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Paralelní Polis is a one-­of-­a-­kind nonprofit organization that brings together art, social sciences, and modern technologies. The ideas of liberty, independence, and innovative thinking and development of society are the main underlying foundations the whole project is built upon.

The project intends to remain state-free as it operates entirely without support from the government, and most of the funds come from voluntary contributions of our donors and partly from commercial activities such as running a unique co­working space and the world’s first bitcoin-­only cafe.

It was founded by members of a contemporary-­art group Ztohoven, and Slovak and Czech hacker­spaces. Its main goal is to promote economic, social, and digital freedom. We try to be a vocal voice of freedom in order to shape the public discourse, and ultimately work towards a freer future.

Yes, so please, if you want to say anything, feel

Yeah, I guess, So just to get right into it, I guess 1 of the reasons why we're talking here is that Amir and I have actually known each other for about 10 years now.

Years now and I mean we've both been following the complicated and curvy path that first the Bitcoin space, then the blockchain space, then the crypto space and now you know whatever it's called today have taken over these years.

The first time that I met Amir was actually at this interesting place in Catalonia called Colafo.

It's this abandoned factory about 50 kilometers northwest of Barcelona that was basically taken over by a group of people that was about this like 50-50 mix of a kind of maybe traditional kind of like agriculture and industry people.

Like I remember they were manufacturing chairs kind of autonomously on a pretty large scale.

They were interested in kind of like vaguely left-leaning anarchist kind of self-organization ideas.

And the other half of the 50-50 is kind of crypto open source hacker community types.

So not just people working on what was then at the time just Bitcoin, but even people who are working on open source messaging technologies and internet routing and all kinds of really fascinating things.

I mean, Amir remembers writing LibBitcoin, which was an alternate Bitcoin node implementation.

I think he was actually the 1 who kind of inspired me to build a Python Bitcoin library.

This is PyBitcoinTools, who here has used PyBitcoinTools.

I mean, you've possibly, yeah, trying to think, people have used it indirectly.

Like, I think some of the code that is in the PyEth sale tool that people use to participate in the original Ether sale might have also been taken from there.

So who here participated in the Ether sale using the Python command line?

Okay, so also a Pi, yeah, Bitcoin tools user.

But the point is that there's this deep technical history across both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But I think in addition to caring about both of those things, I think both of us care about these ideals of decentralized communities and just creating stronger communities in general, trying to really preserve and make sure that we're always looking back to the original spirit of crypto and not just crypto itself, but some of the older movements like open source and all of these things.

So yeah, happy to dig much deeper into all of those topics over the next, I guess, 43 minutes.

Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of very technical history about the Bitcoin scripting and how ETH was born out of that.

And that would be like another hour or 2 hours and all the different things that were going on that led to ETH.

And yeah, and about Califo, because this, you know, it's 10 years since we were in Califo, and now there is, there's a lot of kind of discussion about network states, and Montenegro and Zuzalu.

So it's very interesting to connect you with that.

And also tie into what was the vision of ETH in there and in that time, and how do we unlock the true destiny of crypto like did we that vision at the start has it changed how did it change etc I'll say and you described Calafoe very eloquently like how your experience was how it was there Calafoe was also a subsidiary of the CIC, which was Catalan Integral Cooperativa, which was a network of 10, 000 cooperatives in Catalonia, where they realised...

Because Catalonia has a long anarchist history.

And they wanted to use the structure of a cooperative to create their own internal economy, which means they don't have to pay taxes to the state, they have all the basis of life, of agriculture, industry, health, etc.

And Califo was an experiment from the CIC to construct a kind of community.

You can go on YouTube and you can search Califo or you can search images of Califo to get a sense of how big it was.

It was a huge industrial complex where groups of anarchists, they said, okay, you know, we want to take over this place but, you know, we want to make a break with the past, with how things are done and we actually want to conceptualize society.

We want to conceptualize how does economy work?

Like how can we have an economic model to sustain this?

And you know there were some successes, there were some failures, but it was a good departure from the tradition.

And in California, there was also a system of computers where we had a system of credit and people could trade those.

And also inside the CIC, they had their own monetary system.

That was where the interest with cryptocurrency came in, because they also wanted to use cryptocurrency as a way to connect their economy to also the international network.

So, yeah, I'm interested to hear more also about the network states vision and Zuzalu, etc.

Yeah, well, so Zuzalu was basically this kind of crazy social experiment that I had the idea of doing at the end of last year, which was basically trying to take something in the direction of both network states, but also things that are vaguely like network states, but in a somewhat different direction, and figure out what is a thing that goes in that direction but is ambitious enough that by running it we actually learn a lot of things and we build towards something valuable but at the same time is actually manageable and not some kind of crazy over commitment.

And so the idea is basically to take 200 people from a combination of the Ethereum community but also some other communities, particularly longevity and just the community of people interested in governance experiments more generally, and bring everyone together into a location in Montenegro and live there for 2 months and basically be a pop-up city.

So in terms of what daily life there was like, it was basically, you know, people, I mean, some people described it as being somewhat like a university campus, like basically people live, people talk to each other, there are a lot of things that were kind of designed to encourage people to talk to each other, like providing a free breakfast that was explicitly designed to be as healthy as possible and as close as possible to the fancy longevity recipes of Brian Johnson.

But also there was this structure called the Dome where people could organize events and educational events about various topics, various kind of mini events, mini conferences.

Also fun stuff like karaoke happened there at least a couple of times.

And basically it was trying to both be an opportunity for people in these communities to discover each other and just be an in-person environment in the same way that cities are in-person environments together, both within each of those spaces, but also create some different cross connections between the spaces, like the De-Sci, Decentralized Science Movement would be an example of a cross-connection between the Ethereum movement and people working in health, longevity, biology in general, and some of those other fields.

But also do a couple of experiments and trying to really implement some of the technological ideas that we care about in real life.

So 1 of the things that got built and used was something called the ZooPaths, which is basically a zero-knowledge proof-based identity system.

So if I take this out right now, I can basically, hold on, let me go to switch over profiles on GrapheneOS because we have to be a cypherpunk cool kids now.

By the way, you should use GrapheneOS, it's actually good.

This QR code literally is a QR encoding of a ZKSNARK.

It's not a pointer to a snark, it's not qr.code slash blah blah blah.

And it's a snark that proves that I am in the set of Zuzulu residents.

And it proves this without revealing any other information, right?

So you prove that you're a member without revealing anything else about yourself.

And then there's like a physical component of this, which is I can show you this so you can scan it.

And there's also like this online component where you can pull up, basically, there's an API you could verify these proofs online.

And there was a system called ZooPoll, which is basically an anonymous voting system.

And people could make polls and people could vote on these polls anonymously.

And so all of these technologies that we love talking about in theory, we got to actually test them out and actually use them inside of a community that was actually excited and interested about bringing these kinds of crypto ideas into real life.

So I think the reason why I care about this, I think a lot of reasons, but 1 of those reasons is just that, like, actually, like, implementing a lot of technology as well, and implementing technologies in a way that doesn't involve a lot of sacrifices to the core principles, it often really requires a community to be effective.

If you just say here, I published some code and you can do 0 knowledge proofs and you just put it out there.

Like often that doesn't get very far by itself because people are like, okay, I downloaded it, I ran through the examples, what's the next step, right?

And that's very far from actually saying, here's the technology and let's try to do the technology and have a culture and community that uses the technology and where people can support each other in helping each other use the technology and really benefit from it in ways that just depend on everyone using it at the same time, and really do those things in parallel.

Where basically you don't have to make the sacrifices of making everything super friendly to people trying to figure it out alone because people don't actually have to be alone, right?

And it's like a group of 200 people that's all working through everything and working through the challenges of these kinds of things at the same time, right?

So I think the challenge is how do we create these really stronger crypto communities where people can support each other in bringing these technologies to real life and people also have more choice in what locations, these kind of environments that end up building these kinds of technologies actually happen in?

Yeah, you know, like people today, they feel very alienated, and it's kind of telling that, you know, people seek to be part of an intentional community where they sense there's a meaning and they can work together.

That's kind of very radical speak, what you said about the values in software and it's similar.

I mean there's like many historical examples where if you look at any major paradigm shift that happened in history, any technological scientific paradigm shift, for example, when the heliocentric model was first proposed, it didn't actually offer a better explanatory power than the Ptolemaic model, because usually in science, how the scientific consensus shifts is, there's always contradictions in some scientific theory, and it's not necessarily that the community will shift to a new theory because that theory offer is better.

Like the actual criterion for why people select a new paradigm can change.

Like sometimes it can be the new paradigm or theory is it has better aesthetic qualities or it has more explanatory power.

And always, you know, how does that happen is in society, there's a widespread philosophical or moral change.

And in science, there's always these contradictions.

And for whatever reason, some person or small group of people initially go and start pulling at those threats.

And the more they pull at those threats, the more they unwinds those contradictions, at which point they can form a new paradigm.

And at some point, there is something that will cause the community to shift onto this new consensus and start putting their energy into it and to start develop that paradigm to be better.

And right now with cryptocurrency, you know, there is a feeling of bewilderment.

I mean, I don't know if you, I would be curious to see like when you're envisioning ETH, I mean, I have my own ideas, but I'd be curious to hear in your own words, like when you envisioned ETH, what were you envisioning?

But I kind of can say that in 2012, a lot of us, we kind of thought we were like the agorist parallel economic system, it's inevitable, we just need to relax and it's coming.

And now there is this feeling of, you know, how do we get in touch with that thing that gave us vitality and energy?

The free software movement, when it first came out in the 90s, which there's a history behind that, there was a lot of creativity and they were creating software that people were like, I couldn't imagine that this software could exist.

It was really at the forefront of technology.

Then as the movement started to scale, other people said, hey guys, let's take this to the next level.

And then they started to bring the businesses on board and they said, okay, let's rebrand to open source.

And they stopped talking about freedom and the free software content.

They started to just talk about utilitarian arguments, like that it's cheaper, that it's more secure.

And suddenly a lot of business flowed into the open source movement and it started to grow very big and people started to talk about mass adoption.

But then something happened along the way where people started to look and go, okay, we need to reach mass adoption, which when people say mass adoption, they don't actually mean the world, they mean Western people, Western markets.

And then we kind of looked, okay, who is the biggest by market share?

And instead of being its own thing, Linux became the alternative and it started playing catch-up.

And we lost that, In that process, we lost that vitality, that source of innovation and creativity.

So that's a question now, a big cloud, not just over Ethereum, but cryptocurrency in general.

Yeah, I think 1 of the big philosophical shifts that's happened to me over the last 10 years is this shift from what Peter Thiel calls indefinite optimism to definite optimism.

So the way that I define those terms roughly is that indefinite optimism basically says that you're optimistic, you expect that the future is going to be better, and good things will happen, but you don't really have an idea of what those good things are.

And the best that you can do is set up abstract mechanisms that ensure that those good things are more likely to happen more quickly regardless of what they are.

And that's, I think at the beginning of Ethereum, a lot of my thinking was definitely indefinite optimist.

I had some specific ideas of things that I thought would be really cool to build, and like, you know, things, I'm like making this kind of more full stack financial system, having stable coins, having things like prediction markets, but the larger part of my thinking was basically like I did not know what specific things people would want to build on top of blockchains and what specific things people would want to make more open and more censorship resistant and decentralized.

And so I wanted to create the tools to empower developers to build those things, and they will know more than us what those things are going to be.

And I think over the next, over the 10 years that followed, like the thinking has really kind of ended, become sort of more aware of like what the actual areas are where these kinds of things can provide a lot of value and what the areas are where these kinds of technologies can provide less value.

And I think in my thinking, there is a bigger appreciation of the fact that if you want a thing to happen, sometimes you just have to go do the thing.

If we want people to have finances that are actually secure, and people to actually be able to hold their savings without having to depend on a single centralized company to do that for them, then you have to actually go and specifically build those tools that make it possible.

If we want a stable coin to exist, you have to actually go and make the stable coin.

If we want to create a culture where people actually value privacy and privacy actually becomes a reality, then like you have to actually go and build the culture.

Like you have to build the tools as well, but like if no 1 actually does the last step of building the culture, well, the culture actually won't get built.

There's like so many instances where things just keep on not happening for many years just because everyone is kind of staring at each other in an imaginary room, pointing to each other, and it's like, hey, hey, the thing is going to get built.

The free market incentives say that the thing will be built.

The holy book of Austrian economics says so, human action.

Wait, wait, why aren't the humans acting?

And that realization has been a big change in my thinking.

And I think also just a deeper understanding of the need to focus not on places where you're 1.1xing what people can do, but places where you're 10x-ing what people can do.

So to get into this example of free software and Ubuntu, I think 1 of the mistakes there was I was an early, well, early by my standards, Ubuntu user.

But the thing I remember was that the main pitch for Ubuntu at the time was like, oh, you don't have to pay $200 for a Windows license.

And the challenge is that, first of all, that pitch depends a lot on network effects, because for an average user, if you wanna use that stuff today, you have to buy a computer.

Chances are the computer comes with Windows pre-installed, and then you go and install Ubuntu on top of the Windows and you're not actually benefiting from those savings.

And then number 2 is like, well, Ubuntu at that time when the network effect is still small, you have to incur a lot of personal cost in figuring out how to actually use stuff.

You have to figure out, OK, can't use Photoshop, got to use GIMP.

OK, Ubuntu is developer-friendly, got to understand how to do things in this developer-friendly way.

2 or 3 pieces of hardware are not gonna work, you have to figure out how to do, look through Stack Exchange and get answers.

Right, and like, if your pitch to people is a 1.1x, and when people see the first obstacle, they're gonna give up, right?

And the same thing is true for cryptocurrency.

At that time, the pitch for cryptocurrency is like, oh, you don't have to pay 2.9% to PayPal.

And it's like, well, okay, yeah, PayPal is awful, and the 2.9% is awful, and the 3.9% for international payments is even more awful.

It's like 1.068 plus 2.9% of 3.9%, so somewhere around 1.069.

Like that's literally less than 1.1x, right?

But like, if I, But then if you start talking about like, hey, privacy, the privacy of cash, this is a human right that we did not even have to think about because it's been a basic default fabric of society for 3, 000 years.

And now suddenly over the course of 10 years, we're basically sleepwalking into an equilibrium where that is just being taken away and the privacy of cash is being denormalized and people are trying to like meme into existence the idea that if you are trying to conduct intermediated finance, you are some kind of sketchy person who is not trustworthy and possibly a criminal.

And that's a big deal that not everyone, but some people are going to be willing to like actually, you know, go through a big deal of effort in order to get around.

If you talk about, hey, I'm in Africa, and in my local market, I can make $400 a month, but there's US markets where I can be a remote worker and I can earn $4, 000 a month, well, that's a literal 10x, right?

And like if for problems like that, right, like that's something that you can really, like really make a big deal out of, like you're going to be willing to spend effort and pay costs for that, right?

And the thing is that a lot of the time, the 1.1Xs in our society, they happen just because of technical inefficiency.

The 10Xs in our society, they happen because of political inefficiencies that exist because people want them to be that way, right?

Like, if you're circumventing a 10x barrier in income, you're circumventing a barrier that was put in place by people where those people want that barrier to exist, right, and you are to some extent engaging in what's ultimately a confrontation with those people.

If you want to preserve your privacy at a time when you know of many kinds of bureaucrats are trying to create a 0 privacy cashless society, you're going against their objectives, right?

And like that's it's like a different kind of game.

And if you get people, if you try to sort of push people into crypto in a context where they're kind of, you know, not appreciating that game, then like short term, it's a good adoption strategy.

But like when serious difficulties start to come in, like you're not really creating a community that's really going to actually stick together for that.

And I think that's 1 of the things that the crypto space as a whole and the lunar punk community absolutely is starting to recognize.

And I think recognizing that in a healthy way that at the same time doesn't turn you into a crazy guy that keeps on predicting, like successfully predicting 18 of the last 0 US dollar hyperinflations.

Like that's, you know, an important balance that we need to get right.

And I think, you know, some of the recent movements are doing a better and better job of actually doing that.

Yeah, Did you read The Sovereign Individual?

I mean, I don't want to scare people too much.

To be fair, I also read Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism, which I did not super agree with.

I mean, yeah, obviously, he says some strange things in the book.

Like, at the beginning, he says that human history is purely shaped through technological factors.

And, and therefore, that influences economics and economics shape history and the philosophy and ideologies don't play any part which is not really true because human will and human action you know shapes history and historical events but that human will and human action always exists in the framework of narratives and stories and ideologies, religions, et cetera.

But, yeah, I said I didn't wanna scare you too much, but to give you...

I mean, OK, in Turkey, there's the Bayraktar, which now is being used in Ukraine.

Even on YouTube, you can see they make songs about it.

But the origin of that was the son of the father Bayraktar, who's an industrial guy, sent his son to MIT in America.

And he started hanging around with the hackers and hacker spaces and he was like, whoa, drones.

And then he came back to Turkey, he's like, dad, we need to make a drone industry to kill terrorists.

And Turkey actually has the biggest hackathons in Europe, but it's government-run hackathons.

Anyway, they started mass manufacturing these drones.

And For example, in North Iraq, where they have insurgency from the Kurds fighting for their autonomy, for many years they were far better fighters than the Turks.

But now, the drones have completely changed that reality, where now an entire country or entire region, they can put a drone in the sky and it flies for hours and hours in a circle and they're cheap so you can replace them with another 1 when 1 runs out of battery.

So it's just like aerial surveillance of the ground.

When it rotates around the ground, it just rotates the image so it's a still image.

And it has, it's automated, it uses AI, has thermals, etc.

Everything is completely monitored and surveilled.

And America now has developed what's called a ninja missile.

And that's a missile that when it hits the ground, it doesn't explode on impact.

It shoots ninja swords at an individual target.

It can eliminate a single human being without any collateral damage.

So now you can have your maps on a tablet, like an iPad, and you can like beep, and you can eliminate that person.

And when we brought China into the WEF in the 90s, we said, oh yeah, you know, China, they've become more democratic, human rights, ha ha, didn't really happen.

And now China has this social credit scoring system where people, if you're, for example, late to a meeting with someone, or you hang out with bad people, or your neighbors report you, you get a lower social credit scoring.

And then that means you can't get a train ride, or you can't rent an apartment, et cetera.

So it's a way of incentivizing or disincentivizing citizens' behavior.

And now in Europe, they want to do CBDCs.

It's a long process where they've gradually more and more centralized the financial infrastructure.

And now the last part of that is where there's no other banks, there's just a central bank.

And they say, oh, you know, we're gonna give you an incentive, which is the UBI, to move over to this scheme.

And essentially they're deeply inspired by the social credit scoring system.

So there's a philosopher and historian of science and technology called Lewis Mumford, and he says that there are 2 legacies within technology.

1 legacy he called the state civilization legacy.

And this is like techniques to do with control of society, of management of human beings.

And then there's like democratic techniques.

And this is techniques which empower certain groups in a society to organize, to mobilize, with certain groups of philosophies.

I was talking about in Califor we had this resource management system.

Those are examples of democratic techniques, stuff that enables the society to create value.

So, as a cryptocurrency now, the sovereign individual we mentioned, When I saw him speaking, I was like, oh, there's a lot of, I don't know if it's explicit references, but it touches on things in that book, which was written in 1997, which talks a lot about cryptocurrency.

And 1 of the things it's saying in the book is that cryptocurrency renders the business model of nation states obsolete.

And you know, we're seeing the cryptocurrency, you know, like a lot of people, they're feeling despondent, they're like, oh, it's just used for scams, et cetera.

We haven't, we're trying to conceptualize, to deliver this technology that can liberate people, that can make people freer.

But it feels like we're perpetually close to this threshold and there's something that we're trying, there's something that's lacking that we can't cross that barrier.

That's when we're talking about the values and so on.

And I went to Athens and in Athens, there is a museum of ancient Greek science and technology And ancient Greeks, they had steam power.

They had advanced astronomical instruments.

They were able to calculate the circumference of the Earth accurate to a few metres.

And I was very confused because I was like, oh, why didn't ancient Greece have a scientific and industrial revolution?

I was talking with my friends and somebody said that it was because of the slavery.

The slavery in ancient Greece, whenever there was a problem, you could just get more slaves to solve the problem for you.

And indeed, when you look at the inventions that they made, they're all toys.

And this is kind of similar situation now in crypto, where it's like, I was alluding to it, free software and open source transition.

I think the free software people also made a mistake.

It was tough being a free software developer.

That's what I appreciate about crypto, is we have a way to financialize, to build economy around and to capture value.

Because that's the problem with creative people.

Creative people, they deliver tremendous value to the world, but they often don't have a way of capturing that value back.

At the same time, we have to also realize where does the source of that value come from?

There's developers that are merely good, but there's great developers, or there's great mathematicians.

For example, when you read Isaac Newton, you look at his books, and there's a lot of crazy speculation there on the universe.

See all Parallel Polis transcripts on Youtube

Fireside chat: The prehistory of Ethereum and proto-network states /Amir Taaki, Vitalik Buterin