'Vitalik & Tyler Cowen talk Ethereum' - Vitalik Buterin & Tyler Cowen

All right, we are just about to resume. So given our lag, I'll just wait 5 more seconds before everybody gets set up on the livestream. Welcome, Tyler. Welcome, Vitalik. To all of our audiences, thank you so much for being with us for the full day here. This is our last talk, and this is a talk I'm super excited about on my end. And we are super thrilled to be joined tonight by Tyler Cowen. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of a popular blog called Marginal Revolution. And he's also the host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He has described his personal moonshot as using the internet to ferment broad enlightenment. And we hope that tonight's talk will aid in that goal a small manner. And Vitalik, who should not need a big introduction to our community, he is the inventor of Bitcoin Magazine. And now he spends his time as a chief scientist at the Ethereum Foundation. So in 2018, Vitalik joined Tyler Cowen for an episode of his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. And we want to think of this conversation as a spiritual successor to that episode, but with a slight difference where the tables will be turned around a little bit. And this time, it'll be Vitalik doing in the interviewing. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Tyler and Vitalik on stage, and I'll let them take off with their conversation.

Welcome. Thank you very much. It's good to be here. So 2020 has been such a fascinating year, and I think it's also been fascinating in part just as a culmination of a lot of trends that have been happening for the last 15, 15 years, 20 years. I mean, we've been seeing with Trump and other political things happening the last 4 years, I'm just comparing it to the financial crisis that we had 12 years ago, some of the kind of techno-politics that, that we've had looking at, you know, Snowden back in 2013, the copyright wars that were all of the rage in the 2000s. So I wanted to start by taking a look back at what I call techno-idealism more broadly. I think many people view what the crypto space is doing as a continuation of this project of techno-idealism. And there's different kinds of techno-idealism. There's techno-libertarianism with John Perry Barlow's declaration in 1996 and trying to establish the internet as a separate space away from government intervention. There's technoegalitarianism, and nobody knows if you're a dog. Techno world peace, can we just make everybody more connected? Techno efficient markets with Jørgen Alex's post from 2015 on the end of asymmetric information. And there's been all of the ways in which sort of the world has responded to these ideas and people trying to implement these ideas. So taking a look back at roughly the 25 years since the Declaration of Cyberspace Independence and ask the question, where do you see techno-idealism in general? And I guess focused on the kind of infotech particularly as having succeeded, and where do you see it as having failed?

Well, if we look at the last 8 or 9 months, I think we've seen a validation of what you might call well-capitalized big tech in the United States, most prominently Amazon. People now trust those companies. They've way outperformed their competitors. It's good for tech. It may or may not be good for crypto, right? I think we have also seen a validation of using electronic media, including Twitter, but much more broadly having scientists communicate with each other. That's a very old story. You hear that at the beginning of the techno revolution, that this is gonna happen. This is the year where it really mattered. So we've seen a great deal of progress in understanding COVID-19, and that has been because of tech, would not have happened in any other era. So in the last 9 months, those are the techno utopian trends that look much better. If you're asking me about the last 25 years, I think what has been underpredicted is just the resulting increase in disorientation and how poorly we as human beings deal with the world where so many things are transparent. Everything is said about everyone. Every rumor is out there, and we just don't sort it very well. And in the meantime, we blame it on companies. That maybe is the biggest trend over the longer time period.

Mm-hmm. Um, so Peter, here, here's a question. Peter Thiel said, um, a couple of years ago that AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. What do you think of that statement?

I don't think we know yet. So we don't know what role crypto will play in the world's future. Crypto looks libertarian now. I'm happy about that, but the story is far from over. Mm-hmm. AI is in some ways totalitarian, so surveillance seems to be here to stay. Very few citizenries are opposing surveillance. But oddly enough, having more surveillance, while I oppose it, it may in some ways give governments room to open up other liberties for people. In part, China feels as free as it does because there's surveillance. There's not a policeman on every street corner. It's not going to be the case as in the old days behind the Iron Curtain. You had to worry about someone coming up to you and grabbing you by the collar and hauling you away. So surveillance has some aspects that make autocratic societies freer.

The end of imperfect information in another way, I guess. Hmm. So One of the interesting things that's been happening, I think, both in the crypto space and in the world at large is there's a conversation about governance. So within the crypto space, for example, we've been seeing things like some of these discussions in Zcash, for example, where they as a community have decided to extend the 20% portion of their block reward that goes to fund protocol development. Bitcoin Cash has been trying to create a developer fund, but it's much— ended up being a much more acrimonious and unsuccessful process with a lot of opposition. In the Ethereum community, we've been having these Gitcoin Grants experiments with quadratic funding. Sometimes the governance has even blown up. So there was this fun incident a few months ago where Justin Sun tried to pull off a hostile takeover of the Steem network and its governance mechanism. And the community reacted to this by making a fork of Steem called Hive, where they actually deleted the money of Justin Sun and everyone else who participated in the attack. So these things are all happening in crypto. And meanwhile, in the real world, and especially over the last month or so, we've been seeing a lot of drama around Twitter, a lot of drama around social media platforms, how those platforms should moderate, the challenges that those platforms have in basically trying to be what I call credibly neutral and not just being fair, but actually succeeding in kind of convincing the large mass of people that they're fair. So I guess the first question would be, is just directly Twitter-focused, which is like, if you were Jack, or in the case of Facebook, if you were Mark, what would you do? What kinds of— how would you govern moderation, I guess? And the broader question is, might there be potentially common trends between the things that crypto— the crypto space is figuring out and the things that the larger space is figuring out? And might they end up interacting with each other?

Many different questions are in there. Let me take it in a slightly different order.

Sure.

If I think of crypto governance right now, I think there's a great virtue and a great problem, and they stem from the same factor. There's a massive subsidization of resources moving into crypto because these successful assets have portfolio values that were not foreseen initially. So just an incredible flow of wealth into the crypto space that attracts smart people and a lot of experimentations because of those portfolio values, which doesn't at this point require that much creativity from crypto. You can just hold some Bitcoin. If a bunch of companies put 1% of their portfolio in Bitcoin, you know, my goodness, the value, uh, can go up a lot more. Same with Ether. That subsidization also means you don't have discipline on your governance experiments. So people can try all sorts of things. It's hard to tell what really works because there's just this flood or wave of wealth coming your way. So, uh, might in a sense be better for crypto in some ways not to have that wave of wealth washing over it. So I don't think we'll know for a long time which of the mechanisms do well. There's not like a competitive market discipline. It would be like if companies did venture capital And it just so happened every year, you know, billions of dollars of manna rained on them from heaven. They would get very sloppy. They would take some more chances. Some of those would work. Now, you asked about Facebook and Twitter, and I think always of Balaji when these topics come up. My historical perspective is that media have always been unfair in every society. For the most part, They've gotten away with it. I don't foresee a near-term future where, say, there's a truly decentralized crypto-run version of Twitter. I think hardly anyone cares other than people like us. I do myself care. I think Twitter will continue more or less as is, and it will make whatever political finances are needed. And if Joseph Biden is elected, I think the Democrats will set up a new regulatory agency who cover Facebook and Twitter. It will somewhat cartelize the sector or cement them in as incumbents, will have higher transactions costs, they'll be more labor-intensive, less innovative. We'll ultimately get a version of them a bit like what we have now, except they'll be more risk-averse, and it will be bad, but I think it's more or less a stable outcome. Just ordinary, say, American users I don't see them leaping to an alternative because there's some complex argument about how it's more balanced or freedom of speech or no one can take this away from you. Um, there's nothing in the previous history of media leads me to think an outcome like that, or even the current status quo, is unstable. I think some version of it will continue. Of course it will change and evolve, but I don't see crypto per se having a major role in the evolution there, not soon. I think just sorting out internally which governance experiments are working will be the main task of crypto. Like answering, is it just a portfolio instrument, which is fine, I'm all for that? Is there something you can do with it transactionally that will truly be transformative? And the two possibilities, they're somewhat at war with each other. Transactionally, you want it to have least a predictable value, but probably also a stable value. For your portfolio, you want it to behave in ways not so well correlated with other assets, and that means a certain kind of instability or unpredictability. Like, here's the weird asset whose beta you don't really understand, and that's why it's a great edge. So there are these two forces tugging on crypto. I don't know which will win. I'm convinced the portfolio demand is real and enduring, But I'm not at all sure which of the governance and transactional experiments are going to work out.

Mm-hmm.

I think probably—

No, this just makes me wonder, like, if it is the case that, you know, in the real world, there's just not that many people except for a few idealists that care about basically the big platforms being neutral in any sense, then, like, does that create some kind of pressure for base crypto projects as well to also end up abandoning those values in the long run, like if there is an opportunity to abandon them for competitive advantage?

Again, that's a tough question. So I'm not convinced long-run future of crypto is libertarian. There's always a way to co-opt crypto, and the key question will be when crypto truly tries to interact with the banking system. Not just at arm's length. How will regulators respond? Will they let banking and commerce in some way merge, a long-standing dispute in the United States, or will crypto be forced to play by the regulatory rules of the game, which I suppose I think is somewhat more likely, and then crypto will solve a bunch of internal problems. Maybe you use it to send remittances to Mexico. It will become tamed and a kind of conservative thing. Just on the Twitter question, like, you and I right now, we could go to Mastodon and say what we want to each other. We don't do that, right? We read each other on Twitter, and we're worried about this problem. So why think the rest of the world is somehow going to react and make a change?

That's fair. Um, I mean, one counterpoint is that there has been this move from Twitter to Substack that's really accelerated this past half year. Um, so it does seem possible for, I guess, new things to start. Or like, what's your take on why Substack has been getting popular?

I think it's people trust the media less, typically for good reason. Uh, there's a sense of censorship, but I don't think most of it is from Twitter. I think most of it is from mainstream media and just people learning, as they have with crypto assets, like, hey, I can make a lot of money this way, which was not focal to them before. So I think there'll be a lot of proliferation and Twitter will be less central than it is right now. There'll be a lot more alternatives. Simple things like WhatsApp, but improved version of WhatsApp, right, will displace a lot of Twitter attention. Clubhouse will displace a bit of Twitter attention. So I'm an optimist about more diversity, more choice. Yeah, we'll limit the ability of Twitter to censor, and that will in turn keep Twitter as more or less a going viable concern. Rather than some stranger centralized version of it where it's not really run by anyone. I mean, even in the space you work in, it seems to me there's somewhat more governance than there was 2 years ago. And I asked you this 2 years ago. I said, as Ethereum services become more popular, you know, will there be more or less governance? And I think my sense from a distance is things like upgradability matter more and there's more direct involvement and discussion. And the kind of dogmatic, it's just what the algorithm spits out, uh, that seems weaker than it did a few years ago when you have, you know, the Bitcoin, the Bitcoin purists, and it has to be Bitcoin Cash and so on. I think governance and institutions are winning in what is a necessary and probably healthy way, and you're a part of that. Congratulations. But I think it's a little different than your original vision.

This is true. I mean, what— like, I think a few years ago, well, there was a— back when I was like— I was first starting on my kind of journey of researching crypto economics, and back when I guess I knew less and we knew less, I definitely had more hope that to the extent that governance is necessary, there is like some closed formula that could just deliver something close to a good result in a very robust way, the same way that, say, we seem to have for decentralized consensus with proof of work and proof of stake and all these academic algorithms that are provably robust up to 1/3 faults or whatever that we've had for 25 years. But as I have just— studied the issue and studied the economics of the issue over time, it definitely has become clear that there's this kind of fundamental instability in the governance that especially happens once your models start admitting the possibility that the different actors in the game are colluding with each other. And so basically something robust, you almost can't even be passive, it has to be active to some extent. Like with the example I gave where the attack on Steve by Justin Sun got responded to wanted to with the community rising up and forking.

In Ethereum 2.0, it's fundamentally an act of governance, an institutional creation. In some ways, it's like the American Constitutional Convention, uh, and not very algorithmic. So I think maybe the future for crypto is you have a bunch of very good institutions evolve, often focused around individuals, just like Jimmy Wales It's still important for Wikipedia, no matter how much he does or does not do on a given day. He's like a certifier of trust. And then in the nooks and crannies of the systems, you will have micro parts that do say all internet transactions with no oracle problem, simply on the strict terms of the original vision. But whenever you have to interact more with the so-called real world, it'll get back more to governance and trust. Mm-hmm. People will trust, say, you and the Foundation and Ether more than they'll trust a lot of other institutions. Again, not everyone. A lot of people just will never understand what you're doing, but I think we're in that world already, and we're just going to see this ongoing proliferation of trusted kind of micro-institutions, but they have a very long reach in terms of what they enable people to do.

Mm-hmm. Now, this is definitely a kind of future that I see as being quite possible.

A present, you could argue, right? I know Ethereum 2.0 is not here in the literal sense, but it's on the drawing board, pieces are in place, right?

It's literally on a testnet, so—

Yeah, when I read your FAQs, like on sharding and on —anything you're doing to make it work better. Proof of stake just feels to me like this is an institution. How it works is not being reduced to a small number of dimensions. That to me is what is striking.

Yes. So one other thing that's just interesting about both crypto and centralized tech is the somewhat differing relationship between, I guess, non-governmental projects and government, or including corporations and including non-corporate things and governments that we've seen. And I mean, of course, you know, it's like governments being the kind of sole and primary top dog is definitely not the 10,000-year historical norm. And historically, we've seen lots of things have kind of intersecting authority, including various kinds of religions and plenty of other, of other things as well. But one thing that strikes me as interesting is that like, if you look at the discourse, even just going back to Twitter for a bit briefly, right? Like there is still a mentality that kind of public and governmental are the same thing. And because Twitter is a kind of quote, public concern and Twitter affects lots of people, Therefore, it should be the government, meaning the US government, as an expression of the will of the people, actually meaning the US people that should have to somehow have a say on the whole thing. And I'm, of course, not from the US. And I'm— well, I haven't spent more than half a year in any single country since 2013. And even the crypto community is just very naturally global. In any non-pandemic year, you have people seeing each other in random countries. Every 2 months. And I've referred to Twitter before as kind of the world water cooler, right? So, you know, you have people from all sorts of places, just kind of seem like they're standing all 2 meters away from each other, just, you know, talking to each other in this big cacophony. And you have, you know, people from the US, you got, you know, the wonderful diplomats from China, and you have all sorts of people from India. There was that beautiful moment a couple of years ago where the government of Iran tweeted out this trenchant message saying, "Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated." And an Israeli embassy replied back with a meme from Mean Girls asking, "Why are you so obsessed with me?" No, that moment was just great. But, you know, just thinking about, like, who uses Twitter, like, it seems clearly that just from a kind of institution design perspective, it's like the US as a country is the wrong actor to be kind of having ultimate control of the thing. And I guess like this is why for me, you know, given the kind of imperfect world we live in, like I'm, I actually think kind of Jack calling the shots in the short run is less bad than a lot of other people think. But the kind of the broader thing, right, is that you do have these centralized platforms that are serving a global audience, but at the same time, they are based in a particular country. On the other hand, we have crypto projects that are serving a global audience. And in a lot of cases, they actually are global. And in a lot of cases, you can argue, like in the case of Bitcoin, like 60% of the miners are in China, but then most of the developers are in the US and some in Europe. So how do you see this tension proceeding in the future?

I think the two big winners from the internet are the United States and China. The internet means a significant increase in one kind of America's soft power. Some of our leaders have destroyed some versions of our soft power. Just globally, people debate American ideas. So, a big movement in Iran now, I read, is MeToo. Where did that come from, right? Throughout Africa how people react to Black Lives Matter with a lot of diversity, but that's a major issue. So I think once the immediate moment passes, United States will see Twitter and the internet for a major source of soft power. They cement in English people who are active in the United States intellectual community far greater global reach than, say, Germans do, and that's been a relative shift compared to 15 or 20 years ago. The US will accept that. I think other nations already have accepted it. We won't admit it. It seems to me we're already there. We just need to let our mental models catch up to a world we're already living in. So who exactly is going to defect? So if you're a German public intellectual, your relative status is much lower, actually. You probably won't admit it, you don't have the power to do a significant defect from the broader system. In fact, you'll probably be more likely to play by its rules of the game, and to you, Matt Yglesias will be a big deal, even though in 1968 he never would have been. He would have only been a big deal to other Americans or maybe Canadians. Yeah.

So Bology talks about the difference between physical America and digital America. And so, like, for example, I personally, right, I've spent, once again, in normal years, less than 1/6 of my time in physical America. But, like, would you consider me part of digital America?

Yes, absolutely. You can talk about any American issue with great facility, and obviously you've totally perfect fluent English. That's all you need.

So I guess this is interesting, right? Because this gets to this kind of philosophical discussion about, you know, what kind of, quote, America even is. Like, if it's not just the company and the jurisdiction, and it's not just the— and it includes these tech platforms, and it includes people who just kind of understand this particular bundle of cultural issues that are affecting this particular kind of bundle of people? Like, you know, what is America and what is any country, and is the answer different for different countries?

It's different for every country. Keep in mind, America is going to get a big boost once COVID is over because work from a distance is now much more feasible, even if it's not all the time or every day. So real rents for a large number of people are going to plummet, whether you stay behind— rents in San Francisco are down 31%— or whether you move to Austin, Miami, Nashville, wherever. So that's this big boost to standard of living. It'll make people happier. Uh, it'll be a big shot in the arm to the country, and then American soft power is stronger. And at the same time, we'll be more of a mess. But I don't see what there is about globalization that overturns that. And then if you think that US and China will continue to evolve separate internets, China remains a bit removed from that equation, and that actually cements the relative status of the US in some ways. And China will take Cambodia, Laos, and some other nations with it. But if you're, say, Singapore, New Zealand, uh, you're going to play in that big network and basically accept its rules.

This is a True. I mean, I guess if I'm a Singaporean or New Zealand or whatever intellectual and I interact with this cloud as part of these internet platforms, then I guess you could say that I'm part of digital America. But I guess the question would then be that to what extent does— I guess, to what extent is it legitimate to call it, you know, Digital America as opposed to, say, you know, the digital Anglosphere, even? Like, to what extent does physical America or any kind of core end up actually becoming kind of disproportionately the center of the network?

I think it's fine to call it Anglosphere, but still so much of it will be American. The emphasis on entertainment is more American than British. If you look at important internet writers, say from Britain, Andrew Sullivan moved to America a long time ago. The kind of independent number of truly British, Kiwi, Australian voices— I mean, in absolute terms, it's a lot of people. In terms of the gravity of influences you would measure in a network model, it's striking to me how American it stayed and what the incentives are to move to either American centers or London or possibly Singapore. There'll still be strong incentives for intellectuals to cluster and there aren't that many places they can do it. I think London also is a big winner from this.

This is true. No, the London becoming a kind of cultural outpost of something that, of digital America, is definitely a fun historical irony to some extent.

And you see London picking up on American wokeism and political correctness to a considerable degree, and you don't see that on very much of the European continent. And that division, as outlined by Bruno Marchais on Twitter, I might add, Portuguese fellow who writes in English on Twitter. I think that's a big deal. Brexit was a more significant event than we realized. In addition to the obvious changes, it's the UK, or at least England, deciding it will be part of the Anglosphere and continental Europe deciding it won't. And on all sorts of other issues like attitudes towards Islam, there's going to be this split, which I think is here already.

Yeah, no, this is on a— I made a comment on Twitter at least once, maybe multiple times, where I said that I think in the 21st century people will be divided, um, not less by geography and more by language.

Um, so, and gender also, it's a separate point, but I think those are the divisions that will matter.

Hmm, okay. Um, so I guess back to crypto discussions a little bit. So I think a lot of people, especially those who are somewhat far away from the crypto space, see it as being primarily a financial thing. You have Bitcoin as an asset. You have Ether as an asset. You have both of those systems as a system that you can use to pay people. You have stablecoins. There's also a potential for blockchains and other kind of what we call crypto technologies, zero-knowledge proofs being a really big one, as being a base for other non-financial applications, for example. Do you see any potential for non-financial applications that use blockchains to get anywhere? And if so, are there any particular categories that you see as being— more promising?

Well, keep in mind, as an economist, to me financial things are real things automatically anyway, but I think just enabling new classes of transactions— so if you're going to run micro prediction markets, and I'm not convinced they will take off, but they might possibly— you would want to do that on a global basis, and you would do that using crypto, and crypto will be well geared to support that kind of market that I could well imagine happening not this year, but reasonably soon as virtual reality develops. There are semi-autonomous worlds within virtual reality. If that happens— I'm not an expert on that topic, but again, imagine it happens— you could very readily imagine crypto being very well suited in its current evolution to enable this very new class of transactions. So those to me could be big deals and they're not quite next month things, but you know, we will live to see them happen. So I think there's a lot of promise, but again, we're in this weird governance mix. I don't think anyone has a very clear sense of which of them will work. And even simple questions like, putting aside crypto, why don't we have more prediction markets? You can argue that till you're blue in the face. I don't think there are good answers. I've never met a person who really understands that question.

Right, no, it definitely is a puzzle, and especially given how, like, the amount of trading that happens on a regular financial market, as I understand, is like much higher than all of the no-trade theorems would end up predicting.

Then you have all these other markets you would think it's obvious they would exist. Oh, futures market in GDP, in unemployment, and poof, they're not there. In the 1980s, they tried a futures market in the CPI. Everyone was convinced that would be a big hit. Went poof. Now these days we have lower inflation, you know, we don't need it. I mean, the question of missing markets, one of the central questions of economics, we don't understand it well as economists at all. So a lot of the future of crypto, I think, is tied up with what are your micro foundations for why these markets are missing. It could be it's something so fundamental crypto won't overcome it. That's a more bearish scenario for crypto. It could just be they need the right nudge, they need some, you know, oil and grease in the wheels, ways of avoiding certain regulations, ways of globalizing more easily, and then crypto will give us this huge takeoff.

That's, uh, definitely true. And we've been seeing this kind of small but growing explosion in prediction markets on Ethereum in the last couple of months. And I made a bet on the Trump market. I won't say which side, but I'm contrarian but not super contrarian, so you can probably guess which side that is.

You bet on Hillary Clinton to be next president. He is in those markets still.

This is— no, no, I bet Zuckerberg, come on. Um, the— it's like they're definitely getting easy— ease of use has, I think, been one of the kind of drawbacks for crypto historically, right? You know, you have to interact with this blockchain, you have to send one transaction, and then you wait 14 seconds for it to get included, and sometimes it's 4 minutes, and then you send another transaction. Ironically enough, at the time I made a trade on the prediction market, it was a time of very high congestion on the Ethereum network. And I paid a transaction fee of $17.76, which is fun. But at the same time, we're working on scalability. We are working on a lot of efficiency things, which there's sharding, rollups, ZK rollups, optimistic, all of these buzzwords. And if they succeed, they should— like, the math says that they'll decrease all of those costs by a factor of somewhere between 100 to 10,000. So I guess that might be when the experiments will be. And if it fails then, then we can really say that it failed because there's no microfoundations. And if it succeeds, then user experience really was the barrier. And it'll be interesting.

I'm very bullish on all the tech stuff you're doing. But let me tell you my worry. If you go back and you look at hyperinflations in history, like look at Israel in the 1970s, there were no practical barriers to denominating your contract in terms of US dollars. People wouldn't do so until the rate of price inflation hit about 40%. Now, 40 is pretty high. You might think at 8 or 9%, they would start thinking about redoing the contract. But they waited until '40. It seemed there were these mental transactions costs that were very high. It's what we see in nominal wage stickiness, which is in virtually all societies. If those are very fundamental and can't be overcome by crypto, overcome by sharding, overcome by greater speed, you're in the more bearish scenario for crypto more generally, and it stays a portfolio hedge asset. It doesn't open up broad class of new transactions. That to me is possible too.

Does crypto need to become a unit of accounts to open up a broad class of new transactions?

I don't think it needs to become a widely used unit of account, but simply to think things through in terms of this other system, this other medium, you might need for dollars and other currencies to be much worse than they are, and maybe that day will come, right? That's possible too. But it doesn't seem to be now. And just how sharp that substitutability is, that's always the variable I'm mentally trying to estimate in forming my own forecasts for crypto. I'm quite sure I don't know.

Yeah, no, this is also an interesting question, right? Because, uh, I mean, so, you know, there, there is such a thing as crypto dollars, right? There's stablecoins, you know, there's the algorithmic stablecoins like DAI, there is, um, the kind of asset-backed ones like USDC and USDT and so forth. And like, if you look, a lot of them have like very terrible trust properties, right? I mean, like DAI is fairly reasonable historically, but I mean, USDT is held in some bank in the Bahamas. And I think like the terms of service say that the entire $15 billion belongs to them. I mean, something like this. I don't remember the details. But people are still— willing to use it and hold it and just use it as the base medium for a lot of crypto trading. So it almost seems like in the short term, I guess the dollar is winning as a unit of— a base unit of account inside crypto, which is interesting. And I guess in the long run, will it flip over to BTC or Ether, both or— or something else, I don't know. But, you know, there has been this interesting trend right now.

Rise of these stablecoins either makes me more bearish on crypto for the reasons implicit in what you're saying. Keep in mind also, in world history, exchange rate pegs, fixes, they have never, ever, ever held, not in millennia. Bretton Woods lasted— I mean, it's debated how long it lasted, maybe 11 years. And that was a system backed by all the world's major free countries and a lot of nuclear weapons, and that lasts 11 years. And how long am I supposed to think the stablecoins will last? Uh, I, I'm all for those as experiments. I just think become more floating exchange rates, which I'm, which I'm fine with. I wrote a whole book defending that idea when I was starting my career. Um, I don't think stablecoins are stable.

Ever. That's fair. Yes, you know, something, something, something, fat, fat tail risks, very possible. So going into kind of the macro foundation, kind of the cultural macro foundations for crypto, one of the big ones that a lot of people talk about, right, is distrust in governments. That, you know, Bitcoin, like, for example, people, for example, talk about Bitcoin being this trust, this thing that people will gravitate to because they just see how the US dollar is going, like as the meme says, money printer go brrr. And they see Bitcoin as having this kind of sounder foundation. Even Bruno made this tweet a couple of years back using the crypto drama as an example for why people would see the value in the more decentralized solutions. And in general, it has this— idea that decentralized technology could thrive because governments, as this historically dominant root of trust, are losing the trust, has been fairly large. And 2020 has been an interesting year for people's trust in governments. In a lot of places, it's decreasing. In East Asia, people's trust in their own governments is at a high point, but people's trust in each other's governments is definitely is definitely decreasing as well. So I guess, do we— how do you see the future of just trust in governments in general as being— like, is this something that even can be kind of broken down? Like, is financial trust and geopolitical trust different? Are they ultimately the same? To what extent is this a driver for crypto?— and, you know, I guess, where will this go?

Well, for thinking about crypto, I would distinguish between trust in government and trust in the Fed. People trust Congress less, or Trump less, or the other party less. That's very obvious, and it's a big deal socially. But in terms of institutions, Fed has had a 12-year run of a totally amazing positive performance, in my opinion, and people trust it a lot more. It's the first place Congress goes. Treasury goes there. You need a problem solved, you have the Fed do it. They did okay enough in 2008. This time around, they did phenomenally well. It's like that in the NBA, or our two well-functioning institutions. So when the Fed does well, that holds back crypto because it papers over problems in American banks, banking system. And people as well, I'll use banks because the Fed stands behind those, and it's been doing well. Like the NBA does spit tests well. Now, there's two ways of looking at it. One is just, that is really credible, and that will keep crypto at bay for a long time. An alternative view is, well, the Fed has done a great job, but they only have so much credibility, and they've spent it down maybe in an optimal way, but they can only pull so much water from the well. And we're getting closer to the Fed not being able to paper over those problems in the banking system. And this is like medium term, very bullish for crypto. It's the idea of, eh, it takes 3 days to clear, you know, who gives a damn? I know the Fed stands behind this all. People maybe won't say that, you know, 17 years from now, and they'll be thinking about safer, more transparent alternatives. And that would be a big boon for crypto. And again, there's 2 very different paths. I'm quite sure, I don't know which is true, I think a lot for crypto depends on which you find to be the plausible scenario. Yeah, OK.

Moving on a bit to radical markets. So we— I think last time we talked, we talked a bit about quadratic funding. And back then, quadratic funding was mostly just an idea. It was this paper from myself and Glen. But since then, in the Ethereum ecosystem— I don't know how much you've been following, but we've done these experiments with it with Gitcoin Grants. We have distributed about $2 million with quadratic funding, and people seem mostly happy with the results. There have been experiments with, you know, kind of downtown stimulus, trying to use it in Colorado to fund businesses. So how, I guess, how have your views on quadratic funding and quadratic other things changed, and like, where do you see the long-term future of those ideas being?

I think it can work. It's been shown they can work. There'll be greater diversity of many, many things, including those ideas. But when I think about collective choice in general, to me, the key input is the quality of voter preferences. And if you're getting bad outcomes, it's not like, oh, we need a new electoral system, we need to, you know, change how the Senate works or move to proportional representation. Those may or may not be good ideas. I don't think they're fundamental. It's the quality of the inputs. What do people want? What does your culture tell people is or should be important? So I'm not sure any of those mechanisms will make a big difference for our largest problems. But I think especially with very well-educated communities, as are connected to, you know, Ethereum, there's kind of a lot of things you can take care of more effectively Because within the model, the efficiency properties of those methods are clear and you can use them, right? Yep.

This is true. I can— no, quality of inputs is definitely one of those things that you just can't get around just needing to have if you want to have good outcomes. I guess, um, before the, uh, um, audience questions, I wanted to finish off with an overrated versus underrated section. Oh, of course. Uh, yes, uh, central bank-issued digital currencies.

I'm worried we will try them and they will suck the life out of our private banks. I think probably China can do this because its private banks, its state, are so closely intertwined. It's in broad terms one big system. But other countries doing it will either be a minor add-on, which I'm fine with, but if it becomes really popular, you end up with your central banks as the intermediaries, your private banks as starved for deposits. Being broadly libertarian, I see that as a bad thing. So I think they're overrated. I'm not even sure they're rated that much at all, right? But I'm worried about the idea.

Okay. The idea that remote work is making it more viable to move between different countries, and so the market market for which country people are, are residing in and will become more competitive?

I think remote work is making it much, much more viable to move around within a country, but the costs of moving to a different country I don't think have fallen very much. A lot of those costs are your personal network. So you could move from Seattle to Vancouver, that still makes a big difference. I don't think new viability of remote work changes that calculus very much. So moving across nations will change less than people are saying. Moving within nations is changing more than people are saying.

Okay. Charter cities and building new cities in general.

People mean different things by the phrase charter city. If by charter city you mean there'll be some big newspaper article that says this board of like 8 people, 6 of whom are white guys, will like run a part of Africa. I don't think that will ever happen. But if by charter cities you mean governance becomes more complex and more diverse and you have things arise almost like shopping malls today, which clearly have their own governance, it's just embedded within a broader structure, but their actual problems they tend to solve on their own, including of course security and often adjudication. That things like trade complexes, shopping malls, enterprise zones will become more significant and sovereign in an actual practical way, and they will be like the vision of charter cities. I think that's very definitely underrated. Kind of old-fashioned, here's my charter city, let's all vote on, you know, letting these people run Roatan. I would pick that won't ever happen.

OK. Online to offline communities. So this idea that Balaji has been talking about of communities forming offline and then intentionally coming together in some place.

What is it exactly you mean by that? Like we all move to Austin and eat barbecue together?

Or potentially just people agree to move to a particular place. Place for a longer period of time?

I don't know. Overall, moving in the United States, you probably know, has gone down every decade since the early 1980s. People move less. They find one place they really like, and they stay there. I think work from a distance will shift one place you find. But rather than Boston, maybe it's Chattanooga—cheaper, better weather. Over time, it'll have food just as good as Boston. But I still think your tendency to move only once won't change so much. So we'll have different one-time moves to very different places, and that will matter a lot. I don't think we'll see that much hopscotch, unless you mean, you know, the very wealthy who kind of fly around and in some ways don't quite live anywhere.

Okay. Virtual reality.

Makes me dizzy. And I think I'm enough of an arbitrary subjectivist that I'm not convinced. So I'm not ready to press the button on predicting that one. I'll say overrated, but I could easily, easily be wrong. Because my main complaint, so brutish and biological and simple and stupid. My argument is so unsophisticated. My argument is either totally correct or totally wrong. And it's probably totally wrong, but I don't quite see the people want to do it.

Okay. Small countries as a category.

I think they will do fine, but they will attach themselves to larger units. They will have to make choices. Countries such as Singapore that play a complex game between China and the United States They will be put in increasingly stressful and difficult positions. But at the end of the day, a lot of them are well run. They have to be well run to stay competitive. And I think we're going to do great. New Zealand now, obviously, with COVID-19, Taiwan, you're seeing a lot of successes that will be replicated as future crises come along. And we had this long stretch of decades with few major crises. So the stupidities of large bungling countries such as mine and Brazil got away with it, and all of a sudden now they're not getting away with it, and it is looking better. And it is— I mean, it's big physically, but it's like a small country in, in some ways, especially not Quebec, Canada. And Quebec has done the worst. Yep. Um, the United Nations, well, it's certainly vastly overrated. Normal humans who went to public school and were told it was great But when I look at actual econometric papers, like, does the UN modestly reduce the scope of conflict in the world? In those papers, it seems it does. Does the UN on a regular, very totally regular basis put out messages that completely offend me? It does, so I don't like it. At the end of the day, it's still a modest positive, declining all the time. In many, many issues, it's just not a player. And again, the public school rhetoric is so over the top, I have to say overrated.

No, I mean, that's, uh, definitely fair. I, uh, I participated in a Model UN in high school, and it definitely decreased my perception of the real thing to some degree. Um, Mars.

I'm a skeptic about space travel. I'm not a skeptic about Mars per se, any more than any other location. It seems to me the journey is perilous. The experimentation for reentry for normal humans in an age of litigation, complacency, and risk aversion is a lot to swallow. And I sometimes say, you know, when Nevada is full, I'll start to think about Mars. So I don't see what's there of value unless you have a kind of utopian libertarian Heinlein-esque governance scenario that we're going to go there and do things all over again. It just seems the costs and problems and radiation are so daunting, and you end up dependent on the governments here anyway for getting back and forth. But to me, it seems way overrated by those who are enthusiasts. But I'm not sure the normal American is wrong about it. Probably they expect nothing from Mars. And I think that's about right.

So what do you think is going to take the place of people's need for some kind of frontier over the next century?

Well, we may be frustrated and unhappy from not having a frontier, which arguably is the case now. But I see a lot of advance in biomedicine. It may not feel like a frontier to people. That could make the world very strange and different, and people will talk about that much more than Mars.

Okay, well, that's—

and that ends the, uh, the list of things that I have. Uh, so I guess we can have some questions from the audience. Amazing.

Well, Metallic, Tyler, thank you so much for that conversation. Uh, what we're gonna do is just gonna— anybody listening, uh, feel free to start posting your questions. We've had a handful of them already come in. So as we kind of get them, we'll kind of ask them out. I kind of want to start off by sort of more of an open-ended question for both of you. In this case, Tyler, you kind of talked about some of your opposing views on the use of blockchains and just in general kind of the need for the feature it offers. I guess I'm curious on hearing that from the Vitalik side. What are kind of some of the things that you would probably disagree on the most from that argument and kind of I feel like we only heard one side of their argument, but I'm curious to see if there's something you disagree.

What's the argument you want me to disagree with?

The—

so Tyler kind of talks about that, uh, people largely may not care, um, when we were kind of talking about Mastodon and just social media, just the benefits that you would get on censorship resistance or, or having control over your information.

Um, what do you— I definitely There's definitely an effect that does happen a lot of the time where people don't care until something personally affects them. But eventually things is like, if it's a bad system, then eventually it will personally affect you. Right. So, you know, historically, like, people start using VPNs when something that they personally want to access starts getting censored. And I guess people will use crypto-based solutions when it is the case that there is some specific issue that they personally care about that the existing platforms are not serving them well on. So I guess it is possible that just big centralized platforms are going to miscalculate massively. It is also possible that— just in order— even just for lower-grade public relations reasons, the existing platforms are going to evolve somewhat in a kind of not fully crypto-y, but somewhat more decentralized direction. And so one of the reasons why I think this is— I wrote this post a year ago on control as a liability. This idea that if you do put yourself into a position where you have control over a lot of things, that can easily come back to bite you. And now, of course, reducing control doesn't— it could mean crypto, but it doesn't have to mean going all out on decentralization. It could even just mean something as simple as establishing some kind of independent governing council, as Mark has done. Just like making that more transparent and letting it have a final say over decisions in some way. It could also mean that Jack recently retweeted this approach, in favor of this approach, where he says that people should be free to choose what moderation algorithms they want to use, they use for their tweet, which is also interesting. Some degree of experimentation of those kinds of things I can see happening. I mean, fully decentralized things I expect will continue as a niche in the short term. And what they will be in the long term depends on— one is if they find a use case. Two is if the mainstream systems just completely break. And three is if we can figure it out technologically.

Don't you find it striking how few Chinese use VPN, or that TV network news in the US has always been terrible, even with cable and satellite? Hmm. Those would be my comparator points.

Right, I mean, this is true, but I guess— well, I guess it depends on what your definition of like few versus many is. Like, the number of VPN users is definitely in the tens of millions. Those tens of millions may even be the tens of millions that matter more in terms of just their long-term impact on global culture. It also, I think, is the case that even if these technologies do not get widely adopted, the credible threat of them getting widely adopted is enough to push centralized actors to be more reasonable. I guess the go-to example of this is the argument that the possibility of people pirating everything, um, in terms of just like movies and music, um, really pushed these recording labels to become more reasonable and eventually and start creating things like Spot— uh, Spotify and Netflix, um, which, you know, people use now. But I mean, arguably, if the ability to just illegally torrent things that did not exist as a backstop, the terms would be considerably less favorable. Less favorable to consumers.

I was going to see if Tyler was going to respond. No, no, next question. Yeah, great. A question for Tyler.

Vitalik and I, I think it's wrong to think of Vitalik and I as disagreeing. I would say we have different stances. I'm a very detached, distant observer. He is a doer. That's a difference in perspective. Is more important, and our stances might differ. I would admit on all these issues he knows more than I do, but would be inclined to bend toward him epistemically on that basis. But still, his different role as doer and mine as distant observer will make us feel like we have somewhat different views when maybe we really don't.

Absolutely, and it's also, it's the time interval that you're kind of debating this on also that matters and shifts that perspective. So I've kind of seen that happen, and you've kind of brought up different timelines where this may be important or not important. A question for Tyler is, if you were trying to convince some bright economics students that Ethereum was an interesting thing to study, how would you pitch it to them?

I'm not sure the pitch matters. I think you need to see that a paper on Ethereum and related services and get in a top journal. There are some papers on crypto in top journals. There might be on Ethereum, Vitalik would know. I don't recall seeing one, and it's all proof by showing. They don't give a damn what you say, they want to see it. It's probably unfortunate, it shows too much conformism and status quo bias, but I think it's how it's working right now.

Yeah, and there's definitely been, uh, quite a bit of academic publishing on Ethereum within the cryptography space. And within the economic space, well, there's those papers that Eric Budish has done. And there's definitely a few things here and there. There's— well, there's Tim Roughgarden's upcoming analysis on our fee market reform proposal, the AP-1559, which— and it's not an academic paper in the standard sense, but it is something that he has could just end up showing that, no, this is an area that has interesting economic problems that are worth looking at.

Got it. Another question for Tyler, and this is more around the audience trying to understand if you have looked at or have followed what's been happening recently in the world of decentralized finance, or DeFi. And if so, kind of what do you think about that as a as sort of a new enablement in kind of what's possible now, especially using cryptocurrencies, and kind of how do you think about that if you have kind of paid attention to that sector?

I read about it a fair amount, but I'm quite sure I don't understand it, and I'm not a participant. I suspect it's one of those areas to understand you need to actually try to do it. I would repeat my broader point flow of wealth into crypto has meant all these incredible experiments, the creation literally of new worlds, new vocabularies. To me, that's just phenomenal and exciting. At the same time, it has so weakened the market tests for these things. The normal metrics I would use— look at, say, the market for thumbtacks, like which thumbtacks are going to work. Well, I'm not a thumbtack prophet, but I sort of know how to figure that out. I can't do that in these areas. So I read, I listen to podcasts, you know, like also on Bitcoin, everything. And at the end of it all, I'm basically confused, and I don't see that my mental models have let me narrow it down to questions reducible to a few dimensions. That's my impression, that's my answer.

Totally acceptable answer. A question for Vitalik is, for For a new developer in this ecosystem, what would you recommend that they start reading to get involved in developing the codebase? And I think this is more, the way I understand it, towards contributing to the development of Ethereum instead of building on top of it, but happy to accept any answers that will clarify.

Yeah, I mean, I think just going through the process of developing a simple application on top of Ethereum, like even just a simple like wallet dApp or even just a dApp that points to a smart contract and lets you click a button that sends a transaction and that adds some, one to some number and just kind of walk through that entire process and see what all of the different steps are is a valuable exercise for any new developer to go through. Like myself as a learner, I've learned, felt like this just doing and kind of getting into the nuts and bolts of things is generally a great technique, definitely a better technique than reading, for just giving yourself a better understanding of like what the heck is going on in the different parts. Then branching out from there, I think it really depends on like, you know, what it is that you want to focus on. Like if you want to focus on like, you know, building and developing applications, then you might want to look at existing ones. If you're looking at the protocol, then, you know, are you talking about ETH1 or are we talking about ETH2 or are we talking about Layer 2 protocols? It's definitely just important to kind of get a lay of the land in terms of what the space is and what all of these different components are. As you know, Ethereum is this big ecosystem and there's a growing number of these just kind of baseline things that you do need to learn about and keep track of. And then from there, it depends on a specific thing. And once again, like if he wants to become an ETH2 developer just poking around the spec, trying to even build a chain or doing the same with ETH1. It's a challenge, but if you want to be a core dev, it's the sort of thing that you do have to just be able to do in principle. And then just go from there.

Awesome. Next up, we have actually a clarification and more of an insight that we would love from Tyler Cowen. You kind of talked about when you were commenting on the US dominance through the media power it has. And the question is, what about the rise of non-American Anglo soft power in kind of specifically the world of entertainment? So as kind of, uh, the Indian, Nigerian, and, and a handful of other film industries sort of begin to really scale and take off, um, to a lot bigger audiences, um, do you think that, uh, the U.S. will still retain that soft power of having control over media content, or did you mean something else from that, uh, point, or just kind of what's your reaction to that statement?

Well, I think U.S. soft power in movies has always been weaker than people have charged. That was formerly a major trade dispute. That soft power was super strong in Canada and a few other places, uh, but of course, as you mentioned, never in India, uh, Middle East, or many other parts of the world. Future US soft power is through the internet and social media, and that I think is still accelerating. The extent to which, say, the two of us by having this conversation in what is North American English are reaching the whole world. People haven't grasped the import of that yet. And it's not Hollywood. Hollywood is decaying, not going to have that soft power or carry it. Being much worse, of course, with COVID but that was already the trend. So, I think it's all about social media. Korean movies are better than Hollywood movies. It's not close.

—And, and sorry, is that a comment on the quality or the, the reach or the propagation or how many people end up viewing them, or sort of is there a specific metric where you measure this against?

I think there's been an act of self-destruction that goes on in Hollywood precisely by trying to reach a more global market. It comes down the product, dialogue is less clever, more things blow up. And, uh, say Korean cinema, a more extreme example, Iranian cinema, being directed to much smaller audiences. It's back to this collective choice mechanism. What really makes for good results is a quality audience, and that's the truly scarce variable here. And Hollywood deliberately aims at a not-so-quality audience, so it becomes crud. It's my subjective judgment, but I think it's true.

Oh, so here's some— actually an interesting question. What do you think about the possibility that AI and, you know, with recent developments with the GPTs and so forth, is going to massively decrease the cost of making a movie to the point that a less than institutional actor and even an individual will be able to do it?

I think that's already true, even without all of those developments. But what's special about movies is people want to see the same movie as what other people are seeing. That means you end with a pretty high degree of centralization no matter what. It's like— listen— Michael Jordan, LeBron, they're the best players, yes, but you want to talk to other people about them. So I'm not sure how much it will matter that we'll get this blossoming. It'll mean that the players will pull from a bigger tent of talent. That has to be a good thing. Great. But still, there'll be the centralization at the top, right?

There'll be centralization, but like the mechanisms that we have for, um, pushing things into, uh, kind of massive heights of popularity to the point where they get that kind of position as the thing that you have to watch them because everyone else watches them— historically, it's been very kind of institutionally driven. And, um, you know, Hollywood makes the movies and they market their movies to hell, but this seems like a process that social media potentially could end up getting into disrupting at some point soon.

As you well know, YouTube stars, Instagram stars are typically bigger than movie stars. There may be a few older movie stars, everyone knows them because they became famous in this earlier world, but movie stars today, they're not that important. Again, YouTube and Instagram, much more powerful producers of celebrity already. And that's typically not without complex AI or GPT-3.

We want to just ask a couple more questions before we wrap today. And we are a little bit over, so I want to thank you for kind of going over with us. The question is, how do you kind of think crypto will shape the regulatory framework around how finance is structured right now? Do you think it'll be in a positive way? Do you think it'll be because we'll force it to sort of amend to allow some of these applications to work? Is that even a valid question to you? Like, how do you react to the regulatory aspects of cryptocurrencies?

Obviously it depends on the country. The United States, the SEC has been very light on crypto. I would not at all assume that will last. And if Biden is elected, which as we speak seems more likely, it's almost certainly not going to last. And then there's this longer-term issue as banks move into tech and fintech moves into services closer to banking. How will the regulators react when banking and commerce start to mix in the United States? That will have major implications for crypto. I wouldn't say I have a particular prediction, but I think if you want to think through the future of crypto, just the regulatory side, don't assume, you know, the light hand is going to last. I would bet against that at least 5 to 1, and we'll see what comes. I don't know.

So we'll just do 2 more questions, and it will be for both of you. So the second last question I have is, if all we end up with is a really efficient replacement for the existing financial infrastructure, and that's kind of the primary and the most exciting use case for blockchains, is that a win? In any count from each of you. And kind of, if all we kind of, as you kind of pointed out, if clearing time becomes 3 seconds instead of 3 days, is that still a net positive for us or not?

For me, I would say that doesn't excite me, but again, there are these options on things like prediction markets, economies, either in virtual reality or in some other future thing that wants to behave in a seamless way that fiat currencies and financial regulation won't allow. I see a reasonably high chance all that can be significant. I'm not ready to predict it. The exciting side lies in these future dimensions that current institutions have just not evolved to handle, and they will be slow and sluggish in trying to do so, and crypto is going to whip their ass if that what comes to pass. So that's the exciting scenario. We'll see.

We will see indeed. Great. I'm excited.

That's awesome.

So the last question I want to ask, and we want to wrap this up based on this question, is it's been 2 years since your last conversation, at least on air, and we want to see if we can end today's chat with making a prediction on what you think the future of Ethereum will be 2 years from now. Um, I'll kind of take predictions from both sides and, uh, we'll call it—

what is it, 2 years from now?

I don't hear you.

A prediction on the future of Ethereum 2 years from now. What do you think Ethereum specifically will be, uh, down the road? Whether that's a political answer or a technological answer or a user adoption answer, um, what do you kind of predict for the development of the Ethereum ecosystem?

The TALC deserves the last word, so let me go first. It will be more of an august mainstream institution known to more people. The TALC will be more of an elder statesman, and it will all feel like more grave and serious, but it will be doing more things. That's my prediction.

I think, I mean, we are going to see just First of all, a continued steady growth. And I'm very hopeful that all of the things that we're doing with technology, including sharding, rollups, proof of stake, zero-knowledge proofs, and all of these things will be— continue progressing extremely quickly, the same way that, I mean, zk-SNARKs have been progressing extremely quickly in the last year. And this will be this kind of necessary bedrock to enable a lot more applications to happen. And I think we will continue to see, as we have seen historically, people attempt to try to break out and make crypto things that just kind of go viral independently and try to reach larger numbers of people. So 2 years ago, we've seen CryptoKitties as one example. I think there are going to be more examples. And I think— then these examples are each going to be more interesting and meaningful than the previous. And once the tech is actually there to handle it, that when the thing gets— just when the thing gets big, the transaction fees don't just immediately force it to come screeching to a stop. Once that stops being a factor, I think the results may well be amazing.

Amazing. Tyler, Vitalik, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing your thoughts. I'm sure there'll be a lot more follow-ups on Twitter and other platforms, and we'll be sure to relay some of those future questions to you.

Thank you. Thank you, Kartik. Thank you, Vitalik. A real pleasure and honor. Yes, thank you everyone for listening.

Thanks. And with that, I am proud to sort of say that we are at the end of our our ETH Online Summit in the month of October. We kind of did some of this summary at the beginning of this morning for the summits, but this has been an incredible month for us, for ETH Global and ETH Online. We had 710 developers spend the last 3 weeks working on amazing projects, and now we saw 12 of our favorites as our finalists present with their live demos. And together we contribute 175 projects just in the last 3 weeks. Spanning anywhere from DeFi to scalability in Ethereum to experiments with governance. And just to summarize how this year has been for us, we've been able to onboard and host 713 developers over the course of this year by running online and in-person events. And together they've contributed to over 470 projects into the Ethereum ecosystem. As I kind of said this earlier today, some of these projects have gone to become well-funded companies from just this year. Some of them have been just fun experiments. And the thing that's consistent with all of them is that 100% of these projects have been made because the people wanted to build it for themselves, and they really cared about sort of bringing that on and trying that out and just working on it directly and sharing it with all of us. So with that said, I would like to thank all of you for spending the last 4 weeks with us and everybody who was here on the chat and our speakers today. And last but not least, even though we're going to announce some of our future events soon, we are going to hint about and announce that we will be doing eBogotá, our next hackathon that will be in person on August 6th to 8th in Bogotá, Colombia, in tandem with DEF CON. So kind of do keep an eye out on this announcement. And I want to thank all of you here for being with us. So thanks again, and hope you have a great afternoon and evening and night, and goodbye.