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Vitalik Buterin is co-creator of and author of the white paper that launched Ethereum and ether, which is a cryptocurrency that is currently the second-largest digital currency after bitcoin. Ethereum has a lot of interesting technical ideas that are defining the future of blockchain technology, and Vitalik is one of the most brilliant people innovating this space today.

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So let's ask the high philosophical question about money.

It's a kind of game and it's a game where we have points and if you have points, there's this 1 move where you can reduce your points by a number and increase someone else's points by the same number.

Like, for example, you know, You can have other kinds of fair games, like you're going to have a game where if I give someone a point and you give someone a point, then instead of that person getting 2 points, that person gets 4 points.

But money is easy to set up and it serves a lot of useful functions.

And so it kind of just survives in society as a meme for thousands of years.

And it's also useful for denominating future payments, a unit of account.

So what, if you look at the history of money in human civilization, what, just, if you're a student of history, like how has its role or just the mechanisms of money changed over time in your view?

Even if we just look at the 20th century or before and then leading up to cryptocurrencies, that's something you think about?

Yeah, and I think the big thing in the 20th century is we saw a lot more intermediation, I guess.

The first part is the move from adding more of different kinds of banking, And then we saw the move from dollars being backed by gold to dollars being backed by gold that's only redeemable by certain people to dollars not being backed by anything to this system where you have a bunch of free-floating currencies and then people getting bank accounts, and then those things becoming electronic, people getting accounts with payment processors that have bank accounts.

That's such a fascinating philosophical idea that money might not be backed by anything.

Is that fascinating to you, that money can exist without being backed by something physical?

If we look at the future of human civilization, is it possible to have money at the large scale at such a hugely productive and rich societies, be able to operate successfully without money being backed by anything physical.

I feel like the interesting thing about the 21st century especially is that a lot of the important valuable things are not backed by anything.

Like if you look at like tech companies, for example, like something like Twitter, you could theoretically imagine that if all of the employees wanted to, they could come together, they would quit and start working on Twitter 2.0.

And then they have value and just build the exact same product or possibly build a better product and then just kind of continue on from there.

And the original Twitter would just not have people left anymore.

There is theoretically kind of code and IP that's owned by the company, but in reality, good programmers could probably rewrite all that stuff in 3 months.

So the reason why the thing has value is just kind of network effects and coordination problems, right?

Like these employees in reality aren't going to switch all at once, and also the users aren't all going to switch at once because it's just difficult for them to switch at once.

And so there's these meta-stable equilibria in interactions between thousands and millions of people that are just actually quite sticky, even though if you try to kind of assume that everyone's a perfectly rational and kind of perfectly slippery spherical cow, they don't seem to exist at all.

That stickiness, do you have a sense, a grasp of the fundamental dynamics, like the physics of that stickiness?

It seems to work, but I think some of the cryptocurrency ideas kind of rely on it working.

It's the sort of thing that's definitely been economically modeled a lot.

The kind of analogy of something as similar that you often see in textbooks is what is a government?

If, for example, 80% of people in a country just tomorrow suddenly had the idea that the laws that are currently the laws of the government that currently is the government are just people and some other thing is the government and they just kind of start acting like it, then that would kind of become the new reality.

And then the question is, well, what happens if between 0 and 80 people or 80% of people start believing that?

And the thing you see is that If there is 1 of these kind of switches happening, this kind of revolution, then if you're the first person to join, then you probably don't have the incentive to do that.

But then if you're the 55th percentile person to join, then suddenly it becomes quite safe too.

And so it definitely is the sort of thing that you can kind of try to analyze and understand mathematically.

But 1 of the kind of results is that the sort of like when the switch happens definitely can be chaotic sometimes.

Yeah, but still, to me, the idea that the network affects the fact that human beings at a scale of millions, billions can share even the idea of currency, all agree.

That's just, I know economists can model it.

I'm a skeptic on the economic, and it's like, so my favorite sort of field, maybe recreationally, psychology, is trying to understand human behavior.

And I think sometimes people just kind of pretend that they can have a grasp on human behavior, even though it's such a messy space that all the models that psychology or economics, those different perspectives on human behavior can have are difficult.

It's difficult to know how much that's wishful thinking and how much it is actually getting to the core of understanding human behavior.

But on that idea, what do you think is the role of money in human motivation?

So do you think money from an economics perspective, from a psychology perspective, is core to human desires?

Money is definitely very far from the only motivator.

And that's 1 of the closest things you have to a universal motivator.

Because ultimately, in like almost any person in the world, if you ask them to do something, they'll be more inclined to do it if you also offer them money.

There's definitely many cases where people will do things other than things that maximize how much money they have, and that happens all the time.

But a lot of those other things are kind of but much more specific to and of who that person is and of where their situation is, the relationship between the motive and the action and these other things.

What do you think is in the interplay of the other motivator from like Nietzsche perspective is power.

Do you think those are conflicting ideas?

Do you think, I mean that's the 1 of the ideas that decentralized currency, decentralized applications are looking at is who holds the power?

There's definitely people who want money because it gives them power.

And then even if money doesn't seem to explicitly be about money.

A lot of things that people spend money on are ultimately about social status of some kind.

I definitely view those 2 things as interplaying.

And then there's also money as just a way of like measuring how successful you are, I guess, a scoreboard, right?

I mean, like if you have $4 billion, then the main benefit you get from going up, or 1 of the big benefits you get from going up to 6000000 dollars is that now instead of being below the guy who has 5, you're above the guy who has 5.

So you think money could be kind of in the game of life, it's also a measure of self-worth.

It's definitely how a lot of people perceive it.

And I'm not saying it's a healthy thing that people define their self-worth as money because it's definitely far from a perfect indicator of how much value you provide to society or anything like this.

But I definitely think that as a matter of current practice, a bunch of people do feel that way.

So what does utopia from an economic perspective look like to you?

I guess the economist's utopia would be 1 where everything is incentive aligned in the sense that there aren't enough conflicts between what satisfies your goals and what is good for everyone in the world as a whole.

Does that mean there's still poor people and rich people?

Do you think ideas of objectivism, where the market rules is strong.

Is there different economic philosophies that just seem to be reflective of what a utopia would be?

So I definitely think that existing economic philosophies do end up kind of systematically deviating from the utopia in a lot of ways.

Like, 1 of the big things I talk about, for example, is public goods, right?

And public goods are especially important on the internet, right?

The idea is with kind of money as this game where, you know, I lose a few coins and you gain the same number of coins is that this usually happens in a trade where I lose some money, you gain some money, you lose a sandwich and I gain a sandwich.

And this kind of model works really well when the thing that we're using money to incentivize this set of private goods, right?

Things that you provide to 1 person where the benefit comes to 1 person.

But on the internet especially, but also many, many contexts off the internet, There's actions that individuals or groups can take where instead of the benefit going to 1 person, the benefit just goes to many people at the same time and you can't control who the benefit goes to.

For example, this podcast, we publish it And when it's published, you don't have any fine-grained control over like, oh, these 38,000 people can watch it and then these other 29,000 people can't.

Once the number goes high enough, then people will just copy it.

And then when I write articles on a blog, then they're just like free for everyone.

And that stuff's even harder to prevent anyone from copying.

So aside from that, things like, you know, scientific research, for example, and even taking more pedestrian examples like climate change mitigation would be a big 1.

So there's a lot of things in the world where you have these kind of individual actions with enough concentrated costs and distributed benefits and money as a point system does not do a good job of encouraging these things.

And 1 of the kind of other things even tangentially connected to crypto, but kind of theoretically outside of it that I work on is this sort of mechanism called quadratic funding.

And the way to think about it is, and if imagine a point system where if 1 person gives coins to 1 other person, then it works the same way as money.

But if multiple people give coins to 1 person, and they do so anonymously, so it's kind of not in consideration for a specific service to that person themselves, then the number of coins that are received by that person is greater than just the sum of the number of coins that have given by those different people.

So the actual formula is that you take the square root of the amount that each person gave, then you add all the square roots and then you square the sum.

And the idea here would basically be that if, let's say, for example, you just started going off and planting a lot of trees, and there's a bunch of people that are really happy that you're planting trees and so they go and all kind of throw a coin your way.

Then there is basically the fact that you get more than the sum, you get this kind of square of square roots of these tiny nodes, that this actually kind of compensates for the tragedy of the commons.

There's even this kind of mathematical proof that it sort of optimally compensates for it.

This is just this idea that if there is this situation where there's some public good that lots of people benefit from, then no individual person wants to contribute to it, because if they contribute, they only get a small part of the benefit from their contribution, but they pay the full cost of their contribution.

In which context is this, sorry, what is the term, quadratic what?

In which context is this mechanism useful?

So obviously you said to combat the tragedy of the commons, but in which context do you see it as useful, actually, practically speaking?

Yeah, theoretically, public goods in general, right?

Yeah, so within the Ethereum ecosystem, for example, we've actually tried using this mechanism.

I wrote a couple of articles about this on Vitalik.ca where I go through some of the most recent rounds and it's been really interesting.

Some of the top ones that people supported, there were things like just online user interfaces that make it easier for people to interact with Ethereum.

There was documentation, there were podcasts, there were software clients, like kind of implementations of the Ethereum protocol, of privacy tools, Just like lots of things that are useful to lots of people.

When a lot of people are contributing, like funding a particular entity, that's really interesting.

Is there something special about the quadratic, the summing of the square roots and

So another way to think about it is like, imagine if N people each give a dollar, then the person gets N squared, right?

And so each individual person's contribution gets multiplied by n, right?

And so that kind of perfectly compensates for the kind of end to 1 tragedy of the commons.

And I'd recommend you go to, on vitalik.ca, I have this article called Quadratic Payments, a Primer, and highly recommend it.

It's at least my attempt so far of explaining the intuition behind this.


Speaker 0: So let's ask the high philosophical question about money. What at the highest level is money? What is money?

Speaker 1: It's a kind of game and it's a game where we have points and if you have points, there's this 1 move where you can reduce your points by a number and increase someone else's points by the same number. And these...

Speaker 2: So it's a fair game, hopefully.

Speaker 1: Well, it's 1 kind of fair game. Like, for example, you know, You can have other kinds of fair games, like you're going to have a game where if I give someone a point and you give someone a point, then instead of that person getting 2 points, that person gets 4 points. And that's also fair. But money is easy to set up and it serves a lot of useful functions. And so it kind of just survives in society as a meme for thousands of years.

Speaker 2: It's useful for the storage of wealth. It's useful for the exchange of value.

Speaker 1: And it's also useful for denominating future payments, a unit of account.

Speaker 2: A unit of account. So what, if you look at the history of money in human civilization, what, just, if you're a student of history, like how has its role or just the mechanisms of money changed over time in your view? Even if we just look at the 20th century or before and then leading up to cryptocurrencies, that's something you think about?

Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the big thing in the 20th century is we saw a lot more intermediation, I guess. The first part is the move from adding more of different kinds of banking, And then we saw the move from dollars being backed by gold to dollars being backed by gold that's only redeemable by certain people to dollars not being backed by anything to this system where you have a bunch of free-floating currencies and then people getting bank accounts, and then those things becoming electronic, people getting accounts with payment processors that have bank accounts.

Speaker 2: So what do you make of that? That's such a fascinating philosophical idea that money might not be backed by anything. Is that fascinating to you, that money can exist without being backed by something physical?

Speaker 1: It definitely is. Like what do

Speaker 2: you make of that? Like how is that possible? Is that stable? If we look at the future of human civilization, is it possible to have money at the large scale at such a hugely productive and rich societies, be able to operate successfully without money being backed by anything physical.

Speaker 1: I feel like the interesting thing about the 21st century especially is that a lot of the important valuable things are not backed by anything. Like if you look at like tech companies, for example, like something like Twitter, you could theoretically imagine that if all of the employees wanted to, they could come together, they would quit and start working on Twitter 2.0. And then they have value and just build the exact same product or possibly build a better product and then just kind of continue on from there. And the original Twitter would just not have people left anymore. There is theoretically kind of code and IP that's owned by the company, but in reality, good programmers could probably rewrite all that stuff in 3 months.

So the reason why the thing has value is just kind of network effects and coordination problems, right? Like these employees in reality aren't going to switch all at once, and also the users aren't all going to switch at once because it's just difficult for them to switch at once. And so there's these meta-stable equilibria in interactions between thousands and millions of people that are just actually quite sticky, even though if you try to kind of assume that everyone's a perfectly rational and kind of perfectly slippery spherical cow, they don't seem to exist at all.

Speaker 2: That stickiness, do you have a sense, a grasp of the fundamental dynamics, like the physics of that stickiness? It seems to work, but I think some of the cryptocurrency ideas kind of rely on it working.

Speaker 1: It's the sort of thing that's definitely been economically modeled a lot. The kind of analogy of something as similar that you often see in textbooks is what is a government? If, for example, 80% of people in a country just tomorrow suddenly had the idea that the laws that are currently the laws of the government that currently is the government are just people and some other thing is the government and they just kind of start acting like it, then that would kind of become the new reality. And then the question is, well, what happens if between 0 and 80 people or 80% of people start believing that? And the thing you see is that If there is 1 of these kind of switches happening, this kind of revolution, then if you're the first person to join, then you probably don't have the incentive to do that.

But then if you're the 55th percentile person to join, then suddenly it becomes quite safe too. And so it definitely is the sort of thing that you can kind of try to analyze and understand mathematically. But 1 of the kind of results is that the sort of like when the switch happens definitely can be chaotic sometimes.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but still, to me, the idea that the network affects the fact that human beings at a scale of millions, billions can share even the idea of currency, all agree. That's just, I know economists can model it. I'm a skeptic on the economic, and it's like, so my favorite sort of field, maybe recreationally, psychology, is trying to understand human behavior. And I think sometimes people just kind of pretend that they can have a grasp on human behavior, even though it's such a messy space that all the models that psychology or economics, those different perspectives on human behavior can have are difficult. It's difficult to know how much that's wishful thinking and how much it is actually getting to the core of understanding human behavior.

But on that idea, what do you think is the role of money in human motivation? So do you think money from an economics perspective, from a psychology perspective, is core to human desires?

Speaker 1: Money is definitely very far from the only motivator. It is a big motivator. And that's 1 of the closest things you have to a universal motivator. Because ultimately, in like almost any person in the world, if you ask them to do something, they'll be more inclined to do it if you also offer them money. There's definitely many cases where people will do things other than things that maximize how much money they have, and that happens all the time.

But a lot of those other things are kind of but much more specific to and of who that person is and of where their situation is, the relationship between the motive and the action and these other things.

Speaker 2: What do you think is in the interplay of the other motivator from like Nietzsche perspective is power. Do you think money equals power? Do you think those are conflicting ideas? Do you think, I mean that's the 1 of the ideas that decentralized currency, decentralized applications are looking at is who holds the power?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Money is definitely a kind of power. There's definitely people who want money because it gives them power. And then even if money doesn't seem to explicitly be about money. A lot of things that people spend money on are ultimately about social status of some kind.

I definitely view those 2 things as interplaying. And then there's also money as just a way of like measuring how successful you are, I guess, a scoreboard, right? So this kind of gets back to the game. I mean, like if you have $4 billion, then the main benefit you get from going up, or 1 of the big benefits you get from going up to 6000000 dollars is that now instead of being below the guy who has 5, you're above the guy who has 5.

Speaker 2: So you think money could be kind of in the game of life, it's also a measure of self-worth. It's like how we...

Speaker 1: It's definitely how a lot of people perceive it.

Speaker 2: Define ourselves in a hierarchy

Speaker 1: of society. Yeah. And I'm not saying it's a healthy thing that people define their self-worth as money because it's definitely far from a perfect indicator of how much value you provide to society or anything like this. But I definitely think that as a matter of current practice, a bunch of people do feel that way.

Speaker 2: So what does utopia from an economic perspective look like to you? What does a perfect world look like?

Speaker 1: I guess the economist's utopia would be 1 where everything is incentive aligned in the sense that there aren't enough conflicts between what satisfies your goals and what is good for everyone in the world as a whole.

Speaker 2: What do you think that would look like? Does that mean there's still poor people and rich people? There's still income inequality? Do you think Marxist ideas are strong? Do you think ideas of objectivism, where the market rules is strong.

Is there different economic philosophies that just seem to be reflective of what a utopia would be?

Speaker 1: So I definitely think that existing economic philosophies do end up kind of systematically deviating from the utopia in a lot of ways. Like, 1 of the big things I talk about, for example, is public goods, right? And public goods are especially important on the internet, right? The idea is with kind of money as this game where, you know, I lose a few coins and you gain the same number of coins is that this usually happens in a trade where I lose some money, you gain some money, you lose a sandwich and I gain a sandwich. And this kind of model works really well when the thing that we're using money to incentivize this set of private goods, right?

Things that you provide to 1 person where the benefit comes to 1 person. But on the internet especially, but also many, many contexts off the internet, There's actions that individuals or groups can take where instead of the benefit going to 1 person, the benefit just goes to many people at the same time and you can't control who the benefit goes to. For example, this podcast, we publish it And when it's published, you don't have any fine-grained control over like, oh, these 38,000 people can watch it and then these other 29,000 people can't. Once the number goes high enough, then people will just copy it. And then when I write articles on a blog, then they're just like free for everyone.

And that stuff's even harder to prevent anyone from copying. So aside from that, things like, you know, scientific research, for example, and even taking more pedestrian examples like climate change mitigation would be a big 1. So there's a lot of things in the world where you have these kind of individual actions with enough concentrated costs and distributed benefits and money as a point system does not do a good job of encouraging these things. And 1 of the kind of other things even tangentially connected to crypto, but kind of theoretically outside of it that I work on is this sort of mechanism called quadratic funding. And the way to think about it is, and if imagine a point system where if 1 person gives coins to 1 other person, then it works the same way as money.

But if multiple people give coins to 1 person, and they do so anonymously, so it's kind of not in consideration for a specific service to that person themselves, then the number of coins that are received by that person is greater than just the sum of the number of coins that have given by those different people. So the actual formula is that you take the square root of the amount that each person gave, then you add all the square roots and then you square the sum. Square

Speaker 2: the sum.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you give that. And the idea here would basically be that if, let's say, for example, you just started going off and planting a lot of trees, and there's a bunch of people that are really happy that you're planting trees and so they go and all kind of throw a coin your way. Then there is basically the fact that you get more than the sum, you get this kind of square of square roots of these tiny nodes, that this actually kind of compensates for the tragedy of the commons. There's even this kind of mathematical proof that it sort of optimally compensates for it.

Speaker 2: What is the tragedy of the commons?

Speaker 1: This is just this idea that if there is this situation where there's some public good that lots of people benefit from, then no individual person wants to contribute to it, because if they contribute, they only get a small part of the benefit from their contribution, but they pay the full cost of their contribution.

Speaker 2: In which context is this, sorry, what is the term, quadratic what?

Speaker 1: Quadratic funding. Quadratic funding.

Speaker 2: Yeah. In which context is this mechanism useful? So obviously you said to combat the tragedy of the commons, but in which context do you see it as useful, actually, practically speaking?

Speaker 1: Yeah, theoretically, public goods in general, right? So

Speaker 2: like services? Like What are we talking about? What's the public goal?

Speaker 1: Yeah, so within the Ethereum ecosystem, for example, we've actually tried using this mechanism. I wrote a couple of articles about this on Vitalik.ca where I go through some of the most recent rounds and it's been really interesting. Some of the top ones that people supported, there were things like just online user interfaces that make it easier for people to interact with Ethereum. There was documentation, there were podcasts, there were software clients, like kind of implementations of the Ethereum protocol, of privacy tools, Just like lots of things that are useful to lots of people.

Speaker 2: When a lot of people are contributing, like funding a particular entity, that's really interesting. Is there something special about the quadratic, the summing of the square roots and

Speaker 1: the taken square. So another way to think about it is like, imagine if N people each give a dollar, then the person gets N squared, right? And so each individual person's contribution gets multiplied by n, right? Because you have n people. And so that kind of perfectly compensates for the kind of end to 1 tragedy of the commons.

Speaker 2: I just wonder if the squared part

Speaker 1: is somehow fundamental. No, it is. And I'd recommend you go to, on vitalik.ca, I have this article called Quadratic Payments, a Primer, and highly recommend it. It's at least my attempt so far of explaining the intuition behind this. You

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What is Money? (Vitalik Buterin) | AI Podcast Clips