Lamentations & Predictions – A Fireside Chat with Joe Lubin and John Paller

so we have the founder of consensus Chiba Lubin and the co-founder of the etherion protocol jo Lubin one in the same and my friend Jo Lubin three at the same join me on main stage we're gonna have a quick fireside chat we're going to talk a little bit about the happenings at consensus this birthday of a theory and a whole bunch of other interesting things so please welcome to join me jo come on up [Applause] thanks Jo good to see you are you on the Sun yeah you're on hate to say it but it tasted a little bit like buffer corned beef had an odd taste to it but I like it's a Colorado sour man yeah very sour yeah you're not a sour guy I don't mind sour yeah all right well it's good to see you I haven't seen you in a while good to see you too yeah so we're gonna we're gonna I'm gonna kind of grill you on a few things here and and I think people are interested in hearing from you on several subjects I think the first thing is you know theory and maintenance to be five years old and you know what retrospect is an interesting thing you kind of look back see what happened wins learnings developments surprises you know give us a rundown what's the you know what's the most disappointing thing the most exciting things just give us the give us the play-by-play disappointing things and exciting things so or surprises or yeah so I think I think the endeavors gone reasonably well so far I was pretty confident that when I saw the technology in the form of Bitcoin and then aetherium that it would have massive global social economic etc impact over time it has gained traction in a bunch of different ways remarkably quickly and so I did anticipate that we'd build out financial plumbing infrastructure and that businesses would be drawn to building or RER connecting what they do on that I did anticipate and others did very early on that in the face of a paradigm shift in how the world organizes itself from being built on subjective Trust infrastructure to automate it an objective Trust infrastructure that there might be one or two entrenched entities that didn't really want things to change so much and so I anticipated that there'd be a lot more resistance than there is and so there is a lot of resistance so yeah I didn't say how do you measure that because it seems like well I don't know I guess you measured in terms of how many years and how many difficult battles and how many massive failures and how many subversion of valuable projects or endeavors happen and so what we have seen over the years is that a lot of smart people in legacy industry in government etc really get it and understand that re architecting things along on decentralized protocols can make things much better can create effectively a better world and we're seeing I think the entrenched entities pop up in different ways so I actually think that the SEC is doing a pretty good job in the United States and Esther yeah Esther's awesome I mean pretty bold very brave yeah yeah absolutely but but he not just Hester they're they're people at the SEC who have a really good understanding of this technology and they got lots of pressure on them to protect the consumer etc and so we've had lots of discussions with those people over the years and have a lot of respect for their understanding and and how they're trying to enable innovation to move in at a pace that them and the people in their context are going to be comfortable with and and God bless Hester may she win the day over and over and open things up much faster so with respect to Wyoming in Colorado and Nevada and California and other groups that are as we saw in the panel earlier that are enacting legislation to essentially be a catalyst or suggestive to the feds to open things up I think that's one bit of value the Uniform Law Commission is potentially trying to throw up some roadblocks to that and so there's there's some very interesting resistance right there I don't know where that's coming from whether so the deal with that is that blockchain and crypto currencies are all about owning fully controlling your own digital assets fully controlling your identity and the Uniform Law Commission supplementary Act or something like that essentially mandates that you're gonna need a custodian of your assets in order to have the full weight of the law available and so it's obviously a pathetical and I don't know whether those people are just trying to do the right thing the way they see it or whether there are lobbyists who are trying to keep making a buck it's gone astonishingly well ultimately and and it's a it's a super powerful technology and we need to in our different societies and our different jurisdictions which have different rules not every eat land is as free as America there are others that they want to essentially live in different ways and so they should be able to have discussions amongst themselves as as we're doing here and and figure out how the technology fits in their society at the same time we should have this universal trust foundation that's permissionless so that we can all have a global settlement layer and enact global systems so do you have any bold predictions you want to make for the next five years bulk predictions 5 not a big fan of predictions you've made some I predict that F Denver will become the the preeminent biggest and best hackathon conference event on the planet will become will become well will be will be universally recognized as some others believe that that's very great they're doing good things too it's true it takes a village it takes globe so a few months ago you announced 1 million deaths it's a lot of deaths and I think a lot of people you know myself included is it's an ambitious thing you know a million people million developers working on etherium is is it's a big it's a big deal and if we when we get there I should say it's gonna I mean it's a big accomplishment how's it going what's the road to get there and how are you measuring the progress so I would agree that it's a pretty ambitious endeavor might be slightly less ambitious than re-architecting all financial economic social and political systems it isn't so we're gonna need a million or more people who either are fully focused for their full-time job or show up at events like this as hobbyists or students or or young entrepreneurs we're gonna need all those people in our ecosystem and there's probably a couple hundred thousand of those people already around the world it is likely that people in other ecosystems whether you're a full-time Java dev or python dev or or Rails dev or or Drupal dev it's likely that all those people will increasingly easily be able to access aetherium just the way they access different kinds of database systems so whether it's for transactions or decentralized identity or reputation in the form of verifiable credentials it's possible that all devs are going to become aetherium developers at some point in the future just like all devs use tcp/ip and and HTTP and other protocols essentially those protocols were developed for the infer the Internet of information and they have become just a foundation upon which everybody builds and protocols like etherium bitcoin and others are protocols for an internet of value and so it's not free and easily copy a pool value it's it is information that is essentially scarce digitally scarce and so we need the same kinds of protocols to enable everybody to interact with those things to move transactions to define assets to establish identity and reputation how are you measuring I mean how do you yeah I mean you have like a measure a million depths yeah how are you actually getting any visibility into into like progress huh so we put up a website that enables people to point their web to developer friends or COBOL developer friends to these holy moments or these learning quests and so we're you're trying to do a little bit of measurement there ultimately I'm not sure that it really matters that we measure it precisely I think it's more about the process it's more about the journey and I think we'll know that there are a whole lot of developers on a theorem as as things move on so I would name as a proxy measurement when this event hits 20,000 hackers or probably at a million where are we gonna hold it we're gonna have the legs it's a good question yeah I have no idea some other buildings around we could do it so last week Joe consensus announced the restructuring and I think you know I think everybody's interested in knowing like your thoughts on that what does it mean for the ecosystem what does it mean for consensus what does it mean for the future of your grand experiment I'm not sure the implications are that profound but consensus was formed about a year after the start of the theorem project to continue the vision and the mission of the etherium project and we focused on adoption focused on doing cool things running lots of experiments learning from them figuring out what it is to build a a decentralized application figuring out what it is to wrap a company around a decentralized application so essentially we were a venture production studio intending to explore the solution space widely and I think we were remarkably successful in that we brought in lots of brilliant entrepreneurs technologists people who are passionate and philosophically aligned and effectively a bunch of those projects gained real traction gained product market fit and they're maturing rapidly and they're commercializing rapidly some of those fit in what we're calling a core tech stack and some of those get more of the application there that they're doing different things and so consensus right now has we've actually for a year memory architecting itself to be a cortex tack software company we've also and we've been spending out companies for years out of the venture production studio so we've also defined a whole set of companies that don't really fit in the core tech stack but will still work intimately with consensus and they'll move into what we're calling consensus investments name might change of consensus investments will oversee I think it read 111 different investments or or projects that we've incubated over time and so it will also make new investments in the space implications yeah I think bush not much I think the implications are bullish like where would mean there's maturity coming to our ecosystem we opened up an ecosystem and so many are pouring into it look at all the companies that are present here sponsoring the event and other and so consensus needs to compete in that ecosystem and it's going to be if it isn't obviously already it's going to be the next big thing so last night you talked about d5 buffer corns so we know a little bit about buffer corns I've heard it was a stampede stampede above buffer corns is exactly the quote coming into the space sorry I guess two-part question what exactly is a d5 buffer corn can we refresh us on that and then what are the what are the implications that and what do you mean by economic bandwidth means sure so I was referring to the many more naive unaware buffer corns that are in the mountains that the ones on the table that you haven't even we haven't found them yet helicopters have not even flown over them in photographed those what we have work to do exactly so there are lots of buffer corns many of them are here that are very savvy that understand the etherium space blockchains bays the deep eye space and what i said last night was that defy right now is the playground is the pasture of so many that are technically savvy or that are real crypto financial nerds entrepreneurs but in a world that is seeing its money systems and of life that's seeing very low interest rates that's seeing massive asset inflation that is seeing negative interest rates and in many parts of the world we're gonna see people who are just pure financial nerds like a see world financial nerds and and more get much more interest in getting some yield 7% yield on on-die sounds pretty great if your money is sitting in a bank account at essentially zero yield and people at this event and people out in our ecosystem are putting together things like savings accounts that will automatically yield or or tools that will scan the entire space and optimize your yield for you and so I really feel that all the natural events and actions that are happening in the world due to macro economic forces due to governments trying to squeeze too tightly and hold on to control they are all pushing the people in the direction of greater freedom greater agency political and economic agency so the hurt is coming they're coming and we like the fact that you call them buffer corn saying can you continue to do that everywhere you go absolutely we should distinguish them from the savvy buffer corns yes let's recall them baby buffer corns that the the baby buff corns the we like that buffer corner there's actually baby buffer corn stickers here this year okay yeah you get we need one of those for you what what's gonna be the animal of the year next year it's probably the year of the spork Marmon next year or climate yeah the spork Marmot just one of my favorite that was part of the memory last year still part of the memory but I think I heard your personal fan I am as you know so I had a brand new laptop last year we were sitting up on his lounge and I was like I'm not gonna put any stickers on this laptop so he's like and it's still there he made me it's literally still there I have two two very special stickers on that laptop so talking about defy we hear all this talk about money Legos business Legos but some are describing this is like money Jenga and there's vulnerabilities and there's risks and I've even heard from people in this face like I you know I wouldn't park my my capital too risky you know there's too much volatility or it's just not mature enough there's not enough liquidity like how do we balance this emerging defy ecosystem risk reward right like how do we protect from vulnerabilities but still grow it without sort of imploding and unintentionally or the Jenga tower falling if that's a tough one and many in our ecosystem are pretty vocal about understanding this is a bleeding edge technology that you really need to understand the risks in order to play in the space you really should be experimenting in the space and not doing anything with money that you need or really care about but if you look at any sort of financial technology it's always had the builders and the breakers and the builders generally see a solution they build it and it's really hard to think 360 around a solution so you need breakers I call them consultants to come in and analyze a protocol analyze a safe analyze a stagecoach and figure out how to break it and to extract your consulting fee from that system and so we need the builders and the breakers to work together ideally we'll get more and more breakers to be inside the ecosystem we have get coin for bounties it's a spectacular there's Kevin out there it's a really good project I I heard it was founded in Colorado or something there just found it right there there's the public or it so we need bounties we need automated security audits we need fuzzing of different protocols and so it's it's gonna take a lot of hard work and certainly there will be some unfortunate events but it's the the hopefully five steps forward one step back progress that humans have to make so you've talked recently about partial decentralization I remember talking to you in 2017 about that and at the time it was full DAP like we're gonna DAP everything and I think that was sort of just the approach Jessi Walden at a 16z put a medium post out progressive decentralization you know so there's this this new approach right we're gonna sort of bridge two things what do you think the best approach is I mean you have a formula opinion approach to this path you know I think last year you talked about DQ decentralization quotient so fill us in on your sort of updated perspective so decentralizing everything on the planet is never gonna happen and decentralizing a lot of things as hard and so I think we should all be focused on increasing decentralization as well and as quickly as possible even in the etherium space the blockchain space bitcoin defy a lot of those protocols a lot of the apps have backdoors built in so that if something goes wrong with easy acts for instance as we saw that you can shut things down while they're in there they're early they're infants they're their children while their baby protocols essentially so baby buffa corns don't don't get burnt too badly and so even in Bitcoin you've got essentially state channel payment channel solutions that have some elements of use case appropriate decentralization the liquid network from the proponents of perhaps maximalism is a federated network I think there are 15 federated nodes on that network that sit on top of the Bitcoin protocol and so I have for a long time been a big fan of working with enterprise bring them into consortium helping governments banks and central banks understand the technology because we're all going to come together on a much more decentralized worldwide web that makes liberal use of decentralized protocols for blockchain elements like trusted transactions guaranteed execution decentralized identity verifiable credentials for reputation decentralized storage decentralized bandwidth decentralized heavy compute these are the building blocks of the decentralized worldwide web and all the stuff that we build a consensus for main that we also use in private permission systems and so we're seeing private permission systems like Congo that we built for commodity trade clients and in fact for commodity trading to forge lateral links to one another these networks are going to for links down into the maximally decentralized protocol which we absolutely need for highly valuable digital assets and in other ways of speaking together between different networks so it doesn't make sense for a consortium to put all their stuff on main net right now because they're just not comfortable with that it up until now it's not we're gonna take them to get coke so it's now sort of scalable enough and we have privacy and confidentiality technology thanks to Aztec and nightfall and others scalability thanks to two stark we're so we can't put those things on main net roughly starting now but it's a political issue too and so there are major organizations and we're gonna have a big announcement early March that are going to start using main net across a lot of different enterprises for essentially entangling information with one another so that it's purely confidential nobody can figure out what's going on except except the counterparties so when is it gonna happen it's gonna happen now very very soon how long is it going to take as long as it takes I mean there'll be lots of applications that that build on these technologies virtue so I don't know if you were following Twitter but we announced that we invited other protocols technologies the way that i catched it was look we're a big tent a blank canvas a big diverse community of intelligences and if you're gonna really promote diversity you got to include technological diversity and approach and we actually got a little bit of we got a little bit of blowback for that and I'm just curious what's your take on that I knew you to be one to be swayed by blowback don't you like blowback ah well I don't mind being conferencing and controversial sometimes you know it was a little bit more surprising to me than I then I I was more surprised wouldn't happened than I thought I would be so what's your take on that when you when we talk about interoperability collaboration shared knowledge you know working together I mean the whole ethos of the space is that but the practicality is it seems like tribalism gets in the way sometimes not just I mean we're not probably close to the worst in the etherium community but you know what do you think about events like this being technologically diverse so I I don't have a problem with it we a lot of us came out of the Bitcoin space we've been thinking interlayer for a long time we have a project called equality that links Bitcoin trustless lee in a nun intermediated fashion to etherium there's some other great Bitcoin etherium bridge projects tea BTC is coming very very soon we've been debating across various of our teams for quite a long time when and how to go into her ledger for each one of them so meta mask keeps getting asked in furor keeps getting asked it coin has a long list of projects that they could be doing truffles in doing a bunch of inter ledger stuff and so we're ready for the inter ledger world from my perspective some of those protocols just aren't ready enough so it's a question of us having scarce resources it's if I talk to the inferior team and say hey what does it take to support this protocol they go back they do some calculations and they're like this just doesn't make sense for us right now we're philosophically open to it and so it is an inter legend world it will be an increasingly interlayer world and we're ready for it and you know when it's all when it all makes economic sense or whether there's some use cases but for instance there's a been a bunch of discussion between IBM fabric people and us about when and how we should build a bridge between the two protocols and it's likely that one of these commodity trading networks will drive that so it'll happen so we're gonna do a quick flash of two questions so Steve can we open the mic on the floor so we're gonna give the audience the ability to ask two questions to Joe we're gonna wrap it up so if you have a question come down to the mic right here in the front hello assaultin so one of the big challenges I've done a ton of work in ICS but also in corporate enterprise one of the biggest challenges that we've seen to adoption of blockchain inside of not just corporate America but government is the necessity to have some sort of data transport layer in the backend that's at least uniform right right now you're going in between multiple protocols you've got Malta transport layer that lots of different protocols use that a standard basically basically kind of like OSI so what do you I mean what are your thoughts at least in future forward in the next 12 months about something that could matriculate towards that so I think that makes sense it would be a hard project to define a universal data transport layer that lots of protocols can understand and and make useful use of and so I think the way to build something like that is to start off with two protocols and see if a third protocol can adapt to it or if it can be adapted to a third protocol it's it would be just a a complicated nightmare to bring a whole bunch of protocols together to create a unified standard right off the bat I think but it again makes sense thank you okay we got one more question who wants it Wow first time ever works for me alright well thank you everybody we appreciate it thank you Joe [Music] you