people who've had different uh sometimes complicated experiences that would like to see things done in a different way and and we had a good amount of that talent on the project neat it looks like we're out of time but joe i want to give you the last word any kind of final message to the people who gather here in denver every year and what's going to happen next or you know just tell them how you're feeling well um i guess thank you all for uh for your passion for your interest uh it's very clear that uh the paradigm shift uh to a world of automated trust um to a world of global decentralized finance to a world of re-architecting everything on those two foundations uh is underway it's gonna be uh challenging but it's actually been remarkably um smooth so far we predicted that it would be a real battle a number of years ago as as entrenched interests uh uh found their their ways uh to be challenged but the ideas are so so profound and the changes will be so positive that uh it's actually going remarkably well so paradigm shift is on enjoy it thank you joe