41 - Network State Conference 2024 - Closing Address

Do you guys like comments?

I'm glad we've got. If you think about it, we have the founder of Ethereum, the founder of Solana, founder of Coinbase, Brian Johnson, Abu Rabi Khan, the most popular podcaster in India, professors at gmu. Basically, people, you know, like Noah said, it's actually a fairly popular blogger, lots of people from many actually different walks of life realizing actually, yes, we cannot just start new companies and new currencies, but we can and should start new.

Cities and communities and even countries.

And we have a lot of people who are actually doing that.

Right.

So close remarks I'm going to just make, actually not just things, it's actually a relatively long talk, but a bit of what I think. So a quick story of what you just saw and then a secret talk.

That I saved for the end.

Okay.

And then something about the networks rule.

So summary. What you saw today was a number of startup societies. And the thing about this is the physicality of it. The reason that we led with the parallel societies is their making the map real. The cloud is taking land in many different ways, right?

This is now a thing where there's.

Best practices being shared between people. Oh, this worked for you. This didn't work for you. Fundamentally, the network state is about real estate as much as cryptocurrency is about.

Fiat currency, which is to say it's a fundamentally digital thing and it can exist in a fundamentally digital way.

But the interface of the fiat world or the offline world is actually very important.

And that's a crucial initial bootstrapping that you like the group that a fiat.

Exchange is a hundred billion dollar business, it will become a trillion dollar business. I've worked with that a lot.

I'm trying to save Coinbase and the.

Network state real estate interface is how we go from cryptocurrency to crypto real estate and other kinds of things like that, which I'll get to.

So what you saw today, you started.

Off part one with parallel societies and that was over for opt in experimentational and transportation, on health, on finance and all these things, right? Then you saw parallel institutions in finance, health and media.

And you start to see that people.

Are opting out of the system in different ways, either on the land where they're actually going and building these physical societies, or in the cloud they're going to parallel media.

And then those things connect with that table that I show.

And finally, in the third part, what was the point of all these talks in the third part?

Essentially each of them serve as a.

Poke on the sort of received wisdom of the, let's say the current ruling establishment, like actually maybe China is very strong. Actually India's rising. Actually Neil Ferguson thinks US are like the new Soviets. So does Inrcle actually, so does one of the most popular Yanpa. So people who are 60 years old, people who are 23 years old, you know, and very popular like Rudyard, are.

Coming to similar conclusions that you need.

Honor, you need coverage for what's going to come. You have Kathleen Tyson talking about how actually you don't have to have a single replacement for the dollar, you could have many replacements for the dollar through.

Multi currency mercantilism and of course cryptocurrencies and other things.

So the point of all of those.

Combined is China's on the map, India's on the map, Tijuana's on the map and the existence how tremendously decline really.

Includes those four forces. The rise and really return of Asia, both China and India, which are the United States, but of course everybody else.

The rise to the Internet and the decline of the Western army. So you put all that together, we're.

In for a time of very high volatility, we're in for a time of change. And really one rule I think is.

That any institution built before the Internet may not survive the Internet.

So anything that was for example founded post 1991, arguably, for example, I think India was refounded post 1991 because they had liberalization and many Chinese institutions were built really post Internet because they didn't.

Have stores and stuff. So they go like e commerce first it leaked Prague and the things that.

Are functional today, if you look at.

The US stock market, it's magnificent.

Seven tech companies which are all built post Internet. And if you start actually applying that filter and you say what is this? What is my country? Or what is this country?

Or what is this group minus the Internet. Right.

That's actually a helpful thing where much.

Of the things that you think are.

Going well are actually things of the.

Network as most of this, at least in the west, as most of these. So the thing about this is I.

Like the West, I like a lot of people in the West, I have lots of friends in the west. And I think it's incumbent upon folks here who realize A things are broken, B they can't be easily reformed.

But see what we can do is we can build Internet first alternatives.

That.

Replace the incumbents, that these incumbents are.

Getting crushed by the engine that we're.

Going to replace them. So one of the things, one of.

The Most important things is we've talked really the first whole half of this on how we physically form these new communities.

And it's like cross country scheme, right? Like in the sense of, you know.

You first put up a theory and then it was hit and like okay.

Who'S actually doing it?

Okay, now we've got all these physical big parts of how do we attain political legitimacy?

And you kind of go back and.

Forth between these different things, become bottlenecks at different times. But so we talk about the physical form, how do we politically form a network state? We want to build legitimacy quantum, we want to win. What I was talking about with Nubble, which is the market for boats. Okay, the market for boats, as I'll.

Show, we're going to create that market in a sense.

And this is the concept of deep metrography, basically fundamentally the same technology allows you to securely send one coin, allows you to securely send one book.

I'm going to illustrate this with a.

Talk that I gave earlier this week a little bit, but I've got some.

New slides for you if you haven't seen it. So technology.

I'm going to illustrate this with Ryan Johnson, my friend, because I don't want to run for a president on these slides, but maybe we will in the future.

So from magically electronet money to manage electionet votes, if that's an I voted nft that shows you voted in this case for Brian and for his friends, for this party.

Right. So motivation, visualization, execution.

First, what comes after cryptocurrency?

This is a funny image of just a few months ago. Two of those people are out and the third is on thin ice. And so these democratically elected leaders are.

Actually extremely democratically unpopular.

That's supposed to be their main claim to fame, is that they're supposed to.

Be popular, but they're at best 51%.

Democracy and often less than that. And so this is a global phenomenon. Many of these electioner leaders are at, these are historically unpopular numbers. And I can treat all this stuff.

You'Ve seen the smell of times.

I want to belabor the point, but.

Global dissatisfaction with democracy.

And when you see this, people say okay, well that democracy is bad because.

They think it means a certain thing. But I'm going to make a case.

For testing democracy where we take all the good features of it like the consent to the governed and so on.

And we reboot it in an Internet.

First and fair way. So what comes after cryptocurrency?

I think.

We knew that the Fed.

Was bad, but you Couldn't just yell at the Fed and expect it to reform itself. You had to build a complete system of Bitcoin. I think what comes after our dissatisfaction.

With democracy is something like this with graphically verifiable books.

Let me go into detail. Let me just jump right into a concrete example. So let's say Brian Johnson founded the.

Don't Attack party, right?

We'll use it to visualize the sample implementation of techno farms.

This is actually a sample app built on Farcaster, which is. We saw talk earlier today by Dan Romero, growing popularity Opensea protocol and he builds Farcaster. At first it looks just like Twitter, right?

Whatever, fine, but sets some new tabs.

For example, if you zoom in, you start to see.

Oh, there's the ideology vector.

Right? Every member has essentially an ideology vector that distinguishes them from the population of farms or more capitalist or libertarian, pro longevity, et cetera. B, what happens when you click this apply button? You have to actually apply. It's not just you can instantly follow, you have to apply.

Okay, you click this.

Well, first you try to follow them as vice president, vp, treasurer, et cetera. Okay. And this is simple social media already.

Okay, fine, that's little.

But you're also following the party, not just the individual. Second, you're funding the party. And this already starts air gapping what you're doing from the traditional political party to non democrat or republican where you just self identify something.

Where you actually have to, in this.

Case pay 100 bucks a year for snake oil. Ha ha. Nor guitar. That joke's funny.

And then the free membership nft. And so this capital attack.

But now I'll show you the most important part. It's the core concept of technical democracy. If you understand this, you understand the whole thing. And if you don't or you're not technical, then ask engineer, they might get why it's important. So the third part is that you exercise the franchise by having it on.

Chain, finding signatures or contract against partial.

Control over a crypto wallet.

Okay, so in this case you're voting through this slate.

You're saying I'm paying $100 annual dues. And also party leaders can slash 100 bucks in stake funds if you violate community norms and the president's huge resolver when all matters of governance within digital loans or properties.

Okay, so the things that are within.

The digital space, there's various complicated things you can do in Ethereum. Now you have account abstraction and with Solana, but where Solana actually had that.

Built up for him, where you can do these Things where you're granting, making.

Complicated conditional grants and provisions over your account and you say, okay, why is that important? Well, when you have a politician, when.

You go into a country, that's what you're doing.

You're saying, hey, I'm voting for you and I'm granting you control over my fiat account. That's not all of what you're doing, but it's actually a big part because.

The taxation of that, the amount that.

They can take out of that account, the penalties they can impose on you, allows them to fund everything else. So that fundamental financial relationship of giving them some authority to esteem in return, arguably for mutual benefit, is what signing.

The social contract is. And you've actually done this before, you've done this in other times. You know why this limited hip binding.

Grant permissions over your wallet to a third party is actually not all the time.

If you use, let's say Metamask in every time you're granting all of permissions, you're saying, hey, what permissions am I granting? And let me look at them. Or if you don't use Metamask, if.

You use Google and you've ever logged into a site, Google, this is like oauth, right? It asks you, what permissions do you have?

What I'm just doing is taking it.

One step further and saying, hey, I'm.

Not granting permissions to a third party app.

I'm granting permissions to a new party.

I'm taking the Internet seriously. Think about how much stuff is controlled.

Digitally at this point. You can control. Some are all permissions. And if 1,000 people do it or.

A million people do it, suddenly that's actually a really substantive digital quality.

We've actually got a policy construction going on.

So basically the fundamental innovation is delegating.

Permission not to a third party app, but to a digital party. It's not like a bunch of people.

Are just using, I don't know, something.

They log in with Google and it's like some new AI product. They're actually doing it intentionally to collectively work together.

So one of the things about this.

Is when you do this after you vote and check your proxy and this.

By checking democracy, I mean as a term like cryptocurrency, there's different implementations of cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency. Solana is a cryptocurrency.

There's really different implementations of Bitcoin.

I do want to do one. I want to do one at the network school later this year, I'll put on bounties for it so you can work on it even if you don't come there.

But one fundamental innovation is you get.

An a cryptographically verifiable vote. Okay, this on chain I voted sticker.

You could prove A, that you voted.

Or that you joined, B, you can see who others joined the party and.

C, any skeptical individual who doesn't believe it's that big can run proof of.

Human on those 10,000 people that sign up and say, oh wow, this is actually real.

There's actually a lot of political support here.

Right. So that's really cool because it's an auditable online election.

Okay.

Again, all the technology that we've used to securely send one coin and audit.

That can be used to securely send.

One vote, you get this lovely little high voted sticker.

So once you do that, once you've.

Signed up for the party, you attend party events like longevity or group workouts, blueprint dinners, whatever. So all of this is something where.

You can two things that advance the cost. Right, okay, so let me discuss some key concepts behind this. Why should we expect things that are now.

Well, I mean, 20, 30 years ago.

Elections, or rather your transactions, your communications, how much did you use cash back then?

In the 90s, a lot. How much did you send physical email or physical mail?

A lot.

Today, 99% of your transactions and communications are online. But elections and legislations aren't really fully.

Online yet, that's obviously going to change. And because taking the Internet seriously means it's eventually going to just digitize everything.

And so you have to think about what does the form of Internet native.

Election and legislation look like.

If we're still writing on a piece.

Of paper to govern the Internet, the answer would look something like smart contracts, obviously, in a sense.

Right. But not obviously because that's not how.

The environment see coming in.

And so one way to think about it is institutional voting has three parts. So Vivek, who's a friend of mine.

He'S had three parts to his voting.

He has 2 million Twitter followers, he's got his fundraising vote and he's also got his official vote. And two of those votes are online, the following and fundraising vote. But the third vote, the franchise fiat vote, that's offline, that's runs offline, and it's voting that has three parts. Internet voting also has three parts. You've got red and spell up votes, you've got DAO votes, and you've got Estonia carrying out the world's first mostly online elections.

So my point is that when you.

Actually look at it, actually a lot of politics, a lot of the electoral process has already moved online, except for.

The final segment layer.

It's kind of like PayPal was a layer on top of bank accounts and.

Bitcoin moved settlement layers of blockchain. That was a crucial shift that the settlement was there.

So once you realize conceptually, how do we move settlement from fiat elections to crypto or on chain elections, that's a crucial step.

How do you make them binding in a fundamental way?

But that's a question in what sense is this digital vote binding? Isn't it just alarm and why is.

It different than how you voted? Survey buttons saying thumbs up. And the answer is that digital governance is already real. Let's say if your private key at.

A minimum controls, let's say your access to a discord, that's your communications, it controls your access to a dao, that's your transactions, it's already your messaging and your money.

But this is the key step.

Crypto wallets will soon and all they already do.

Controlling your access to doors. Okay, listable objects to get into your.

House, obviously you unlock it, but you'll have smart blocks are already there. You go to a hotel, they've already got smart blocks. They're already ubiquitous. So your crypto wallet basically very finely gives you access to a door in a room, but that could also be the door of a car, that could be the door of your office, it could be the door of anything. It could also mean control of a drone, control of a humanoid, control of a fleet of drones, control of a.

Fleet of subdirected cars. And in fact, if you really think.

About it, the only secure control plane is on chain. The Pentagon gets hacked over and over and over again. But once you actually have them, be.

A mission critical thing and you really, really, really, absolutely 100% defining means can hack.

The best people in the world in.

Defense of cybersecurity are in cryptocurrency because.

They actually have to have 24, seven, no excuses, perfect cybersecurity, where the protocol.

Goes to zero and that's actually where true security will be.

The same security that secures a coin will secure your door.

So the point is that it's not.

Just like some sideline thing to say, oh, accumulate a bunch of crypto wallets or whatever. Today you can argue it's a sideline.

But lots of things started like that.

Twitter started trading your breakfast and it became similar about politics. Facebook started this Harvard hangout thing and became a communications arch for 3 billion people.

So this stuff doesn't start with the equivalent of like voting for dog catcher.

Very, very small kinds of elections get much bigger, so it'll control a lot more. That means fundamentally group of alts can.

Control real resources, which means these crypto.

Economic votes are pledges of real resources.

Like crowdfunding. Okay, but political crowdfunding in a sense, that's a good way of thinking about it. So let's go through a few key features. I went through the thing fast, but.

Let me show you why I think F is really cool. So first, it's a cryptographically verifiable vote. Every vote counts because you can count all the votes just that you can download the bitcoin blockchain and run verification on it. Okay.

In fact. Exactly. Because once you solve the problem of.

Verifying one byte, you can verify a bunch of mark.

Right. And number two is it's a streaming vote.

Important, but.

So when you have something like Twitter.

It'S not like every four years you can decide to join somebody, follow somebody on Twitter. Okay, it doesn't work like. So the following period, okay, incentives continues.

It's streaming. You can click the button, you can unclick the button. And so you can now have a.

Streaming accumulation of techno democratic votes.

In a sense, you know, lots of.

Western governments are sort of moving faithfully.

In this, of halfway towards the storage. They went from one day paper ballots.

Everything to this election miasma period of mail in ballots.

If you go to pure streaming, that's.

Actually the other side.

You just lean into it, lean into the future.

Cryptographically verifiable votes.

Why does it happen? You have to be able to educate. We have the technology, we can change that.

So when you have a streaming vote, you're starting for office all the time.

It's like autocracy, it's more like Twitter. And it means that you just lean.

Into the idea of it's just the license every day.

Third, the social smart contracts.

You take Rousseau's concept social contract, you take the modern implementation smart contracts and.

You put them together into something you exclusively sign. And it binds you and it binds.

The person on the other side.

So politicians have finding campaign promises like OAuth. Like if an app would dig into.

Your stuff and do more than it had permission to OAuth, that would be really bad. Google would have to authorize that.

In this case, what we have is.

Something that is even more trustworthy, much.

More trustworthy than Google, which is the blockchain. So that is actually the thing that.

Is ensuring that the politicians can break.

Their campaign promise to them.

Wow.

Okay. Politicians can sign binding contracts, right?

With their millions of followers.

That is completely new. Right now campaign promises are just vibes. Selects are acting right as opposed to doing and certainly as opposed to committing. If companies made the kinds of promises that politicians soon didn't deliver on them.

They'D be busted for fraud or whatever. But politicians are okay with that.

This changes that completely.

It makes it more like a business contract where both sides have to abide by their terms.

Deal. Next. Provably limited government. I like the constitution of the U.S.

But I rely on encryption. Okay, and why?

Because the provably limited government is here. In this employee example, the contract literally can't move more than 100 bucks at a time. It's a big like the minimum wage, it's a banks tax. Right.

So there is a limit to how.

Much they can take.

It is not 100% something, not just what are they Git score for the.

Blockchain protects your property rights and you.

Know what your options are?

Truly universal franchise.

So this is actually one of the core underlying concepts.

Just like anybody on the Internet can.

Connect to each other, anybody on the Internet can now take them democratically vote for somebody else. You can form new polities in the cloud. Cloud first plan, last but not planned ever. Okay. Your friends who are 50 different nationalities.

But all same pro tech, pro capitalism, pro internationalism values.

They can all group together now.

Right?

So truly universal franchise solves the democratic recession. We basically put capitalism with democracy under everybody's phone.

Okay, take the democracy now. This is a big one. So the universal candidacy, okay. So if you actually work out the.

Math, the US is 4% of the.

World and only maybe half of that could actually become president of the United States.

You have to be like over 35 and a national born citizen.

And so it's so 98% of the.

World cannot become president of the United States.

That's an egalitarian.

It's at democracy. Well we can have 100% of the.

World become oppressive in number two and democratically legitimate themselves by saying 3 million.

People voted for me on Jean in this dreaming vote and I can prove it.

And you can run the assessment and you can see the proof of human and you can see the real legitimate.

Political score that they signed the binding social smart contract.

This is really big.

Truly new polities. That's what I just got at.

It's basically the fact that anybody can.

Technically democratically vote for anybody else on the intrenic means you can form new.

Polities, meaning like a group of people.

That agrees to be bound by the same leaders and laws.

Digital delegation.

So if you wonder who's in charge.

Of this or that government, you don't.

Need to wonder anymore. Because permissions that are granted by president to their VP or treasurer are themselves things that are auditable on chain. Right?

It's literally like account abstraction, something like that.

It's similar to like a Google Doc. Here's the owner of the Google Doc, this person's edit privileges, they can be revoked. All that stuff is auditable.

And you can turn that into something that's fundamentally digital.

Technical Democracy is of 100% democracy, as opposed to the 51% democracy of Western.

Societies where 51% wins even with 49% is unhappy.

51% of Axi is the fairest democratic religion. Barely clear spar and most people are unhappy.

But 100% of oxygen.

Everybody has actually voted for its party.

And nobody's against it.

You're only there. It's like Elon.

And nobody's in SpaceX, which you can.

Choose to be in SpaceX.

It's 100% consent.

It validates mutual consent because Elon, you know, can ask him to leave as well.

Right.

But it's also quite oversending.

Oxy. It protects minority rights because 1% of.

The world see 100,000 people move even.

Less than at least 10,000 people. A tiny minority of people can form a new techno democratic party.

So finally, just give a few more.

Examples of what techno divergency enables.

So here's a fun one.

So the Mars party.

So Elon could do this.

And you've got people who just habits.

Their purpose getting to Mars.

Think about how much they're there.

They're doing simulations, Mars terraforming and making.

Margins movies about the right planet and.

Passing bills and all this kind of stuff. Open source. AI specific one, which is movement similar to copyleft or GNU movement, a movement similar to the Pirate Party.

This kind of thing. That's the answer. You can pick some objective and align.

People around that and start pressing and pushing for change. It doesn't even have to be legal. It can be technology, open source and get out of yourself. So in short, technical honesty takes us.

From the two party system to the hidden party system.

It could reopen political innovation, which is actually very important since people are.

The fundamental thing of honesty is the consent of the government. You are consenting to this government.

You have 100% of people that they are consenting and you massively reopen competition from a collusive duopoly of two parties.

To literally anybody interested in being able to check the democratically vote for anyone.

Else, just have you be by yourself in the neighborhoods. So now it's a whole different thing to have these parties contest fiat elections. I think for a long time this is purely online. It's just agreements among yourself. Okay, assume they all start purely online only after, later and after you've thought about it. Blah, blah, blah. Okay. All rights reserved.

Not financial advice. One last market. But I had this inside heartbeat.

Second two.

In the 2016 election, the two candidates.

Won 62 and 65 million votes.

So if a president in New York state accumulated more than 70 million Democratic.

Votes, they would have more provable, cryptographically.

Provable democratic legitimacy than the legacy system. You have the flipping, the secret democratic voting.

Wow.

Okay, now that's a long term goal.

But it's an up or go up goal.

We can implement this and we can.

Have people start to run for president.

If you ever see it on the Internet.

And why do you get votes? Because you're actually a good steward of those big funding. You sign the binding social smart contract, you do well by your people and more flock to you.

And if you don't, then you don't get that right.

So we turn it into merit. We take the good parts of our lot of good parts about it. There's free speech, there's privacy, all those.

Kinds of things.

That are valuable, even.

If some people refer to them in a way that's disingenuous. This is something where we can protect all those things. And the 2D democratic flipping is just.

Like Bitcoin versus that, right?

You can have a president of a network state eventually in close to time.

Have more protected Democratic votes on chain.

Than the president of any United States. And the thing about that is, by.

The way, you don't even need to.

Get to 70 million. If you have like 100,000 Democratic votes, that's more democratically legitimate than many presidents of existing states.

The only thing is you'd then be.

A stateless nation, right?

You have a group of people that consider themselves people that has a leader and that has capital that's buying things.

And so on and so forth. And then you'll figure out the next step. You'll crowdfund something, you'll negotiate with somebody. There's many, many ways of doing deals.

That are like with various countries, right?

So this is how we win the market for votes, okay? This is something we can just literally.

Call this at Elvis. So that's the execution. If you want to build technomarcy climate network school that has to help apply this to the kind of thing we're working on, okay? Open source and all this type of stuff. So we actually build a fair and free future.

So that brings us to the network.

School, the last part. So summary of what you heard today, which is all parallel societies and parallel institutions. A summary of how we build a.

Techno democratically legitimate state.

I want to become one of the largest hunters of democracy in the world.

In terms of technology.

Actually giving everybody the tools to run for office on chain, to vote for people on chain, to form parties on chain, to have fair governance on chain, transparent audible governance.

But obviously it should be on a piece of paper. We have the Internet now and that's.

Cloudless of soul since our school. So this is a pretty fun video. Let's take a look at this pretty cool island. We do have a really cool island.

For the networks of your bio and.

It is basically there's lots and lots of territory we can just Occupy. We've got 150 people there now I want to get this to 1,000 people.

And 10,000 people soon enough.

We just want to nail it. Let's nail it. And as I mentioned we had 3,000 plus applicants from 100 plus countries. And the thing about this is if you guys are here and obviously you're.

Interested in static stuff, you know, when.

Elon wanted to make electric cars happen, he called upon his audience.

He said hey, if you want to.

Make electric cars happen, then put in a pre order of a Model 3.

And it might not deliver it for a few years, but the economic demand of it proves that.

Okay, it's smart for me to allocate capital and time and energy towards this. I can show the pre orders to all the spenders and tick in much the same way you go to attitude commply. 10 bucks is like a standard review, 99 bucks is priority review. Okay?

And just that demand, just showing that.

People want to vote against the system and vote for a better system and opt out allows me to allocate the capital, just build out all this real estate.

Because real estate is so expensive, right? It shows that it's rebuilding.

So if you want.

Political reform, if.

You want new options. And by the way, you know, one of the things about the network school is I don't think I have all the answers.

It's a tech community that's meant to boot up tech communities.

I'm there to do a first one.

That shows what it's like to boot up an international capitalist tech community.

And then others will come there, they'll have ideas of their own and I.

Can fund them or bless them or.

Wherever they go off and do their own thing around the world. And we have a thousand flowers already and we have applications from 100 plus countries. They're from Senegal and from Spain and all over the world. Right? And so the more proven demand we have, the more we can invest in building, because it is time to build.