Welcome to the Network State Podcast.
I'm here today with Anatoly Yakovenko, the Co founder of
Solana. Today we're talking about why
the decentralized crypto phone is central to both digital civil
rights and digital property rights.
To understand the crypto phone, you need to understand the
concept of private keys. These are the keys to your
crypto wallet. A crypto phone is unlocked with
those keys just like a normal phone is unlocked with your Face
ID passcode. Now because these private keys
are kept local, the Cryptophone is built around protecting
digital civil rights and digital property rights to a much
greater extent than a typical phone.
It protects digital civil rights because it allows you to send
provably end to end encrypted messages and protect your
account from centralized search and seizure.
But the Cryptophone also protects digital property rights
by preventing centralized services from freezing
transactions or seizing funds. And that's why the Cryptophone
is important protection of digital civil rights and digital
property rights. Anatoly is with me today to talk
about Solana's efforts on their phone and how as a former
Qualcomm engineer, his experience in low level hardware
optimization was actually very helpful in building it.
We talked about some of the nitty gritty technical details
in building the phone and then go all the way up to the big
picture of the society we're building, namely how the crypto
phone is perhaps the crucial enabling technology for the
sovereign individual and thereby A crucial enabler of the
sovereign collective, what we call the network state.
Let's get started. Welcome to the New York State
Podcast, Anatoly. Should I say totally go ahead?
Totally works. Thank you for having me.
You know, we've been think friendly for a few years now.
I've seen the rise of Solana from very humble beginnings.
I actually knew Raj all the way back in the day when he was at
Omaha Health. I was a board member there and
you have gotten to know more recently and you were formerly a
Qualcomm engineer before a relatively unusual laden career
migration to crypto. And what I thought I thought
we'd talk about today is, you know, the Solana ecosystem in
general, but specifically why the Solana phone, a
decentralized crypto phone is is central to human freedom.
But maybe you want to, you want to just give the most people
know what Solana is at this point.
But we want to give the background yourself, background
on Salon and so on. Just bring us up to the the
present moment. Sure.
So the my origin story, You know, I'm went to school in
Illinois. I was a nerd.
Loved computer science, loved performance optimization.
I don't know for whatever reason I like mentally got into the the
love of like looking at code and trying to make it run as fast as
possible and a piece of hardware like optimizing assembly, all
that stuff. And I ended up working on kind
of that part of Qualcomm, like looking at like various parts of
the stack and like doing optimizations.
And I was there from the start of the mobile revolution.
Basically 2003 for about. I can't remember for sure but
like 12 or 13 years. So I went from like these two MB
2 inch phone phone devices. To like 2005 ish pre iPhone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Way, way before iPhone.
And like I saw the iPhone revolution, I saw the feature
phone market drop from 80% to 20%.
I saw the hardware improve every year by more than a factor of
2X, which is pretty cool. And 2017 like I've been.
I was aware of crypto I think since the origin.
I thought Bitcoin was kind of neat, but I never understood the
social impact of it even in retrospect it seems so obvious.
2008 financial crisis sure this sound money thing comes out.
It just like didn't click. It seemed like, oh, this is kind
of neat but would never scale kind of thing.
And a lot of engineers get very skeptical about, like, this is
going to change the world. Right, right.
And like, missed the whole social implication of it in 2017
is when I got into crypto, I saw fees and Bitcoin hit like 60
bucks a transaction. And I literally had like a
Eureka moment that there's a way to encode passage of time as
data and that was the foundation of proof of history.
But like, that I didn't know what to Google for.
This is kind of funny, like the reason why so long has started
is because I couldn't. I didn't know this was a
Verifiable Delay function. There's a bunch of folks like
Dan Bonet working in these things at Stanford and I didn't
know what to Google for. And I thought, oh man, I found
something really, really cool that no one has thought of.
And it has this unique property where I can take this data
structure and I think I can apply it to build a source of
time and create time division multiple access which is how old
school 2G cellular networks. Look like, yeah.
But I started before CD. Yeah, before CDMA, it was all
TDMA before CDMA. That's right.
Yep. Yeah, so I and that's like the
fundamental way you scale bandwidth in a shared channel
and radio is you split everything by time and then you
get you can utilize basically almost all the bandwidth
available to you. And once you have that, you have
a scalable blockchain. So that was like the Eureka
moment. I didn't know what to Google
for. My wife basically said you
better go start this and do this for real or stop talking about
it. That's great that she encouraged
you, though. That's really great.
Yeah. And that's when I met Raj and he
was kind of the perfect Co founder because he was not an
engineer. He's raised money before.
He kind of understood a large part of tech in Silicon Valley
that was really new to me. His quote is that like, he was
like, OK, I'll help you for six months and then, you know, off
you go. But five years later, yeah, five
years later, we're still working and building.
The sort of low level optimization stuff that you're
talking about. You know you know Duff's device,
I'm sure you Duff's device right, That type of stuff,
right? Where in theory you can just
write a four loop and you know the compiler will take care of
it. But in practice you might need
to actually manually unroll the loop and you have to have a
familiarity with the underlying, you know, architecture, right.
You know, it's interesting because you know, a couple of
just remarks on what you said. One is you know Feynman, I think
he used to say that he didn't like to read the literature
before he attacked a problem. He only did that afterwards if
you ever did it, because then you would try to take an
original approach from first principles, which is sort of
what happened with you in proof of history.
And now obviously there's an intersection with VDF and you
can pull some ideas from that literature.
But you you came at it from an original way of thinking of, you
know, essentially VDFS as an alternative to proof of work or
proof of static, right? Yeah, I felt like I got lucky in
solving a hard computer science problem you can do.
Basically, as an engineer, you never want to feel like, OK,
this is like, I'm going to solve this really hard computer
science problem, You're very likely to fail.
And what I felt was like, oh man, I think I got lucky.
And they have like a solution to something really clever, to a
very hard computer science problem.
So let's see like how far we can take and how far we can scale
it. And one way of thinking about
this and you tell me if I'm off base, but like the way I sort of
model it is that part of how Solana scales is because you
assume that nodes can have heavy compute, whereas you know
Bitcoin for example assumes like a one Meg block size constraint
is a hard constraint system. The whole Bitcoin civil wars
fought over that. And then Ethereum now obviously
is a totally different model with with stake and and so on
which is which is different, right?
But would you, would you agree with that?
Yeah, and that comes from this idea that they don't have a a
source of global, they don't actually have a global clock and
they have to rely on other forms to to get their notes to
coordinate. And the the problem this is like
TDMA solves is like pretty intuitive.
Like imagine you have two radio towers that transmit at the same
time or the same frequency, you get noise.
So if you give each one a clock, they alternate by time and they
there's no longer interference and information passes through.
This is actually exactly the same thing that happens with
blockchains. You have two block producers
that produce a block at the same time, they'll produce a fork.
So now the chain doesn't know what the next state is and has
to resolve it. And that's effectively noise
because now you've dropped the amount of information that this
this thing is is handling per second.
So yeah, and actually I've actually, I have a signal
processing background. I didn't do certainly as much as
you've done at Qualcomm, but you know, for the, for the viewers
or what have you, the, you know, the noise that you're talking
about is if both of those stations try to compete with
each other by blasting at the same time.
There's a beggar, that neighbor thing where I'm broadcasting,
OK, no, you can only hear me, OK, I'm going to broadcast and
then they compete and then people just hear static because
they're just kind of competing with each other, right?
But if instead they take turns, which they can only do if
they've got a very reliable clock, then I can broadcast
stop, you broadcast stop. And we cut up the spectrum by
time. But what's interesting is I
don't think, you know, maybe it's just I'm remiss or derelict
in this, but I don't think I've actually heard the analogy
between TDMA and proof of history before.
And The thing is that CDMA is much more efficient than TDMA
because you have, you know, instead of I broadcast and then
you broadcast and then person C and person D or whatever, you
use orthogonal functions, you know, wavelets or you know, hard
bases or something. And then everybody can broadcast
at the same time, but their signals are actually have zero
inner product with each other. And then you have a much, you
know, much better use of bandwidth.
I wonder, is there is there something I'm sure you thought
about that? Maybe it's a really trivial
question, but is there some analogy for that with with
Solana? There is, it's it's pretty
complicated. So there's a way to broadcast
multiple block, have multiple block producers broadcasts at
the same time, and you're kind of dealing with a similar
problem. If I see if I have to guarantee
that when I receive this information that is partially
from A&B that I can decode it and it think in a very general
way that's very similar to how these wavelets don't interfere.
You can solve it with the ratio coding.
You can pad it with enough ratio coding which is a polynomial and
you receive parts of the message and then you recover it.
That's like on a road map. Eventually there's something
that we want to build, but this is like one of those non linear
hard engineering problems. Sure, sure.
I think it's my, you know, my my recollection is CDMA was not
done in an adversarial environment.
And so probably there's some assumption that breaks down when
folks are trying to broadcast because you have to, you have to
nail the the that basis exactly for it to work right.
The the concepts of like having polynomials interpolate the data
and give you this. Like like now, now you're no
longer looking at like discrete chance of data.
You're looking at samples of a function.
You know you're you're sampling a function that actually works
really well in an adversarial environment because it has this
natural error correction. So you can make an assumption
that as long as X percent of the participants are like honest,
then I will recover the sample. And like in general, you know,
the assumption that all these networks run on is that 2/3 of
the network are honest. And therefore that's a very
pretty valid assumption. What you want to avoid is that
if they are dishonest, what you want is that the natural state
as the thing halts, but that's the result.
Like not that it can like steal money or issue like new tokens
and something like that and that's also pretty easy to
achieve. So I think, I think we have like
a a realistic engineering plan to to build that it's just
deploying these systems like on the global Internet with random
people running this and random hardware on random connections.
It's like a massive pain. It is, Yeah, I know.
Of course. Well, that's The funny thing is,
even even with the hardware requirements that you guys, you
have fairly beefy requirements for the nodes, right?
So even with that, it's still like, you know, the Dunkirk
evacuation. No.
That it's like, well, so basically in in World War 2, the
British were able to evacuate France with a, it wasn't like a
nice military set of ships. It was just this boat and this
dinghy and so on. And they just kind of used
everything that they could get together.
And that's kind of how I think about a lot of decentralized
computing is. It's like it's like the Dunkirk
evacuation, just get whatever boat you can to to solve the
problem. And so even with that baseline,
that's interesting. So you still have a lot of, you
know, just a lot of folks in in the consensus network?
Well, yeah. Well, Solana is unique in the
like. I think we're the only network
that has a single core where there is no sampling and it's
very large. It's like about 3000 computers
all participating in consensus and they're voting every 400
milliseconds. So we've kind of like when you
look at the trilemma problem that Vitalik kind of laid out
that there's trade-offs between performance, decentralization
and security, like the properties.
You can't really scale that without hardware or or.
You basically take the sharding approach where you start
splitting the network and you're making a trade off.
There a bit on security but like.
Well, there's a third approach, which is 0 knowledge or
something along those lines, right?
Like where you you are, you're it's that's almost like the CDMA
of our space where you're using you have an algorithmic gain
potentially. I don't know if you'd agree with
that. Zero knowledge helps you on the
compute side, so you can improve how much computation A verifier
needs to like. You basically lower the CPU
count. But well, I was saying like roll
ups, like ZK roll ups like you just store less, you use as a
compression thing, you store less information on chain or
something like that. That has its own trade-offs, of
course. You can get rid of signature
verification, but you can get rid of the state and the Ledger,
and fundamentally that's that is the bottleneck.
Like, there's tricks. You can apply these tricks to
layer one and kind of compress a bunch of the signatures and do a
bunch of other tricks. But at the end of the day, the
bandwidth that's shared between the network, in a very like
radio analogy, that Channel that's shared between all the
towers, that's the limit. And totally either you build two
different networks on different spectrums, right, And then have
like algorithms to to make sure that they can reliably assume
that the other one didn't create a fault, or you just make it
bigger, right. You like increase the spectrum
and therefore you can increase the number of participants.
And that's the approach we're taking.
And that means that we are the optimization nerds that are
looking at like Duff device like OK, what if we like pre fetch
this into memory and like do stuff like this, Can we handle
more messages per second and therefore have more
participants? And the result of that I think
is like been awesome, like we have nearly 3000 validators all
in a single quorum, all voting every 400 milliseconds.
So this is a single replicated global computer that's
synchronized every 400 milliseconds in the world.
So when you drop a piece of data into it, it's replicated around
the world. Which is pretty amazing.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, actually that's.
An interesting way, you know, it's an interesting way of
thinking about it. It's not just ACDN in the sense
of data replication. It's also compute replication,
right? And it's and and it's got
verification that the data was replicated consistently across
all those places where CDN, a normal CDN like Akamai or
something like that doesn't have, doesn't have the same
thing. That's just an interesting way
of thinking about it. I hadn't.
I for some reason I just hadn't thought about the latency aspect
in quite that way, like a CDN two point O OK, well, so well
actually do you have any more remarks on that?
I wanted to. I wanted to talk about the go
ahead. Yeah, there's like kind of a
fundamental difference between in in like values, between what
Solana's working on, what a theory of folks are working on.
And you can kind of think of it as like both care about trust
minimization. There's some amount of that the
network needs to minimize the amount of trust that people
place in it. But like Solana really cares
about global synchrony, That data is replicated globally as
fast as possible and everyone has the exact same state, like
as fast as possible and atomic composition that me as a
developer or me as a user, I can like reuse the references any
pieces of this data immediately and like atomically.
And those three things are what Solana cares about.
And Etherium folks have been able to sacrifice the other two
while improving trust minimization to a degree.
And that's. I I think it's reasonable.
I I actually think I I mean I'm a multi, I mean and so and so
forth. My mental model is that you have
just like you have different levels of security for different
kinds of things. You know you might have a
certain level of security for the the president of a country
and another level of security for I don't know the, I don't
know the the the mayor of a city or something like that right.
And then you have another level of security for just somebody
walking down the street who may not be as much of an
assassination target or what have you in the same way that
you have. You know, Bitcoin has a certain
level of security where it's like it's trying to be a nation
safe, resistant, and then Ethereum and then completely
immutable. And Ethereum has relative
immutability in the sense of infrequently mutated smart
contracts and they try to keep the chain fairly thin, but not
as thin as as bitcoins. And then you guys are, you know,
like a, it's like a third gear on a bicycle.
And you know, each year on a bicycle is like useful for
different things. And then you guys have what I
call a fatter chain, right, which makes actually a lot of
things very convenient. You just have all the state
there. You just program against it.
You don't have to have anything off chain or what have you, but
it does increase the weight of the chain and you need, you
know, heavier compute to deal with it.
Does that sound like a fair? Yeah.
Description like the difference there isn't that the security is
is worse or better, it's security is more expensive.
Like you have to pay for a more expensive full node to get the
the full trust minimization guarantees.
So what I wanted to talk about today, you know, maybe primarily
is the solanophone. You know, the decentralized
Cryptophone is central to liberty and freedom in the
world, to civil rights, to property rights in this age of,
you know, centralization of of things.
And I can get my brief thesis on it, and I'd love to hear your
thesis on the solanophone is a specific embodiment of this.
Essentially, if you, you know now about 15 years into the
smartphone revolution, certainly our our wallet is on our phone.
You know, with your Apple Pay or what have you, your boarding
passes are on there. In many countries, to get
through like a COVID checkpoint or something like that, you
needed to use your phone. They just assumed everybody had
it. You call your Uber or whatever
on your phone, you get to your Airbnb on your phone.
Your data is on there, your communications are on there.
A large part of your life is on there.
Your digital life is on there. But it can be remotely accessed
like, for example, in China not too long ago on videos of those,
you know, protests against the like, you know, the third year
of lockdowns are videos of those were just like remotely I've
heard deleted, you know, from like WeChat.
They just reached in and deleted them.
We've seen, for example, with Google, there was a report that
some parents were taking photos of their kids for the doctor,
for the pediatrician, and they got flagged as CSAM.
And, you know, their life was turned upside down as a function
of that. OK.
And then there's stuff where, you know, of course people, you
know, there's various hackers that can do remote wipes.
And. And so it's over.
And so this thing that really is your sanctum sanctorum, your
phone, there's some being some good moves in the sense of, like
intent encryption is now out there.
Apple has done some very laudable stuff recently with
their, you know, iCloud actually has private keys.
It's getting all these people. Everyone's like, oh, no one will
learn private keys. Apple has actually got this new
thing with iCloud where you can have private keys and actually
get into an encryption locally, but we're still not all the way
there towards a a sovereign phone, you know where you have
private keys that you hold locally that encrypt cloud data
and they give you not just intend encryption.
That's asserted. I mean I like the fact that
WhatsApp is there's it, but that's provable because you're
encrypting it locally, right. And so, so that is kind of where
I'm at where I wanted to see a crypto phone for like 10 years.
And I'm so glad you're doing it, but I'd love to hear your thesis
on it then maybe we can kind of go from.
There, I think like the really the coolest thing about crypto
is not the blockchains or the layer ones is the it's the self
custody cryptography piece. Yes, because it's the it's like
AI think when you kind of think about combined with like the
First Amendment and like the 4th Amendment, you effectively have
the base layer for a stateless society like I have.
I have my cryptography, nobody can take it from me.
There's. And you know, an atomic weapon
cannot break the encryption and like that's a very, very
powerful tool. And I think it's because it's
secured by math. It makes it I think kind of
outside of almost human facilities like magic
effectively. And I think that was like the
revolution. What crypto created is that like
you know, I have consumer grade crypto that people are able to
install and download through Metamask, through Phantom,
through like Chrome extensions or through Ledger and that
didn't exist before 2008. Like, I don't know if you ever
worked at a big tech company prior to that signing something
required they were like armed guards by the Verisign security.
Oh, really? I didn't know that.
That part I didn't know. Yeah, go ahead.
How did that work? Tell me about that.
Yeah, so the way Verisign works is there's a certificate chain.
They have a cryptographic key that is the root, and then that
key signs a child key that then gets passed down to like Google,
and then Google has its own certificate chain down to like
its own people, but it's really. Click the lock symbol near an
https://site and they'll show you the certificate chain.
But the armed guards part I wasn't aware of.
I knew about like DNS sack and I knew about like the people who
are like the root domain, you know, holders and and so on.
But but tell tell me about this. Well, if you steal the root, you
can reassign certificates and then you can fake all the
connections and you can pretend to be Google.
So what? Was the armed guards thing, so
Verisign basically. So, so like at a big tech
company, like, if you're signing code that says, hey, this is
like Qualcomm's code or this is Google's code that's now running
in your device, and the device trusts that code to have certain
privileges, You have to sign it with a certificate.
And that signature process is extremely like, it's a ceremony.
There's guards that guard the key for Mike.
You got to go to like, a Faraday cage, like.
It's the whole thing. It's the whole thing.
Interesting. So I mean, you know, what that
does remind me of actually is the security for a crypto
exchange, right? Where you do use a Faraday cage
and you do like you know, you just don't take any.
You know you sign offline and you air gap and you cold story.
You just all of the different defenses in depth, right?
But go ahead, you're going to say.
But like, consumers basically didn't have access to this.
It was very likely PGP was like the encryption tool for signing
emails. And all of the stuff never
really worked at scale. But all of a sudden with crypto,
because there's some, you know, need for like people to have
fun. Like either there's for
speculative reasons or just because they're developers that
are messing around with Ethereum and looking at it as a new
programming environment where Bitcoin people started building
all of these tools to make it easier.
And you started Metamask, I think was a massive step up from
PGP. Like if you ever as a as a human
like I could not figure out PGP right?
Well. And I'm an.
That's The thing is, you know, I have a rule of thumb which is if
it's hard for you and it's hard for me, it's usually too hard,
right? Like like it's hard for like
basically, you know, our friends and ours, it's usually too hard,
right. And but but your point is
actually a really good one because the entire, you know,
PKI problem, right, public key infrastructure, there's this
whole slew of actually nowadays as I'll get to very useful
papers. But at the time all these papers
were written under the assumption of the 90s and the
2000s of assume the PKI problem is solved, right?
Assume just for the viewers that everybody has a private key that
they keep secure and accessible at all times and a public key
that's that's available to everybody on the Internet.
If everybody on a network had that, there's all kinds of
amazing magic that you can do with things that are, you know,
like like secure e-mail and messaging and all this stuff,
right, Transactions. The problem is, I think the part
that was not appreciated is that to have something both A secure
and B accessible at all times is actually very costly.
Because you could have it secure without being accessible by just
going and putting in some safe deposit box that you never, you
know it's dug up in the ground, right?
Or you can have it accessible without being secure by just
having it, you know, like pinned to the top of your Twitter or
like tape to the top of your computer or something like that.
To be both A secure and B accessible is like on your
person. It's like it's like literally a
wallet, right? And and so you needed a strong
incentive for something like that and you need to teach
people that if it was not secure or not accessible, they would
lose money because it wasn't accessible, then they couldn't
find the key and if it wasn't secure, someone else would take
the key. And so cryptocurrency
incentivized the build out of public key infrastructure.
Without it, we wouldn't have had millions, hundreds of millions
of people trained and incentivized to keep their
private keys private and secure, right.
The secure and accessible. And so that's enabled this
entire, all this magic of, you know, this this like world that
these these papers assumed into being.
Now that assumption is actually manifest.
I'd love your thoughts on that. Yeah.
And that that's exactly what I was kind of my realization too.
Like once you have PKI that's like consumer scalable PKI, all
of these ideas like become possible.
You can like you late. What does?
It's not even going to matter which layer one people are you
seeing when you have 8 billion people that can sign with
cryptography. That's right.
Yeah. It's like, it's like, you know,
in the early days when people started using the term crypto,
of course you could do software before the Internet.
I mean, there were personal computers there, there you can
do disconnect computers. But software and Internet are
almost synonymous today. They're not, of course.
But because so much software runs an Internet and so much
software depends on the Internet and sober software assumes the
Internet. And the same way, like so much
cryptography will assume cryptocurrency.
Because if you're going to assume that a private key is
there locally, I mean this is the thing where Apple
introducing this thing for I cloud or WhatsApp doing intent
encryption or you know Google has like DNS verification for
you to confirm you have your domain right.
Amazon of course has its EC2 keys.
All of the majors understand that you need like some sort of,
you know, key challenge or some sort of digital verification and
all that will eventually in my view and probably yours
eventually go to some sort of, you know, crypto based thing,
right, Because it just the platform that has the most
adoption. We've got 300 million crypto
users now. In five years, 10 years, we may
have a billion or more, right? Go ahead and it's much easier
once the like the all the tools that we've built for crypto make
that communication challenge response process much, much
easier and much faster. And like it, you're not no
longer need to be like APHD in cryptography and cryptographic
secure protocols. You can actually use a bunch of
JavaScript to go punch it out, and all of a sudden you've got
something that works. And.
People like we're still not at a stage where you can make that
secure, like like a entry level engineer can build a secure
system. But we're at a stage where you
can build these systems and they're somewhat straightforward
to audit and you can get to that like, OK, this is a secure
protocol. We're doing the key exchange
over Solana or whatever and now we've set up the communication
channel. Everyone can go and talk in a
secure environment. That's right.
And actually, you know, one thing you touch on, which is
user interfaces, like really nice and clean user interfaces.
People take them for granted because they're simple to use.
They think they were simple to develop, and it's actually quite
the opposite. Go ahead.
And the simplicity comes from like consumer scale.
When you can make an assumption that the Internet connection is
always there and it always works.
And when you when you get to a point when developers can make
the assumption, OK, everyone's going to have a wallet and when
they talk to my website there's a wallet, you actually blow away
a massive part of like normal developer user account
management. Like I don't know if you ever
had to build a SAS or whatever. Yeah, it's a like managing
accounts, managing their credit cards, doing all of the stuff is
like a team of 20 or 30 in any decent like size like SAS
company. And and and you basically, I
mean you can rely, you can try to use Facebook login, Google
login and so and so forth and you can actually get quite far
with that. But eventually you're almost
always going to need your own account system because it is the
central node in everything you're doing, right.
Like you have types of users and all that type of stuff and you
have admin users or whatever. But now we have the portable
login. We actually have this article
called the Billion User Table, which I'll flash up, but
basically you know the advent of ENS and SNS and so on, like now
you can have portable name between sites, which is the
portable social profile that people wanted.
It is is locked to a blockchain. But you can import and export
your profile data in and out of sites, which is kind of what
you're talking about, right? It's like a third model for
accounts, right? Not username and password, not
log in with Google or Facebook, but log in with your private
key. Effectively go ahead.
Exactly. So once once you assume that
consumers of PKI, it's just all like not only can you build like
just normal applications much faster because you're not
managing accounts, but you can now also build financial
applications, which has really been impossible before.
And like you can build a bank, right?
Bit like 2-2 devs can build a bank in three weeks.
And and you know, The thing is, one thing I find, and you're
probably aware of this as well, is folks who are first or second
Gen. immigrants are just so much more conscious of how big a deal
that is, right. Because we've all experienced
some problem with the banking system, either in our home
countries or, you know, with family abroad or something like
that. And the more you're kind of, you
know, more the developed world, rich country, whatever, you
know, legacy infrastructure works for you, the less you see
the need for crypto. Because you don't, you just
don't see the problem. You're like, you know, my
Starbucks thing kind of works. Why do I need this thing?
Whatever. But if you're sending money
overseas, you know, Murtaza Hussein had a good post on this
where, you know, he's in, he's got like family, totally
innocent family. They happen to be in a country
which is just very hard to send money to and boom, he's just
able to do it right. And so that kind of thing, like
now boom, you can just instantly set up the equivalent of a bank
account, send and receive money. It is actually like it's on a
that's The thing is people think, oh, where's the use
cases? Well, it's 1000 X, it's 100,000
X easier to set up a bank account in terms of time and to
send money across borders and to do accounting on chain and and
all these different things. Whatever.
I I'm, I know I'm preaching to the choir.
But go ahead. So, so you get to kind of like
the mobile phone. Why mobile one like me as an
engineer at Qualcomm. This is while I was there.
This is basically, I think before even Bitcoin was a thing.
We're already working on this idea of a trusted display and a
trusted computing environment on your phone.
And that means that it's, it's by trusted.
What this means is that it's an environment that the operating
system that runs all these user applications cannot cannot
touch. It's like it's like.
Exactly SGX, right, Exactly. But SGX did have a problem with
it, right? If I was like a while back or go
ahead. These these systems are hard to
build and it takes a lot of iteration and like the SGX
design was more ambitious than like something like trust zone
and ARM. But you basically the way kind
of from a very high level, the way it works is it segments
memory is it. There's some chunks of physical
addresses that are accessible to the trust zone and nothing else
in the operating system can read it.
And you need to also make the display trusted environment.
And that's a very kind of an unintuitive thing.
But like let's say you had like a widget for you to enter your
seed phrase on the phone and an application from a malicious
developer replicated yeah, mimic the exact same screen that asks
you to re enter it. Risers would get fished and
accidentally enter it and know your seed phrase is is gone.
So you need a a very a way to override the display and make
sure the operating system cannot mimic that and like create that
environment. Very similar to the HTTPS lock
symbol. Exactly.
Right. So once you have those pieces,
you can then effectively treat this device very similar to a
hardware wallet like a Ledger. I would say that like most
people should not use this for cold storage like storing their
life savings on it. But even if even if the if we
like prove that supply chain and everything else and audits the
trust was as secure as a Ledger, you still need to get into this
like idea that I have like my cold wallet which is my savings
account and that has air gap security and this is my hot
wallet. But I use day-to-day and I use
it for talking to applications and that if I lose my wallet
it's not catastrophic right? Right.
Right, right. No, I think, I think it's very
important. I mean the the thing about it
though is it is much While you should still have cold storage,
this is this is putting up a much higher bar.
A warm wallet is at least not remote shut off able very
trivially right. Exactly hacked.
But it's like it's still far more secure than the status pro.
And you know there's something else you said by the way which
is I think really important. I don't want to skip over when
you said restoring the 1st amendment and the 4th Amendment
right. I actually wrote an article on
this called Bitcoin and Civilization.
That's actually the the domestic policy version.
And then also, you know, the, you know, an article for foreign
policy and the international policy version.
But to your point, free speech, how are you going to do it?
Well, you need to actually encrypted speech.
And how do you have protection from search and seizure?
The TSA is like patting everybody down, searching
everybody without warrant. Well, encryption restores your
ability to walk around without search and seizure, especially
in those countries that don't have even those traditions of
civil liberties, you know, unfortunately in a many places
around the world. So we're basically wherever
there's a phone, we're parachuting in civil liberties
as well Right now the only thing I would maybe added on what you
said is I do believe that what that does is it gives people the
ability to opt out of you know, like bad states, you know,
failed states, surveillance states.
I think the next step is going to be them opting in to good
jurisdictions. And I I think we're both you
know, in a sense pro civilization because that that's
actually the third bit in in in my book that I was like the
least popular word in the world is re centralization.
You know because the people who are currently running
centralized systems are like why aren't those OK for you And the
people who are pro decentralization are like why
would you want to re centralized.
That's where we're escaping from.
But the way I kind of think about it is, you know,
decentralization is like hitting the fire alarm.
You know, everybody runs out the building and in different
directions, but then they want to like a regroup at the like,
you know, the the union point, right.
And maybe not in exactly the same way, but you know, you you
need to have those sovereign individuals, they they unbundle
from the system that's failing them.
They use the civil rights, the property rights that the crypto
phone delivers to do that right. And it's really both.
It is, I mean it's like, you know, punk 6529, you know, on
Twitter, right. She has this really great thread
which actually expresses that so clearly, which is most civil
rights don't exist in practice without property rights.
They are basically the same like you want to buy a sign to
protest you need some money, right.
You know, almost all kinds of things.
If you can shut off somebody's banking, you can basically like
throttle them and they don't have you know the cost of
speech. If you raise it too high, they
don't actually have freedom of speech, right.
So the sort of so the the left libertarian, the right
libertarian have something very strong in common here, you know.
Right. And so, so putting that
together, basically that sovereign individual as a civil
rights and property rights that are restored in my view
protected by the crypto phone can then bundle with other
people to have a sovereign collective where now they can
actually because they have property rights, they can do
collective goods together because they have civil rights,
they can speak freely together and they can come up with a
polity that suits them. Go ahead, let me know your
thoughts on that. These are like the freely
associated communes that like Mikhail Bacunin dreamed of.
Like there's no, there's no oppressive state.
Everyone associates at their own will, they bring whatever they
can and everyone kind of works together and next it.
Yeah, well, so, so, but it was so it's funny, there's there's
that utopian version, but it's actually the actual version.
And the actual version is like mid 1800s America.
So it's called the The Communistic Societies of the
United States is a book by this guy Charles Nordhoff and he goes
through and for example like the Oneida commune in in upstate New
York was actually a group of people because there's all this
land, right? So people could just go to
wherever piece of land and if they liked it, they stayed.
And if they didn't like it, they'd apply to another
community and they'd move there. And some of these things failed,
but some of them really worked. And like Oneida today is
actually the name of like a glassware manufacturer, as you
might be aware. But back in the day it was like
a, it was like an opt in society where there's enough geography
And actually the Kibbutz's in Israel were also kind of like
this. And some of them now today have
become like big companies like Netaphime is like an
agricultural thing. So other reason I say that is
people there is the utopian idealistic version that doesn't
actually get anywhere but they're actually have been
successful experiments in opt in living of which arguably the
United States is one of the best where you know it's only 4% of
the world. Most of people who came here
came here voluntarily of course you know since the slaves
notwithstanding and the American cetera that's important.
But like let's say 90 percent, 85% of the population came
voluntarily and it did build something great.
It is an opt in society. Of course there's lots of other
dimensions to it but that that is something.
So the only reason I just say that this otherwise people will
think oh Bhaji, just so unrealistic and utopian.
But you're right there's there is the bacoon in aspect but
there's also the American aspect.
There's the there. There's a realistic aspect.
Go ahead. And so like YFO, and I think is
the engineering aspect of the phone for PKI is just really,
really obvious this this device already has the hardware to
support it, like where Apple and Google store your biometric
scans. It's in the secure element, like
when you do Apple Pay, that's a trusted display and nobody else
can fake it. And like all this stuff already
exists. So we've taken basically stock
Android builds like worked with like an OEM, and five engineers
like made the changes to enable cryptographic signing in this
device. This is, I'm honestly, I'm so
happy you're doing this. And actually, you know, the
thing I hadn't connected until just now is I was like, you
know, phone's pretty ambitious and you guys have shipped it and
it seems to work. And then I realized your
Qualcomm background is probably helpful in this and cut in terms
of, you know, it's like knowing what to turn and who to talk to
and so and so forth. Is that correct?
Like, yeah. I think understanding the scope
of the problem like we were able to minimize it to like we need
the smallest change inside the the trust zone to support this.
It's not going to take a team of 100 people.
Take 5 and you can work with any OEM to enable it.
Wow, that's go ahead. If you're saying I'm.
I'm really psyched by this. And that means that like this
technology, like we, we have a really good relationship with
like the Google folks and like it runs all the Google services.
There's no, like objections on their side, like, oh, you can't
do this or something like that. It's just crypto's really,
really small. There's not a like.
I would imagine that like the number of Twitter users that
have enabled the NFT search is probably under fifty 100,000.
Like that have that have. And like when you look at
Twitter, it's like 300 million people to them.
Like, OK, crypto's a buzzword. We can enable this feature and
do a whole bunch of work to support self custody or
whatever, and then only 100,000 people often do it.
It's a failure. Well, so here's the thing.
Actually, I think that that is going to be pretty important for
them in the future and here's why 100%, right?
So, So like lots of things are like this where like for
example, crypto kitties, you know, it was like this small
experiment NFT thing in 2017. It was like a little bubble.
And then NFTS became a huge thing.
And then they crashed, but they crashed back down to a much
higher level than they were before.
One thing, for example, there's an app salon app thing.
It's called Glow, right? Which you're probably familiar
with, right? And you can just take a photo of
something in NFT. People think, oh, that's so
stupid. What are you?
The answer is, it's not just OK Yeah, you can sell it, maybe, or
whatever. They're thinking about NFTS
speculative art. I'm thinking of it as a crypto
instrument. It's a crypto camera that at
least that person at that time can assert on chain that this
thing was photographed by this device and maybe you include a
device signature with it and there's things you could do
maybe even in like a hardware fingerprint or something.
Why is it so important? Because AI is coming at least
mitigate them, right. And so that code that Twitter
has for you know code pass for handling NFT is it may be
something where you have a check mark knowledge just on the
person but on the image that it came from a crypto camera and
you can actually show it's a it's a it's supply chain like
it's digital supply chain. It came back from this block at
this time. And that doesn't mean, by the
way to be clear that doesn't mean it's necessarily 100% real.
It just means at least you can have some some things you know
about it. You know some of the metadata,
some of the China custody, it had to have been faked by this
guy at this time, you know on this chain.
And that narrows it down a bit because with that person who had
the motive to fake it, you know. So hey, I love your thoughts on
something like that so. So I yeah absolutely 100% agree
with you. I think like in the post product
market fit crypto world like every company is going to have
to have some interface to crypto and like.
But the the hard problem for them right now is that like the
number of active users with PKI is actually pretty small.
You have a bunch of people that hold Bitcoin, a bunch of people
that may have traded on exchanges and just buy and hold
it. But like when you look at the
number of active transacting users in NFTS and all these
other stats when you combine them like Open C's global total
number of users that have used Open C is around 5,000,000
number. I didn't argue.
I have an argument on this historically.
No, I understand. Yeah, I understand.
And I'm not. I'm not just one thing that I've
thought about. And this observation isn't
original to me. I think Dixon has made it.
Other folks have made it. But, you know, social media
arose where it had lots and lots of users.
But then for a long time, people said, how's this thing going to
make money, right. And for example, Instagram had
tons and tons of use, tons of use cases.
And when it was acquired in 2012, you know Jon Stewart
because it had no revenue at the time, by the way, it was
actually a huge huge coin flip by by Zuck at Facebook was not,
you know they only had like 4 billion in cash.
They're a few weeks away from IPO.
Facebook itself, it was questionable as where they're
going to make money on mobile. They spend a billion dollars
acquiring Instagram. He didn't consult the board.
Now today it's $100 billion company.
Everybody thinks it's such a genius move.
Obvious move at the time, antitrust.
It was very non obvious move then right.
Point is Instagram had zero revenue but had lots of use and
crypto has in some ways the opposite emergence mode from
social media where it generates tons and tons of money and it's
a use cases that are second as opposed to social media which
was use cases first, revenue second, right.
So that's kind of 1 angle on your argument.
Maybe have some thoughts on that?
And then that's actually like, you almost led me to the
opportunity for us. OK, great.
How can we, how can, like a tiny startup with like 5 engineers
messing around with Android take on like like Google and Apple?
Because like the thing that we're really delivering here is
the PKI for users, But also an app, a DAP store, like an
application store for developers that does not have the fee model
that the Google and Apple stores have and does not have the
restrictions on treating PKI as a feature on the device.
For token gating, for NFTS, for minting these NFTS, you know,
and like submitting them to a chain and selling them.
Like that's basically prohibited in both Google and Apple like
and that's that's kind of like the feature set.
And the opportunity for us is that while crypto has a small
user base, it's probably the spendiest user base on the
Internet. Like I would say it's with it's
like the point 1% of people that like generate the most like
volumes, the most trading, the most like financial activity on
the Internet right now are the crypto users.
So if we can get this device to 2550 thousand of those users,
that's actually better distribution channel for devs
than the big app stores are today.
Anyone that's building in crypto would rather get their
application to 50,000 active web.
Three people that have used Open C or Magic Eden on a day-to-day
basis than try to like find some way to sneak in a feature in the
apps in the Apple App Store behind the scenes.
There's a couple of questions on that.
AI assume you do. You did have multi wallets on
there, so it doesn't just hold salt, it holds ETH and BTC and
so on. Right.
So, so like V0 right now we just why the reason we shipped is
that sure. You just cut cut teachers but
but it's on the road map to add. And like there.
It's open source and we have like external contributors
working on adding ETH support. There's actually an EVM
equivalent runtime called NEON on Solana which requires ETH
support. So like, even if we were just
like trying to box it out, like it would eventually happen
because all this stuff is interoperable.
I'm glad you're taking that approach because I think once
the Solana phone holds both Ethan BTC it may maybe it's not
a maybe it's not a exactly a blocking requirement or
something like that. I think it's like worth checking
out even now. And that's a software upgrade.
So you could get it now and try to.
But The thing is that basically this is I'll, I'll make a couple
of points. These are obvious points to you
maybe not points that folks know in the ecosystem web development
was actually held back through most of the 2000s by Internet
Explorer. Absolutely like right.
That whole time period has been erased from memory.
Right. Everyone thinks oh go ahead.
You remember I remember it. It right.
It took literally like an engineer of Google to, like,
accidentally deprecate Internet Explorer sex and post a link
like, hey, update your shitty, shitty browser.
And like, it wasn't a peon that made that decision.
Or a director. It was like there was like a
fire in Google management. Holy shit, who who pushed this
feature? Yes, well, it was.
It's something where like that whole story is worth telling.
And the reason I just say is because web development as we
currently know it was held back by Microsoft because they beat
Netscape. So just for those who don't
remember this, you know, because they're too young or in the 90s,
Bill Gates saw the Internet thing coming to his credit, OK
And Netscape had just had their huge IPO, I think 1995 and
Netscape Navigator was coming and he decided, OK, we're going
to ship a browser, we're going to bundle it with the operating
system and we're going to a 68 Netscape.
And and basically that's what they did.
And that was actually part of the basis for the antitrust
trial in the late 90s and early 2000s was they were bundling
their browser with the OS. And it was, but it was worth it
for them in a sense because they took all the revenue out of the
space. Netscape did sell to AOL, it was
like, but but basically what happened was once Microsoft had
killed Netscape as a competitor into Explorer, had like 90
something percent share. And they basically just like
kind of stopped development after that, right, Because they
didn't want the web to become a big thing.
They wanted everybody to run on Microsoft Windows.
Now at that time in the early 2000s there were two
alternatives to Windows which were A Apple and Mac OS which is
based on BSD and B Linux. And Linux was a server set
technology that had an ethics around it, open source and
whatnot. Which we forget today because
Linux is now so commercial by the time is a big thing and
Apple was still a shadow of what it is today.
It was pre, it was even pre iPod, pre iPod, pre iPod, let
alone iPhone or iPad or the monster it is, right.
So Microsoft was very dominant in the early 2000s and it was
basically choke pointing the entire web.
And Google just bided its time because it didn't want to get
killed like Netscape and you know, just did search, search,
search, search, search all the way through 2004 focused on that
completely over six years. And by the way, people brought
off the Internet afterthe.com crash, right.
For years. This wasn't, it wasn't, it was
like so out of the news that it wasn't even something that
people attacked, right. You're just thought of as
obviously, you know, a failure. Whatever.
They're all focused on Iraq. They're all focused on
terrorism. That was the 2000s, right?
Even in 2009, somebody wrote this article about, like, the
power centers in the US and they didn't list Silicon Valley among
it. OK?
They had like, you know, the Pentagon and they had Wall
Street. And all this stuff did not list
Silicon Valley because there's still gadgets.
It was like, you know, maybe you have your iMac and there's
Microsoft Windows and that Facebook was still in the 2000,
2009 still, like, for college students, all that stuff was
just not even there. Point being that it was only in
2004 with Gmail, which actually pioneered Ajax.
In 2005, Google Maps. And it took Google's engineers,
which were the best in the world to figure out this backdoor.
Intra Explorer left his backdoor right for XML HTP request.
And then, you know, Firefox started gaining some traction in
the mid 2000s. And then Chrome came out.
I think it was only like, what O8 or O9?
Is that right? Was that right?
And HTML5 was like the late 2000s and HTML5 was this
exciting thing. Oh, you can do the web again.
But that was like 10 years from the.com crash in 2000 to
actually being able to do web apps, kind of sorta in 2010.
And now the iPhone App Store only came out in O8.
All of this stuff is like extremely recent.
And so the reason I bring all that up is I think the, you
know, the Internet only came back by public acclamation as an
important thing in February of 2013.
And that's when the tech lash began.
But it's basically about 12 years betweenthe.com crash in
2013 before tech was taken seriously.
Again, the reason I say this is a big part in my view of what's
being holding back, people are like, oh, where are the
applications for crypto? And so my first answer to that
is with our applications, we've got digital gold, we've got
crowdfunding, we've got wire transfers, we've got setting up
bank accounts, we've got a lot of stuff.
It's like the what are the Romans ever done for us?
There's all these things, right? The 2nd is, well, block space
has been a constraint for a long time.
And so the apps that are being developed for those that
minimize use of block space, like Bitcoin, just hold for a
long time, right? Where theorem is bind to the
crowdfund and then still hold for a long time, it's minimal on
chain, not only now with what you guys are doing and what
other chains are doing is block space, much less of a
constraint, right. So that's the second thing.
And the third thing is what you're doing with Solana phone
because Apple as you know it was just like ridiculous for many
years in terms of filtering apps and you couldn't do crypto stuff
on the phone and they've gotten a little better on that now.
But it's like a it's like one step forward, 2 steps back
sometimes and now you've got a phone which is totally unlocked
and she can do all the crypto stuff on there.
So. So those three things I think
are why like Salon has like this really interesting mobile app
culture now those things have all like come together now
finally. Go ahead.
Yeah, that's my take on it. May be idiosyncratic.
There's like a tidbit of history there that I think, at least in
my memory, this is kind of how I remember it.
The web sucked until the iPhone released and Apple decided to
actually fork KHTML into Webkit, which is the open source like
web browser that was built for KDE which is part of the desktop
suit for Linux. And this is like the people like
at the time I was like a huge Linux cert.
I ran Linux and like the year of Linux and desktop was always
going to be next year. Yeah, yeah, it's actually
arguably come. It's actually come because
Android is a new desktop and that's mobile Linux, right?
But but but it came in a different brand.
Go. Ahead and and like the Apple
engineers working in Webkit and make and that thing being open
source is when Google then forked Webkit and made and made
pro and that was like Google and Apple both working together to
kind of like build a browser that was equivalent to Internet
Explorer and then like could kind of drive the web to like
next generation like these dynamic application environment
was like I think what saved the web And there's kind of a deep
irony there that now like both Google and Apple run these like
app stores that are anti web. Arguably that one in some ways
like neuter the web and prevent these like rich applications
running in like a browser only environment.
So we're like back full circle. We're back full circle.
And actually, I mean I give a lot of credit, immense credit to
Satya for turning around Microsoft and so on.
But we may literally be in this weird history repeats thing with
Microsoft about to like choke points.
Yeah. The entire tech ecosystem
through an API running on it's servers.
Do we want that again? I mean come on.
Right. You know, like with all the
props, I hope they make tons of money.
I just don't want them to have the same control that they did.
Right. And.
But but yeah, your point is very good because basically it took
Google and Apple and Firefox. Right.
All I mean you know like a really good start because
Firefox had Blake Ross who's like a super genius.
You know like browser developer like this.
You remember him, right. He actually, I don't know what
he's doing now, but he's like an early engineer on Facebook also
and he like coded Firefox when he's like a teenager.
So Blake Ross at Firefox and and Google and Apple, all three of
them took years before finally IE 6's market share came below
50%. I don't remember what year that
was, but it was like I feel as late 2000, that's my guess,
we'll go, we'll kind of look it up.
I might be wrong but I I feel like that right?
Yeah, I think you're right. Right.
So so basically and then and only then could all the stuff
that Paul Graham was talking about with web apps.
NY Combinator. Only then late 2000s early 20
tens could that stuff finally become feasible.
Right And and and even like Netflix for example streaming
Netflix House of Cards I think was only 20, 2012, 2013, right.
They were doing mail order DVD. The web just didn't work for
like the the reason I just say all this is people have
retconned that because it works today.
They think it instantly worked. And This is why I think like PKI
is going and I don't know if it's going to take like Solana,
like SMS showing that there's now developer traction and devs
are shipping apps and making real revenues to get like the
Google and Apple to change like my my.
My kind of bet is that like in the in the best case we succeed,
we get 1 to 2% like market share of like global users using SMS.
And these are the web 3 users. And all of a sudden developers
that are shipping applications to this user base are generating
more revenue than they do in the other app stores.
And that's going to be the inflection point that forces the
big companies to be like, OK, we got to like change your business
model, which is going to be really painful because the the
careers built around that business model, right, right and
and support PKI. It's it's funny.
I think, well, you've you've done a very good job at Solana.
You have a, you have an Instagram deal you have a
YouTube deal right. It just, you know Twitter's got
NFT support and so on. So you've done a good job of
interfacing with the big tech companies with the open minded
people there who at least are putting a a toe in the water
right. Reddit also has NFT is now on
Discord is you know they had some pushback last year but
they're I think gradually adding some crypto stuff and so on on.
And and I'm also starting to see apps like like Luma for example,
that have you know Ethereum and Solana support or like Spatial
dot IO has some like crypto support.
So you're starting to see it not as like necessarily the the be
all and end all of the app but as a feature in the app which
you can log in with Metamask or you know Phantom or Google.
Right. So that's like just starting to
happen, but it's happening kind of out of public sight in some
ways, only like the hardcore, we're seeing it go ahead.
And these are the, the small stages of adoption and I think
these are the kind of the, the really like, you know, it's like
really painful to 0 to want to start up, it's really painful to
0 to want to make an ecosystem. Yeah.
So like a whole like new programming paradigm is is also
really really harsh. Oh oh, and Rust and Rust, by the
way. Yeah, I like Rust, but Rust also
adds a degree of a degree of difficulty to some extent,
right? It's great, great language.
But the you know, it's funny though.
One thing is one of my theses, I love your thoughts.
And this is after mid 2017, I realized that we weren't going
to have another trillion dollar American tech company.
The reason is the backlash against Uber, You know, backlash
against Uber. But if Theorem was going
vertical at the time, I realized, OK, we're going to
have the American tech ecosystem, we'll have the
Chinese ecosystem and then we'll have the global ecosystem where
the only other thing that can get to global scale will be
those things that have crypto backends.
And actually that is, you know, the, you know, in a sense, the
competitors to Google and Facebook and so on are actually
already in plain sight. They are Bitcoin and Ethereum
and Solana and you know, the basically the things that are
built around those chains as opposed to companies, it's like
communities and currencies as opposed to companies.
I love your thoughts on that. I think that the maybe I'm like
too much of like an anarchist. I think it's going to look more
of like smaller companies that are very hyper optimized for
their user base that I think it's going to be very hard to
build a global brand that scales up.
Maybe protocols can do it. But protocols only I think
that's. Right.
But but it's going to be like local companies that are like
hey I'm using Ethereum and people have some trust to to
that brand or I'm using Solana or I'm using like this protocol
for matching drivers to to passengers.
And these small companies all around the world can all
coordinate around this one protocol and use that to
bootstrap their like initial user base, initial like set of
drivers and stuff and like because like I think what what
chains provide are like basically marketplaces and
that's a very small thing but very powerful thing because the
web runs in a marketplace, it's the ad exchange marketplace.
Everything runs in a marketplace somewhere, right.
Like when you're buying stuff, somebody has to match it with a
seller. And like having these decent
like decentralized and spared marketplaces with branded
protocols I think could help bootstrap these like small
communities that are like now running effectively like Uber
but now Uber that's built on top of a protocol.
That protocol may not actually be as extractive as a trillion
dollar big tech Corp. You know, you mentioned
something which makes me think of the fat protocol thesis from
like a few years ago. The thing is, the FAT protocol
thesis I think is in the long term may be partially true.
We may see some app chains, but I think in the short term it is
not true because what will happen is you'll put the minimum
necessary state on chain, correct.
And I think this is the part you know, Moxie Marlon Spike is a
great engineer, you know, did Signal and so on.
He had this post a while back, about a year ago or so, where
he's like, it feels like all the Web Three stuff.
It's just trying to put it's good.
It's trying to have the absolute minimum amount of
decentralization. And like, you're absolutely
right because block space is the key technical constraint of the
whole thing. Just like bandwidth was a key
technical constraint of the 2000s, right.
So like in the 2000s, the whole name of the game was minimizing
bandwidth. That's why Netflix did Mailer or
DVD, right? That's why Google did search for
a long time, because it was just keyword in 10 links out, right.
That's why Amazon had a card, basically a catalog interface.
And you know, AWS came only much later.
And it's because they were minimizing, you know, like
bandwidth use. Because the early Internet, most
people didn't have T-bond connections.
Even if Facebook, you probably know the story.
You know why Facebook started at Harvard?
I don't. Because like people that tried
to do social networks before like 6° and so on and that
didn't have photos, because people didn't have enough
digital cameras and have high enough.
I mean think about that time, right?
Like digital cameras couldn't be taken for granted, right?
And most people didn't even have that many digital camera photos.
And yet to have a special camera that would like go with some
like printer, cable like thing to your computer said like 11
digital camera photo. And at Harvard you had just like
you talked about like the 50,000 crypto users as like the
starting base for something. Harvard had that group of like
in in 2004, 2003, these relatively elite users that had
T1 connections, they're well off enough to have digital cameras.
They're young and early adopters.
And that was the hothouse environment where like this
could take off sooner. And then going to colleges, it
was not simply a strategic thing.
It was like an act of necessity. I mean, even in 2009, like
something like only 5% of India was online, right?
So like five years before then, you couldn't have had Facebook
in India, right? And so I think in the same way
the strategy you have where you get 50,100 thousand Solana
mobile users is the same emergent strategy for, you know,
starting at Harvard or starting in San Francisco, but rather
than starting in a geography, you're starting with the global
community. Getting that like small user
base is is very counterintuitive like go to market I think for
like phone companies and I worked on the Amazon Fire the
Facebook like a whole and like the Windows Metro phone at
Qualcomm. We were like like hey this big
company is going to build a smartphone and we throw a bunch
of engineers at it and I would be one of those like working on
subcomponent very similar to like that being lucky being at
Harvard to start Facebook. If if we can get if we can be
that lucky and get the phone to the the crypto users that are
the the number one like I would say spenders on the Internet and
the daily active PKI users. And if we get enough of them
that's going to be I think a very competitive marketplace for
developers can does build applications that are like so
high value to users that somebody will decide OK I'm
buying an SMS enabled phone that because of this application and
if we see that like we see actually somebody doing that
that means that we actually have product market fit for crypto.
The this idea of that like PKI and the interaction between PKI
and a public blockchain, whatever that data structure
that's in it's interacting with is now so valuable that users
are willing to like make a purchasing decision.
I think that that's going to be like the big unlock and that's
the big unknown because I think while we're there a bit unlike
NF, TS and like crypto trading and stuff like that.
I would say my in my mind the only kind of non like more
consumer ask use case that we've seen over the last year was step
in which is like crypto like and that had like a breakout but
like not a sustainable one. But like we need we need to see
more attempts at this. Like this is a consumer
application. It's got it's using crypto Rails
and PKI for like user identity and crypto Rails for finance and
like whatever else. But it has like real value to
consumers in the like the real economy outside of crypto itself
and and I think I think part of that is now enabled.
By block space being cheap enough that it's a transaction
and and that's relatively new that's like about a year old or
so, right Technologically. You know one other thing by the
way to your point is there's this post at you know the
network's called the Billion User Table by by John Stokes and
he it's it's kind of good long form version of an argument that
that I've discussed on Twitter and we've discussed with him.
But it's basically that in the long term, I'm pretty sure that
people will log in with their crypto account as opposed to,
you know, Facebook, Google, etcetera, for the simple reason
that when you log in with your Solana name or your theory name,
you have a balance, tada, right? That alone, you know, if you if
you just had 10,000 users who logged into Facebook and all
you've got is their profile photo and their name, or you
have 10,000 users that logged in that have nonzero balances.
And then more than that, they have the whole vector of all
NFTS, whatever else they've decided to share with the site,
right. Because they've logged in with
that particular name. You just like, you know, that's
just a much more economically valuable user, right?
And you know, one way of thinking about it, you know, you
mentioned a 50,100 thousand. Well, do you know what, for
example, do you know many people that Cayman Islands has like as
a as a country, It's only like 68,000 people.
That's believable. So.
Yeah, that's kind of interesting, right?
Estonia's only. A million people.
Like, there's a lot of countries.
One thing I think, you know, it's a theme of the network,
said Book. And you know, the pod, just like
they're startups that punch way, way, way above their weight.
You know, like WhatsApp had 13 people, I don't know 55 people
on Instagram had like 13 people. You know, to get to hundreds of
millions of users and you guys had five people to go and do the
Solana phone. We're taking a huge group of
people, the small countries that punch way above their weight and
they just do way more with a few 10s of thousands of people.
I mean, the Cayman Islands is like a globally important thing,
right? Estonia is like pretty, pretty
important given it's only like 1,000,000 people.
So I think actually it's not just I, I, I know you know this
and I know you're saying this, but like it's not just a
numerical base, it's kind of their commitment and influence.
I do think that the kinds of applications that would run on
the salon of phone, you know, one graph that has always stuck
with me. Have you seen the graph of
Facebook's user base and the smartphone install base?
If you if you compare both of them, I believe that smartphones
actually grew faster than Facebook, even though you had to
pay money for smartphones. Like as useful as Facebook was.
And how big is Scott it, right? Smartphones were so ridiculously
valuable to people, right? And so an interesting question
will be, when would your crypto phone get so valuable that
people would pay for it? You know what is like the killer
app right? And it'll you know it might be I
can I can think of negative models, right.
I can think of negative stimuli things where there's you know
threatened or actual seizure or search of of things right.
I want to think of positive things.
You know obviously the crypto economy right and tasks and
other kinds of things. Maybe you can earn more within
that environment right. Maybe it's just like a crypto
first environment you know like forecaster do that is it's a
it's like in a sense it's like an Ethereum social network right
Noster. So it's not it wasn't
necessarily created for this purpose is like now becoming a
Bitcoin social network where it's got like lightning
integration and ordinals ordinals are coming in.
Bitcoin is actually now much more interesting again from a
dev sample with Noster and ordinals right.
And then there'll be a Solana network maybe among these crypto
phones that seems like an obvious thing to do just like
other Solana users that integrating with other Solana
users right. So I so that may be just
something where to participate in the Solana crypto economy.
That's maybe why you you you get that phone right.
So maybe you don't actually lean out of it.
You just grow the Solana country right.
Let me maybe maybe disagree. Maybe you agree with that.
I I mostly agree with that. I think I think we we will see
like these kind of like PKI interactions like start
happening with applications that are like start built basically
like the complexity of like dealing with chain you're
dealing with where the data structures are how the users log
in. These are starting to get more
and more kind of melting away with libraries and developer
tooling and like the PKI aspect of it.
Like from a user's perspective, like if they have this phone,
this the what the phone does is it provides secures, a seed
phrase. But then the wallets themselves
can connect to Ethereum, can connect to Solana, can connect
to Bitcoin and whatever. And it's all based on the same
seed phrase. And that's where your root
identity is generated from kind of going back to that Verisign
world, that secure element inside the device is, are the
armed guards for the certificate.
And then you end up with like infinite.
Yeah. Better than armed guards,
because encryption, yeah. Or.
Identities that can be on any network and.
The tooling and like the being able to kind of like move value
and like move maybe like key points of like identity between
them. That stuff is going to get
better and and simpler across like you know it's just time
progresses like on on all the major networks.
We're kind of seeing some of that like you see like major
wallets like fandom start supporting multiple chains but
do it in a way that everything is derived from a single
identity root and you have accounts that can be shared
between chains and like NF, TS that are associated with one.
But you can understand proofs like for smart for like
applications that are kind of becoming more agnostic.
Like I own this NFT, it may be on Solana, but it's AD God and
you guys are doing stuff on Etherium and stuff like that.
So I'm really glad that you're. Thinking cross chain and multi
chain eventually even obviously you have to ship and so on but
that actually I think you know like things like neon EPM
compatibility I think that's really good and positive some
you know I have so I have a couple other things I want to
talk to you about with the the phone one is just on like the
logistics of building it. Right.
The Cyanogen a long time ago they tried to fork Android and
they got I mean they're they're pretty good technically strong
technically but they just didn't have like the business model for
it at the time. And then a bunch of Chinese
manufacturers successfully forked Android and like Xiaomi
being you know one of them And then one of the things Google
did is it sort of pushed more and more stuff into Google
services to kind of discourage that.
So Android was initially very open and everyone like free ride
on Google and Google's like wait a second I didn't I didn't
really want you to do that. And so more and more stuff
became like Google services where they didn't close Android
source but they closed the state of the application and pushed it
server side. And the third was Facebook using
Android for Oculus Quest and of course, you know Facebook's a
big competitor of Google but they they found that that
operating system was a mobile OS that they could for can do
something with. So you know, I don't know.
I mean like the it's interesting because iOS in a, in a sense is
also built on BSc. But they have not made it
anywhere near not even not anywhere near they have not made
it publicly forkable at all. How did you know?
How did you guys think about that in terms of those other
three that I mentioned like Cyanogen and the Chinese
manufacturers and and Facebook are all competing with Google,
but you're you took a more cooperative approach, am am I
correct about that? And this is for practical
reasons I use. Both my my Saga device and my
iPhone. But even before I had the saga,
I was already using Google Maps and Gmail and and Chrome.
So like you, you like, those are really pretty decent services
and I kind of know that they're taking my data, but that that's
just like competitively, I think it's really, really hard to
build products that are as good. But it's getting closer.
You start seeing like things like Hive Mapper builds an open
data set for mapping and that's definitely going to end up being
competitive to Google Maps eventually.
I use signal like more often than I use iMessage, like my
iMessage is filled up with spam for Oh yeah, for randos.
My signal I actually used to talk to like my friends and
family on a day-to-day basis. So like that that stuff was
already naturally happening. At some point we'll get to
parity to where you have encryption first, like privacy
preserving applications that have the exact same properties
as the Google applications, and then it won't really matter if
the Google's stuff is there anymore.
And for now, my guess is that like the GMs licensing and OEM
licensing is set up in a way due to about the Google mobile
services, I don't know if it's set up because Google bull
trying to trying to do this. So yeah, so Skiff is actually.
I'm not sure if they have Solana support.
They have Ethereum support, but they may add salon support at
some point. Skiff is worth looking at if you
haven't seen it, which is like doing Google Docs and Gmail with
crypto login, right? And maybe they could add Solana
login and they're doing basic provable into an encryption and
so on, right? So something like that is a good
example of where you're talking about where you basically have
drop insurance for each thing and one of the reasons that
people might want this is you know Google is starting to do
things where you know it's it's this was this was just a demo
but it was posted on Twitter. You may have seen this where
landlord was being auto completed as being offensive to
somebody and you know just like I don't know there's stuff like
that where you just might not agree with what Google is doing
server side. They're they're now just sort of
showing. It's almost like, you know, Big
Brother can see you kind of thing.
Right. Have you ever heard of Tebow
sorting? Do you know what that is?
Charles Tebow. OK, so all the way back in 2013,
it's actually part of a bunch of tweets.
I had naked a bunch of tweets a long time ago.
But I tweeted something like the long term consequence of the
smartphone will be to enable Tebow sorting.
And there's this economist named Charles Tebow.
If you Google T i.e. BOUT, right, there's something
called the Tebow model. OK, this is a purely theoretical
model in like the 1950s, and he had 7 assumptions.
In the T-ball model, it was something like everybody has
perfect information and they can, you know, we now save
remote work, they can work from anywhere and they have mobility
and services in one location don't spill over to the other.
So for example, if a group in location A is funding services,
that only those people who pay for the service can have access
to it and Group B can't and so on.
So it's like eliminates the free rider problem.
And so it's over. He had a bunch of assumptions
which are all very unrealistic in the world, the 1950s, what's
happening is the Internet is making all of those happen and
the Solanophone or the Cryptophone more generally is
making them happen even further shell, you know, So it's that's
something you know, just like, you know, you the verifiable
Delay Function was something that you you sort of built
something and you weren't aware that it kind of intersected with
some piece of literature. If you haven't seen that, it's
worth taking a look at the T BA model and seeing how the crypto
phone really satisfies a bunch of those assumptions.
Go ahead. Do you think that?
Yeah. Like.
Because the the phone. Has been built kind of like by
these big tech companies. Do you think it's going to
become so like the consumer differentiator between any
device is going to get so small that like it's a commodity
product and then crypto can be that differentiator that like
has a viral flip like do you I I think so, right, because I mean
smartphones. They don't get that much better
each year. You know, like it is true that
your IOSIOS will get slower. People don't know if that's a
real thing or not, right? But but assuming I mean there's
a there's and you you know what I'm talking about, right?
Like if you don't if you don't upgrade your iOS on or you don't
upgrade your phone, I don't think it's malicious.
I think it's just the dabs are. Building on the next Gen. device
and they're using all the hardware the next Gen. device
for their like testing and then when you ported when you install
that code on the old Gen. device, you're like hey why is
it sluggish right. Right, exactly.
So. So it's it's.
Like, you know, there's that saying like, whatever in the in
the 90s people said whatever Intel creates, Microsoft
destroys. Like, you know, Microsoft,
Microsoft eat all the RAM, we're going to eat all the CPU
whatever, right? But actually, you know what's
interesting about it is you know you're a low level guy.
Do you know this app a long time ago called Word Lens came out in
the early 2000, early 20 tens, late 2000s.
OK, so Brazilian guy, you know, friendly acquaintance of mine
who coded this and it was basically able to do real time
OCR and translation of words. So you could hold it up and
assign in Spanish would in an augmented reality way translate
into English. OK.
And this was in like the early twenty 10s with very limited
cameras, I think it was even pre deep learning, OK.
And it was just incredibly impressive low level engineering
where he just coded everything in Objective C at a very low
level and it kind of showed, I mean he was, he was like one guy
basically and he was ahead of like all of Google's ML people
or whatever, right. I eventually got acquired by
Google, well deserved acquisition and and that kind of
showed what could happen if you took your kind of skills or his
kind of skills and actually did push the metal, you know, which
hasn't been done right. And the reason I think about
that is in the event, you know people are talking about some
conflict over Taiwan or what have you and hopefully that does
not happen right. But in the event that there is
some sort of sustained supply chain disruption, we might be
stuck with the current model of phones for a long time, you
know, or at least years, right? Basically 10X improvements.
In software across any application you can think of
like you can like the way things are built right now with React
and all of these like very fast to market stacks.
It's not optimized for performance, it's really
optimized for speed of getting to market.
And that makes sense when you have like a very rich
environment like richer resources.
But if we needed to push the envelope on like performance,
there's just like, you know, 10 to 100 X of optimizations people
can start doing in software. I'm very confident of that.
And then you can, you can see that in gaming concerts like
especially the Switch or PlayStation, Those have a very
long life cycle and it's the same chip for like 10 years, you
know, on the PS2 or whatever. And you saw the quality of games
get better and better as engineers really figured out the
nooks and crannies of the hardware and then the libraries
and then them skills scaled out. But that takes a very large
concentrated effort of continuously working on the same
thing. It is actually amazing when you
go back and play. Some of the old NES games or
something like that, how constrained those engineers were
in their debugging and shipping? And yet how good many of those
games are? You know, people have talked
about, you know, obviously starting new companies, new
communities, new new currencies for a while and I've got this
whole book on starting new countries, right.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Obviously, you know, crypto provides a lot of the material
for that. It provides currency, it
provides identity, It actually provides something
underestimated which is community of a bunch of people
around the world. You know what?
What does Tolley land look like? Right, Tolia?
You know what, what, what is? If you can start a new country,
you start a new currency. So if you start a new country,
what what is? What does that look like?
What? What would you do with that?
The state is the is the oppressive.
Part So I would start a non country like free association
anyone can participate in if they want to and whatever they
bring in bring into it is is like is up to them right like
and I think that's a very natural state of living because
the absolute when in like communities like I mean that was
like the the state of living in prehistoric times like everyone
lived in some community and like everyone contracted you had
ideas of private property but you also have this shared thing
that you are working on and you kind of see that naturally
happening with the Internet. Open source communities, people
build licenses and stuff like that to create some rules of
enforcement, but they're not. But I don't have to use the GPL
though, It's forcing me to be AGPL only person.
Like and then go code Apache licensing or whatever and you
kind of free associate with communities based on whatever
common social rules and standards they've created.
And that to me is like a very natural state.
And this is what like Totally land would be like.
We all have our PKI. If we want to coordinate on
ideas, it'd be open source ideas we would like.
If we want to pull funds together to go do a certain
thing we could use a doubt. You know and like you know set
up a a group and dialect where we like have these like smart
messages that tell everyone hey go sign this transaction and
like tell and like activate the Dow to go like pay for like you
know market marketing campaign for this open source product or
whatever that we go whatever. Whatever it is the thing that
that we worked on together and that's like a very kind of like
transparent free flow of like association environment cannot
thing scale. I I believe that can actually
scale to a very large number of people because this is the
natural state of people. But can it be like competitive
to a nation state is like I think a question like there's
one set of anarchists like back in the French Revolution that
the whole theory was that like we just ignore the state and we
do this like small commune association thing and eventually
if enough people do it, the state just goes away because.
We just we just ignore it like. And then it like disappears and
that's a very kind of utopian non practical thing point of
view but it it feels like very very attractive to to believe
that that's possible if you can get enough people.
From the state to believe it doesn't exist and it doesn't
exist. Like the Soviet Union doesn't
exist, right? So there's an aspect of that
which sounds utopian, but there's also an aspect of that
which is it's it's actually getting.
I mean that's thing I think a lot of people don't care about
crypto. Crypto is a softer install but
it's also a like a mental install.
It's a wetware install, right? Because it's not just the bytes
on a hard drive or a phone that matter, but it's a concepts in
people's heads that value those bytes and and treat them in a
certain way, right. And so, you know, there's
there's the dumb version of it which is, oh let's all just, you
know, close your eyes and pretend the government doesn't
exist. But there is the smart version
of it, which is governments have been convinced to not exist,
right. East Germany does not exist.
You know, like the Soviet Union does not exist.
These oppressive governments were basically convinced in a
sense to not exist. Now of course the counter
counter argument is they were convinced in part at gunpoint.
You know, there was the USA and so on.
And I'm not a utopian about that.
Certainly that was a very important component of the whole
thing. But ultimately, at least a big
part of that revolution was a peaceful one internally where
people did change their minds, right?
So at least part of it, I'm not saying all of it, but at least
part of it is the thing you're talking about where you you
build essentially a parallel society.
It shows a better way than the legacy society.
And people decide to opt out enough and then they kind of
withdraw support for the old thing.
And maybe the old thing doesn't have the legitimacy to even
enforce on the new one, right? Maybe that I think some reality
that are like this kind of already.
Exists and in western like liberal and democracies it
mostly exists too. Like people naturally like have
so far like we have more or less the freedom to kind of limit the
actions of the state and like slowly but surely we kind of
like do that. And for the most part like, you
know in our kids school people get together and pull ass money
together and like go build something right for the school.
And there's no like the state is not involved there, right.
And like yeah, it's a network, right?
We pool. It's a network we work at.
People work on open. Source software.
Together randomly, right? Like random people, they put in
work, they get releases out of the coordinate and the state is
more or less not involved there outside of like the like, you
know small copyright things, right?
Like finish what you're saying then I'll then I'll as like you
know. Totally land, right?
Like is. Is like that happening at a
faster pace and accelerating at a bigger scale and like once
this layer of services that's effectively provided through
these like networks starts eating away at other services
like some are commercial right. It like now open source software
is competing with Microsoft built operating systems right.
Are not as interesting anymore as Linux.
So there's like places where the stuff is clearly one as system
happens I think the the other parts will naturally recede and
and kind of how you described and eventually may only exist in
name only and that is like I think what crypto and like this
idea of an open database with PKI where we can like coordinate
not just on ideas anymore but now and like financial assets.
I think that's the really, really exciting part.
Some people up watching up to. This this segment will say, Oh
my God, these guys are so impractical, blah blah.
But to put to put some flesh on the bones of this and just to
give it a little more practical or not not to give more
practical, but the angle from which it's may perceive as more
practical. The cost of the network state.
The network is the digital part. The state is like the physical
part. That's one way of cutting it.
And I think people aren't really thinking through the extent to
which the network can actually act as quote enforcer but
nonviolent enforcer of good behavior.
So for example, with crypto, the network can enforce property
rights and identity and do birth and marriage and death
certificates, and it can, you know, have registries of who
owns what. And then how does it enforce?
Well, we already know that wealth can be represented on
chain, but it's a little, you know, maybe less obvious is, for
example, how did you get into your office today, right?
Did you use a key card? Right.
OK. It's a key card again to office
for many people. They have like a Tesla style fob
to get into their car, right. Many piece of cap, you know,
obviously you need like some sort of, you know, cryptography
to get into your phone, whether it's Face ID or, you know,
passcode or something like that. And many piece of equipment, so,
so buildings and piece of capital equipment will basically
all be gated by your phone or a fob or a card or some
consolidation of all those that looks like a phone, right.
That means that all financial assets because all stocks,
bonds, all that type of stuff, all property, digital property
and all capital goods, right. All the way in electronics and
stuff. Which is maybe if you Add all
that up, right, because all real estate can be gated by a lock on
the door, right. All electronics, all vehicles,
every crane, every ship, every plane, every car, right.
All capital goods and all property can be put on chain and
guarded by that and in theory maybe you could say, oh I'm
going to go and hot wire a Tesla, Well maybe, but that's
pretty hard to do, right. I'm going to hot wire and get
into this you know, 30 story building.
I'm going to climb up the elevator because I don't have
the crypto key. Maybe that's pretty hard to do
right? As a practical barrier, if you
have ENS or SNS based authentication to those systems,
you can protect buildings and cars and phones and electronics
as well as all the onshore property that's probably like
90% or more of the value of property in the world.
It's not going to protect the clothes on your back, it's not
going to protect the literal, you know, a glass of water that
you're holding right. But modulo those things that are
too de minimis in value to have electronic locks on, everything
else can be protected in this way if it's done with due
process. CD platforming today is done in
this arbitrary, corporate way, right?
But you can imagine a world where de platforming is more
humane than violence, right? It's something where, OK, you're
suspended. You're this, you're that.
You're locked out of this, locked out of that.
That's your punishment. You can still, you know, like go
to work or whatever, but you know the actual punishment is
you can't go to the club or something like that.
I don't know. And and right now, it's being
wheeled in this totally arbitrary fashion.
So there's a forum in which with due process and with societal
approval around it, a digital punishment could be more humane
than a physical punishment, potentially.
And I'm not saying it totally replaces it.
I'm not saying, oh, you know, some people say, Oh my God, do
you think there's no need for violence ever?
No, I'm a, I'm a realist on that.
I'm trying to think of of a good example of this.
You know if if if you have an issue where there's there's
somebody who's people do this in buildings already, right to get
up to the 30th floor you you might need a key card to get in
there. That's an aspect of security
there where it just kind of discourages folks from entry.
It makes the space more secure, it's digitally secure.
You don't need a guard because the key card is is is stopping
at the guard would actually have to be intimidating at the front
door, but this would actually block it into four year
different sluices and gates. So anyway, just some thoughts,
but you know, actually it's not totally land.
You know what we should call it? Anatolia isn't that good.
Right. So Anatolia, the national
currency, Solana, everybody's a volunteerist.
I'm glad you're thinking about this, because I actually think
that all the Solana phone holders could maybe crowdfund
some territory, maybe do something interesting.
I I do think that the crypto phone is an important thing for
civil rights and property rights, and so I'm going to try
it out simply on the basis I don't have any stake in it or
anything like that. I, you know, I hold Solana, I
hold Ethereum, I hold Bitcoin, I hold all this other stuff.
But the the crypto phone is something which I I believed in
even before you guys announced and I've talked about it for a
year or so. I'm glad, really glad you're
doing it. So thank you for that.
All right. And so that thank you very much.
Antilly, thank you for having me.