Hello. Welcome to Byzantine Dreams with Michael and Carolyn.
In this episode, we speak with our friend and colleague, Jameson Lopp. Jameson is one
of the most well-known cyber punks, OG Bitcoiners, and thought leaders in the realms of privacy,
personal sovereignty, self-defense, and other related topics working today.
So we wanted to speak with Jameson for our first episode for three reasons. First, because
of his deep history with the Bitcoin project. Many out there know him from his role in Bitcoin
governance, namely the Segwit debates and split of 2016. And the second reason is because
his strong individual autonomy and anti-censorship perspective is a very crucial one to question
and explore during the deep social unrest that permeates 2020, in our opinion.
And lastly, so few people know this about Jameson, but we wanted to highlight his affinity
for the promise of technology above all else. Jameson is a wonderfully imaginative and optimistic
futurist. He believes in the singularity, the promise of human space travel and colonization,
the ability to upload your consciousness someday, all that fun stuff. And I suppose he only
naturally has these inclinations, since he's somebody that was so important to bringing
Bitcoin as we know it into existence. But yeah, we wanted to highlight that creativity
and hopefulness he certainly possesses, but maybe you so rarely hear play out on crypto
Twitter, which leans towards the angry and provocative rather than hopeful.
Speaking of which, so one note for our listeners. We touched several times, actually quite a
bit during this episode on Jameson's advocacy for gun ownership and his stance on self-defense.
Those of you that don't know Jameson may find this surprising. We thought it'd be prudent
to give you a little bit of background on this. So in 2017, Jameson was the victim of
a swatting attack. For those of you who don't know, swatting is a harassment tactic where
a attacker calls into local emergency services. So 911 reporting a serious law enforcement
emergency like a bomb threat, a mental health emergency, a hostage situation, et cetera,
which hoaxes the law enforcement into dispatching emergency response services to that victim's
house. So in Jameson's case, the attacker was a disgruntled Bitcoiner who had gotten
ahold of Jameson's personal address online and they called in a hostage situation. This
dispatched a SWAT team to Jameson's house. Jameson was actually away at the time, but
his family was home. Thankfully, he was safe. His family was safe. Nothing came of this,
but people die this way every year. So note that Jameson's affinity for firearms predates
this event, but it was certainly sharpened by it. His views are not necessarily ones
that Carolyn and I are a hundred percent aligned with, but they're incredibly well-reasoned
and internally consistent and important. Interestingly, with the swatting event, Jameson does not
blame the attacker, but actually the incentive structures around swatting that he believes
enable and encourage this kind of behavior.
So that's the context for this episode. Now you know. And without further ado, here's
the first episode of Byzantine Dreams with Jameson Lopp.
Hi there. Welcome to Byzantine Dreams. This is Carolyn Rakow.
And I'm Michael Haley.
And today we are joined with a great friend of ours, the cypherpunk Jameson Lopp.
Hello.
Awesome. So Jameson is the CTO and co-founder of CASA and also a colleague of mine.
And a former colleague of mine. We actually all used to work together at CASA. Yeah. I'm
thinking back to some retreats back in the day when the team was smaller. And actually,
I think I shot my first gun with Jameson at a CASA retreat, which was quite an experience.
I'm glad I had that one.
It was a tragic shooting accident, but I'm glad the team bonding was strong. So, all
right. Well, let's just jump right in here. So Jameson, the other weekend on Twitter,
you were unpacking a acronym that's been prevalent on the Twitter waves, which is ACAB or A-C-A-B.
We want to use this as a piece of yarn that we can tug on to get a much bigger sweater.
Can you describe what that acronym is and what it means and why it's been circulating
recently?
Well, it means different things to different people, of course. In general, a lot of people
are using it just to show their distaste or distrust or hatred of law enforcement by saying
that all cops are bastards. But I think that it does go a lot deeper than just hating cops
or hating some of the bad things that they have done or have been caught doing recently
and over pretty much the entire history of policing. This fundamentally goes back to
the creation of public police forces, which at least in America, I think happened over
100 years ago at this point. But really what people are saying is that in order to participate
in this organization, which is an enforcement organization, you can argue about whether
it's good or bad. But if you're going to be an enforcer, whether it's for a public organization
or for a private organization like the mafia or organized crime or whatever, all of these
organizations have enforcers and they essentially are the ones that are doing the dirty work.
They are the real embodiment of that organization's propensity to use violence to further its
own goals. It becomes more complicated when we're talking about nation-state law enforcement,
government-backed law enforcement, because they have this additional claim that everything
that they're doing is for the good of their own citizens. But we have to realize that
the primary goal is to maintain law and order. And the law, of course, means whatever the
rules that the government and the politicians have decided are the best ones to set forward.
And that doesn't necessarily mean that those rules are the ones that are the best for all
of the citizens.
There's a core gesture in Kant's writing that the evil of doing violence or doing evil can
never be greater than the violence of declaring that some things are evil and some things
are not. Could you talk a little bit, real, real high level here, Jameson, just on your
views on policing and the state generally? You hinted at it before, but maybe we could
talk a little bit about the state's monopoly on violence writ large.
One of the most important things to maintaining order, whatever that is, is basically being
the final say. You have to have the ability to turn your words or whatever it is that
you dictate is good or allowed or lawful and turn that into the physical. And that means
you need to have someone physically going out there and finding the people that are
not obeying the words and somehow convincing them that they need to follow whatever you
are saying. And of course, at the end of the day, you can't just have a polite argument
with the vast majority of people and assume that you're going to convince them of whatever
you're saying. At the end of the day, it has to come down to physical intimidation, coercion,
or otherwise taking physical control of someone's body so that they are no longer capable of
undertaking whatever actions it is that you're disapproving of.
Yeah, I think it's been really jarring for a lot of people to be faced with the reality
of what policing is, of what the downsides and the tragedies of living in a state. If
you were to describe that power dynamic very succinctly in terms of what is the state and
why does it need to have a monopoly on violence? Yeah, I mean, I think the thesis, what a lot
of these ideas are really built upon is that it is the logic of violence that fundamentally
shapes society as we know it. And what that really means when we say the logic of violence,
we mean like, what does violence get you? And the fact that it is easier to destroy
things than it is to create things. And so the result of this is that power generally
means the power to destroy rather than the power to create. And so the entities and organizations
that form around power that end up being the most powerful are the ones that are capable
and willing to use violence. And there's a pretty good argument to be made that what
you see on the small scale with things like organized crime and protection rackets, that
is just a small nation state. Essentially, organized crime is a derogatory term that
the larger, more powerful organized crime ring that calls itself the government and
the nation state uses as a pejorative towards the smaller organizations that aspire to have
a monopoly on violence, but they only really have a small amount of power and control.
And you can go back through all of human history and see how the logic of violence has unfolded
over millennia. It has generally remained the same, but technology has changed it to
the extent that the power of weapons and the power of organized entities to have even greater
concentrated control and be able to extend the range of their violence is essentially
resulted in consolidation such that in the very, very early days, we were just talking
about little tribes going around. The extent of their power would be limited basically
to horseback type ranges. And these days, the most powerful nation states have intercontinental
ballistic missiles. And we're now talking about mutually assured destruction type scenarios.
That's great. That's a very clear definition. I always love the historical POV. And so you
mentioned speaking of historical, the size of the types of property and spaces that people
are using violence to protect has changed. Technology has changed and that means that
weapons have changed. You're somebody that is definitely a proponent of the freedom to
own a gun if you so choose. I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about your philosophy
around gun ownership and also how you think about other sorts of weapons or technology
that has changed throughout history in the context of this monopoly of violence dynamic.
Yeah. I mean, there's multiple aspects to it. One is just the fundamental belief that
every human has the right to defend themselves against aggressors. And people get hung up
on the whole firearm thing because that just happens to be the currently most accessible
to individuals type of weapon. And it has proliferated throughout America to the point
that I think we have more firearms than citizens at this point. But I look beyond that. I believe
there's no moral reason why someone, if they have the ability and interest to do so, should
not be able to own say a rocket launcher or a tank or even like a large naval vessel.
It's actually not outside the historical purview for private citizens to own flotillas of armed
vessels. I mean, back in the like 17, 1800s, a lot of both fleets of pirates and fleets
of anti-pirates, pirate hunters were owned by private individuals. They were not nation
state owned. And yes, I mean, obviously you have to be on the wealthier side to be able
to own and control that level of resources. But I think that there's the fundamental reason
that if you at least want to use your resources in defense, then you should be able to do
so. You shouldn't have to worry about some larger entity claiming a monopoly on violence
preventing you from doing that. But then from a different perspective, what do we really
want the power dynamics to be? If we have one entity that is controlling a large amount
of power, a large amount of land resources, et cetera, and all of the people who are living
in the territory claimed by that entity have no way to defend themselves other than like
primitive rocks and sticks type of protest movement, throwing them at armored soldiers
and law enforcers and just having them balance off, then what kind of society is that? There's
some fair quotes around this, like the government should fear its people rather than the people
fearing its government. And it's really, it's about power dynamics. At least if we want
to claim that we don't live in a dictatorship or an authoritarian society, if we want to
claim that people have the freedom and the ability to fight back against government overreach
and tyrannical government, then the people need to have some level of armaments and you
can argue about whether or not a small arm is sufficient. I believe it is. I believe
there's a lot of historical examples of guerrilla fighter movements that even the most sophisticated
military technology wielded by the United States has not been able to quash. And if
we're going to be able to have any sense of the government even somewhat fearing its citizens,
then the citizens need a way to fight back in that situation.
Yeah. Well, as we all know, certain forms of cryptography in this country were munitions
and land. I think it's actually a really interesting time to also tag that the individualist reading
of the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment is pertaining primarily to the right of individuals
to bear arms rather than militias. You could argue that that was really forwarded to a
large extent by the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, where I grew up.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Tell us that story, Michael.
Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, for much of the history of this country, the Second Amendment
was not the topic of discussion that it's been for the last 50 years or so. It was kind
of this red-haired stepchild of the Bill of Rights. The Black Panthers, specifically Huey
Newton, who was a law student at the time he was working with Bobby Seale to help create
the Black Panther Party, was really concerned about police brutality and police violence
and put two and two together when he was in a constitutional law class and thinking about
how they would effectively curtail abuse of power by the police in West Oakland. He and
other members of the party got shotguns and started monitoring the police. I will include
some show notes for people who want to read more and learn more about this, but it's really
interesting. This propelled a pushback at the state level and even outside of that with
maybe not draconian gun laws, but definitely more restrictive gun laws throughout the country.
That's what sparked the creation of the modern NRA as we know it and the current, again,
more individualist reading of the Second Amendment. You wonder if this happened 10 or 20 years
later if the Panthers would have had PGP. That would have been the domain of the standoff.
The other thing that's been top of mind for us, Jameson, is with everything that's happened
with coronavirus, the extent of the disruption that bioweapons could cause to day-to-day
life has, I think, really started to sink in and become real for me and I think probably
real for a lot of our listeners. Could you talk a little bit about how this changes the
payoff structure of violence?
Well, there is a big question, I think, about payoff. It definitely changes the requirements
for creating a weapon of mass destruction. Why would anyone want to do that? I doubt
that you could find a profitable way to do that, but you can certainly control a lot
of people and make them afraid and make them change their day-to-day lives as a result.
But essentially, what technology does is it makes things cheaper. And what we've seen
is that the resources required to create things, in this case, create destructive things, have
continued to decrease. So you no longer need to have a multi-million dollar lab, for example,
to be able to play around with organisms at the cellular level and essentially engineer
different DNA and replicate it and see how it interacts with other biological organisms.
Another thing happening with firearms, for example, it's always been possible to create
your own firearms, but before 10 years ago, you needed to have machining skills. You needed
to have some reasonably heavy equipment that individuals could still acquire, but required
much higher level amount of skill and time to go into building a firearm. And now you
can literally download a file and calibrate a $200 machine that gets shipped to your house
and put some plastic filament into it. And a day or so later, you've got a lower part
of a handgun or AR-15 that you can use part kits and other completely unregulated materials
to build a fully functioning firearm. Yeah. So you're like wet lab style, 3D printing
wild. How does Bitcoin fit in here? That's obviously Jameson, where you spend much all
your professional energy these days. What in your mind can Bitcoin be beyond what it
is today? Like what can it become?
So everything that we've talked about so far has been about the capability for individuals
and other entities to destroy. The interesting thing about Bitcoin and cryptography in general
is that it creates a propensity and ability for people to protect. And what we're really
talking about is protecting data. It allows you to use math to take any sensitive piece
of data that you don't want anyone who is unauthorized to be able to access and essentially
wrap it up in a digital safe that is impossible to crack without the right key. Even nation-state
level resources and all the NSA's servers combined can't crack into a well-designed
cryptographically secured piece of data. So the question is, if that's the fundamental
building block that we have to start building safety as opposed to destruction, what can
we build with that building block? And we had during the 90s, the crypto wars where
you referred to government was still considering cryptography, a munition, something that was
only really supposed to be used by military for military secrets, et cetera, et cetera.
We saw cypherpunk movements start to rise up as people were thinking through, what can
we do with these building blocks? How do we build anonymous systems so that people can
communicate freely without having to worry about government or corporate prying, without
having to worry about potential consequences of secrets being made public? And one of the
many things that was worked on in those early days was, how do we use this fundamental building
block to build a new financial system that is more secure and not reliant upon all of
these choke points and third party actors that are controlling things? And there were
quite a few attempts at that until eventually Bitcoin came around. And now we have this
system that has been running for, let's see, 11 years now and withstood a variety of attacks.
It has shown itself to be a robust, resilient financial network. Now it's far from perfect.
There's still a lot of work to be done. But unlike traditional financial system that is
built for maximum efficiency and liquidity and whatnot, this one is built for maximum
robustness. So we're seeing a completely different type of system rise up and we're still really
trying to figure out what we can do with it. There's a lot of very technically minded and
creative people that are continuing to come up with new use cases and continuing to experiment
with the possibilities that a system like this can really afford for us. But ultimately
it is about building a system where people can take control of their finances. And perhaps
over the long term, the architecture of a system like this can be used as a model for
other types of systems that are also architected with the fundamental goal being robustness
and security and giving power to the individual user rather than what we've seen with all
the other systems that are, oh, we're going to give maximum efficiency and utility to
as many people as possible, but we're going to do that by having one single entity controlling
everything and we're just going to hope that they play nice.
Before I started working at CASA, I read an essay you wrote called notes on a swatting.
I wanted to quickly read two sentences from that and then ask you a follow up question.
So while I certainly blame the attacker for the actions they took, my root cause analysis
places the blame squarely upon law enforcement for creating an exploitable vulnerability.
The militarization of police combined with non-existent authentication creates a great
environment for swatting. So what I want to ask here is, are there lessons about the transparency
or the design of incentives in Bitcoin that the outside world can learn from?
I think so, though they are probably not directly obvious to most people. I mean, I think the
good example of the swatting cases and the vulnerability there is that that is all a
result of fragile systems that have continued to have more layers built on top of them.
So for example, the problem here with what I was referring to like lack of authentication
is that the original phone system was very simple. Every phone number was a landline
and it was fairly simple to trace where a phone call came from because there were physical
wires going somewhere. Now, fast forward 50, 100 years and we have these additional layers
that are built on top of the phone system actually like internet interfaces and proxies
that can allow someone to interface with the phone system through so many layers of abstraction
at a software and hardware level that law enforcement isn't even able to trace where
the call is necessarily coming from. And law enforcement has not adapted to that. I mean,
there are a million different things that you could do to require stronger authentication
on these calls, but they just haven't gotten to that point yet. So how do we look at Bitcoin
and say we can learn lessons from this? Well, I think it's once again, it's about building
for resilience and robustness and building from a defensive standpoint rather than a
just can I make it work? And then we'll just keep building other stuff on top of it and
not worrying about potential negative consequences down the line.
Yeah. I've got one more question squarely on Bitcoin and what it can be. So I think
one of the things that you're really well known for is you're a largely respected leader
in the Bitcoin space. And I know you can say that there are no leaders in Bitcoin, only
code. But I think few people would argue with me on that one. And so I'm curious to hear
your take on like, what do you think the next Segwit style change will be in Bitcoin?
So we didn't really get too much into, I guess, the governance of Bitcoin. But the easiest
way to explain it is that there is no governance. It is crypto anarchy. It is an inversion of
power, such that instead of having command and control, you know, hierarchical top down
type of system, instead, it's this like, bottom up, like bubbling from each individual into
forming a sort of organic result of the consensus for whatever Bitcoin should be. So the result
of that is that it's harder to describe. It's almost impossible to define. Rather, we end
up observing it. And as arguments happen, we try to aggregate what the general sentiments
are across the various participants in the ecosystem. And we're constantly searching
for signals, right? There's in a lot of systems of governance and bureaucracy or whatever,
it's very simple, like you take a vote, and that's your signal. But in a system like this,
where there is no like registration of identity, you have to worry about things like civil
attacks, people, you know, essentially create cloning many versions of themselves digitally
and trying to push sentiment in one way or another with sock puppets and other social
media type of attacks. It's harder to find signal. And that can be very frustrating for
people. And that's what results in some people eventually getting tired of using voice and
they end up using the exit option, which is one of the primary, I think, the values of
these systems, which you you're not going to really find in traditional governance.
Because usually exit means like civil war, you know, something terrible. But on the internet,
if you want to exit, then you just click a button. And now, you know, you go off and
you create your own network. And there are certainly ramifications, but you don't have
to worry about fighting with people anymore, because you essentially just stop talking.
So what can we learn from all of this? Where is it all going? It's hard to predict where
it's going, what is going to become the next big point of contention. But you know, what
happened with the scaling debate and segwit, etc, etc. That was all due to a single point
of contention around should Bitcoin optimize for low transaction fees, or should Bitcoin
optimize for low cost of auditing the entire system. And it was the latter that eventually
won out. And so I think the real question is, is there another one of these points of,
you know, what should Bitcoin optimize for that will be as contentious? And, you know,
one of the big candidates is privacy. Should we make changes to Bitcoin that will improve
privacy? And then what is the trade off to that? There are a lot of interesting privacy
technologies that have been developed. Most of them seem to be rejected by the Bitcoin
ethos, either because they add too much complexity, or, you know, require, once again, too much
data, too much cost, computing cost, increasing the cost of verifying the system. Or in some
cases with like more exotic cryptography, like zero knowledge proves, they conflict
with another major ethos of Bitcoin, which is the ability to audit the entire money supply.
So I wrote a blog post, I think, back at the beginning of the year, where I was trying
to list as many of the major ethos points of Bitcoin as possible. And I think there's
at least a dozen or so. But, you know, some of them are technical, some of them are philosophical,
some of them are economic. And that's why, that's why the system is so hard to predict,
and why it's so hard to say what the next major conflict will be over, because there
are so many different perspectives that are coming together to form this thing that we
call Bitcoin. And it's, you know, multifaceted, multivariable, trying to figure out, you know,
what are the next two big things that are going to run into conflict with each other
and blow up? I think sociologists will, and anthropologists will have a lot of fun digging
through the Bitcoin history. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it feels like Bitcoin
is something that's still being gradually discovered as opposed to invented.
Yeah, definitely. I think at this point, this might be the right
juncture to start looking at slightly more barflung futuristic scenarios. And, you know,
what Bitcoin looks like if you put it in that sort of snow globe. So, man, Jameson, like
apart from Bitcoin, or even VR, because I think cats out of the bag now that you're
kind of a VR guy, what's some of the more like futuristic tech that you're excited about
seeing over the next, I don't know, 40 years? Well, over 40 years, I'm really hopeful that
we will see greater life extension technology, you know, just want to get to the singularity.
I don't want to miss out on the singularity. You know, definitely hoping Ray, is it Kurzweil?
Yeah, Ray Kurzweil is correct about 2050. But the crazy thing about all of this is,
you know, exponential acceleration of technology makes some really far-fetched ideas actually
be plausible even within our own lifetime. I'm certainly interested in seeing space technology
continue to progress after being dormant for so long. You know, it was basically a nation-state
dick measuring contest for a number of decades there. But we're finally getting to like real
commercialization of space and actually seeing innovation happen that I think may result
in more meaningful progress, you know, getting humans to be a multi-planetary and hopefully
eventually like multi-solar race is the only way that we are going to have sufficient redundancy
against edge case astrophysical events that could completely wipe us out. Or of course,
us wiping each other out. But ultimately, you know, what I want to see is the ability
to apply these same types of technologies to safeguard myself and my consciousness.
And the only way that I can really see someone being able to become a sovereign individual
in the purest sense of the word would be to be able to digitize yourself so that you could
then protect yourself with the same type of cryptographic mechanisms and ability to essentially
back yourself up into, you know, multiple redundant geographic places that are no longer
under the single control of one entity or another.
Yeah, well, so I have a question about this, Jameson. So if I were to make a digital copy
of myself, here's what I'm not clear on is if the, it's like a really basic transhumanist
question, but I've never been able to get past it, is if I, you know, we take like,
if we make a digital backup of, you know, my great matter, it's unclear that my consciousness
is going to find itself in that new substrate, right? And like, okay, if I make a bunch of
digital backups of myself, but I die, do I even know that those backups are going on?
It's this like consciousness, awareness, transverse question that's always been sticky for me.
I mean, it's certainly a mind blowing thing to think about. But, you know, we have no
evidence, I think, to show otherwise that, you know, if you make a copy of yourself,
the copy is not every bit the same as you. It's kind of like, what is the human body?
You know, do we want to take this thing down to the biological mechanics level of, you
know, humans are a machine, we're an automaton that accepts inputs and creates outputs. And
it just so happens that our central processing unit is currently beyond our capability to
fully understand. But I do believe that, you know, it is something that will eventually
be fully understood. And perhaps once we fully understand how the brain works, and can make
copies of it, be they biological copies or digital copies, and then observe that all
of these copies act the exact same, you know, perhaps then it will become more clear exactly,
you know, what consciousness really is.
You had an interesting anecdote once, Jameson, about thinking about brain wallets and cryogenics
and some of these interesting like consciousness questions. I think that'd be a good one to
repeat for our audience.
This is like the Athens Bitcoin meetup that you're talking about, Jameson, with the like,
okay, what's the incentive for someone to like unthaw you? If you're...
Well, this is a problem that I don't believe has been fully solved. But there is an interesting
question that comes down to like, if you believe that like the Alcor style freezing of your
head in order to resuscitate you and, you know, hopefully bring you back to life and
fix whatever problems that killed you in the first place. If that's like an actual feasible
thing, then how do you ensure that you actually get resuscitated? How do you ensure that if
that company needs to dedicate resources for hundreds of years to keep your head preserved
so that it can be, you know, analyzed and reconstituted and whatever, how do you incentivize
them to actually do that? Well, I mean, I guess you could like put money in a trust
and, you know, dictate that the organization of that trust and the people who are fiduciaries
and responsible for managing the trust assets continue to be prudent in how they use them
so that they can continue paying the preservation company on a regular basis. But I think that
ignores, you know, some potential macro failures that could occur. So what if instead you could
create some sort of bounty and essentially, you know, prove that you have the ability
to access funds, but the only way that those funds are going to get accessed are, you know,
if you're resuscitated. The main reason I think that this is a hard problem to solve
is that we have to assume that any technology that is sufficiently capable of, you know,
scanning your brain, bringing you back to life is probably also capable of extracting
any secrets that you're keeping in your brain. So I think it would have to be a multi-piece
type of setup that, you know, perhaps you have some instructions that you keep in your
brain, but, you know, it can't just be, you know, a single private key to a Bitcoin address,
for example. That's an interesting, you know, Bitcoin enabling like future transhumanist
kind of vision. But I'm curious, do you think there are other ways that Bitcoin can aid
in some of these far future tech scenarios?
I mean, AI is another important one.
I think that combining the ability for machines to essentially own money that, you know, the
machines truly own the money and can control it without having to worry, of course, about
third parties gives rise to, you know, the idea of the DAO, the autonomous corporation,
the ability to create an entire like operational infrastructure that basically is like self-sustaining
is very interesting to me. I think one idea or one simple example of this, for example,
that combines multiple early stage technologies of what we're seeing today would be, let's
say I want to own a taxi company, but not just a traditional taxi company. I want to
own a much more efficient taxi company that doesn't have to rely on humans at all. Rather,
my taxi company is just a piece of software that is managing a fleet of self-driving cars
that have, you know, full capability to diagnose themselves and report back on their status
and take directives from me to pick up fares and drop them off, et cetera, et cetera. And
by me, of course, I mean the software that I write to run the distributed organization.
And you know, these taxis would, of course, be accepting cryptocurrency that would go
into the coffers of the DAO. And as the taxis needed to sustain themselves via like recharging
or going to a mechanic to get repaired for various things, then the DAO would disperse
the funds to whatever other entities it needed to interact with economically and so on and
so on. And perhaps you could even build more complex business logic and to determine when
it was time to increase your capability of servicing more fares and, you know, purchase
more cars and, you know, engage in other types of economic interaction. And there's really
no reason why all of these things can't be run by algorithms. I'm sure you would still
need to tweak the algorithms from time to time. Though, of course, if we really want
to start talking about artificial intelligence, then perhaps the algorithms can learn from
their own mistakes and tweak themselves. And I think this is where we really start getting
towards some of the singularity type concepts of, you know, what happens when we get to
the point that the vast majority of these complex organizations that currently comprise
our society and, in many cases, require enormous amounts of human effort to keep, you know,
maintained and running on a regular basis. What happens when they all get replaced by
software? There's some, you know, utopian ideas that that means it will become a post-work
society, a post-scarcity society, and perhaps all the humans will be able to just spend
their time doing creative, self-fulfilling endeavors rather than having to worry about,
you know, the lower tiers of, what is it, Maslov's hierarchy of needs.
Yeah, hierarchy.
The pyramid, yeah.
Yeah. Well, that's, I think, sort of like Oscar Wilde's ideal. He has an essay about
the soul of man in the age of socialism. And, you know, this was, you know, the 19th century,
the machines would come in, they'd take care of the dirty work, and humans would, you know,
paint and watercolor and, you know, make sculptures and, you know, sing songs.
That's the fully automated space communism kind of dream.
Yeah. Well, I guess, kind of starting to point towards a wrap-up here. I mean, for all these
different types of, I don't know, let's just say like singularity-related tech that we're
talking about, is there a central theme to what these are doing with respect to the dynamics
of offense and defense that we're talking about earlier?
Yeah. I mean, in general, you know, what we're seeing is that the propensity for violence,
the ability for an organization to exert control over others is decreasing, or at least the
resources required for individuals to amplify their power and to amplify their defensive
capabilities is becoming more affordable as a result of these technologies.
I think of it in terms of leverage, at least as a software engineer, I could spend my time
doing manual tasks and having to repeat them over and over again, or I can spend my time
writing a bit of code and then have that code proliferate all around the internet and potentially
get run thousands and millions and millions of times, and I only have to write it once.
That's like the type of leverage that I think we generally see in technology is the ability
to use a little bit of human creativity and then magnify and amplify it using the technology.
What is the result when it comes to individuals versus nation-states versus other types of
organizations that are based upon the ability to physically control things?
I think it means that we start to level the playing field more.
I think it means that people will have more leverage to essentially negotiate with these
other entities that are primarily based upon violence, that government and nation-states
will turn less into a thing where we are treated like subjects and more into a relationship
where we are treated like customers.
Less the involuntary taxation and more of the I'm paying you fees for protection and
these other socialized services.
That's the long-term progression that I think we're seeing, but it's still fairly early
days.
I think at the moment, the only people who have really attained that level of sovereign
individual status are currently billionaires.
The capitalists who are at the head of companies that are so large and so wealthy that they
are on par with nation-states in many regards and as a result have the ability, they have
the leverage to negotiate with nation-states for more favorable tax status, for example,
for more favorable regulations.
That is currently available to a small set of people and entities.
I think that it will become more and more available as technology continues to progress.
All right.
Well, do you have to ask this last question?
When we're flying around in server farms and outer space, are sovereign individuals still
going to be strapped?
Are we still going to have guns?
We are certainly going to have some sort of offensive capabilities.
How will that manifest itself in the digital realm?
That is an interesting question.
We're going to need to have much better filters and essentially, I think this is one of the
more interesting aspects of artificial intelligence that I am interested in, which is a glorified
personal assistant.
But if we want to build a society that is more like a crypto-anarchy, cyberpunk, futuristic,
individualist society, then we need to build tools that enable us to, on an individual
level, replace a lot of the services that nation states and governments provide to us.
Through that, I mean basically various social services, whether it's your protection service,
your health service, your insurance, et cetera, et cetera.
These are all operations that the bureaucracy of governance is essentially contracting out
to other providers.
Sometimes it's public workers, sometimes it's private contractors.
The roads aren't generally built by government employees, they're built by private contractors
that negotiate contracts with the governments.
Essentially what I'm getting to is that if you want to replace all of that, you need
the ability for each individual to enter into and negotiate and select from contracts for
every one of those services that they need.
If you want to have truly free markets of all of these things, then that's going to
overwhelm the average individual to have to go through that.
There's a lot of overhead.
But if you can build these artificial intelligence personal assistants that essentially know
who you are and what decisions you would make, then you can start offloading a lot of that
mental overhead onto software that essentially acts as an autonomous agent on your behalf
and I think can help replace a lot of the overhead that is currently performed by these
bureaucratic institutions.
That's really interesting, I know some folks who are thinking about a similar type of cognitive
overhead that they see in the future but applied more towards personal brand, aesthetic, cultural
lifestyle sorts of things.
It gets more important too because obviously these networks sort of interpenetrate us more
and more.
I mean, it's bad enough if there's something wrong with your phone or your laptop.
But I think in the next 30 years or so, it's reasonable to expect that at least some part
of the population will have some sort of brain machine interface.
Yeah, I just hope that we build really good firewalls.
Once we start talking about these more sensitive operations of digitizing people or direct
neural interfaces, that's one I think it does behoove us to switch the architectural model,
switch to building models that are robustness first rather than optimizing for other things.
I think the most applicable current model for that is it's basically aerospace engineering.
You have to think of it in terms of high stakes, high precision, very low tolerance for mistakes
type of engineering because the smallest mistake can result in catastrophe.
It's just a different way of engineering things, which is antithetical to what I would call
web engineering in general.
Web engineering is move fast, iterate fast, break things, learn, try again.
That's great for innovation, but it's terrible for high stakes stuff.
We've seen a lot of controversy in the crypto space when new projects come along and they
may take the web engineering tactic and end up with a lot of explosions and people getting
hurt.
Sure, you can learn a lot from it and move forward.
Hopefully eventually you stop doing that and people stop blowing themselves up and you
can have something more stable.
For the people who get blown up, I'm sure they would have preferred that the opposite
engineering approach had been taken that had been more conservative and on the side of
safety first.
Yeah, that's a really interesting and a whole other rabbit hole and we'll have to have you
on another time to talk about your engineering philosophy because I think that that's fascinating
and definitely something that the entire crypto space could benefit from hearing.
But I think for our time today, we're coming up a bit past an hour so might be a good time
to wrap.
Jameson, thank you so much for coming and chatting with us.
Personally it's been great to work with you and even more wonderful to have you as a friend
and appear in the space, thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, Jameson, thanks so much.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Yeah, see you back at the ground.
See you in group chat in 25 minutes.