 I am here to introduce the panel. Thank you Stuart and everyone on the panel for joining us today. I have a passage that I'm going to read off that kind of explains and introduces what we'll talk about a little bit here today. So I'll be reading this off, feel free to take any notes on some interesting things that you might be able to look into after or might be discussed as this panel continues. So there's a really worthwhile book that sometimes gets passed around and Stuart recommends called The Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Kars that is a good philosophy book. It's short but incredibly dense and concise in a sort of flowing always going forward kind of way. Here's a passage. Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning but towards ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own. Blockchains are about resources, applications, shared infrastructure, individual freedom to act, to know, social advancement and more. But fundamentally they are about coordination. We make the world computer and therefore the world computer makes us. How much agency do we have and what do we aim for really in using it? We'd like to welcome Stuart and the whole panel to the stage for many reasons but the ones we'd like to point out is that he's popularized the personal computer. It could have been just called the small computer but it's called the personal computer. Microcomputers they were, yeah. And coined the phrase, information wants to be free. Some of the rest of it will be touched on the panel. The other panelists we'd like to welcome are Wendell Davis and Althea Allen to the stage. Wendell is a community member, an early member of Amiza Go. And excuse me, while Althea Allen is an early member of the Amiza Go community. They are here as infinite gamers, dedicated members of the Ethereum community, the blockchain community, the decentralization space, the human race and space in general. One more passage from the book before we start. Infinite players are not serious actions in any story but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish. Thank you all very much and please welcome. Alright. I'm not here for that, I'm here for this. Alright, what do you want? Welcome. Stuart, you have been there for many a movement. You rarely put your name on things. But you have been often behind the scenes behind the camera. I had to do some research myself in preparation for this and as I was sort of tracing your story, it was rather mind-blowing how many times your name popped up in things that I had heard of, things that had influenced me, things that had influenced the people who have influenced me. So we're hoping that you can bring some of that perspective to us today. But before that, I would like to let you tell your own story. I know that you have some slides and just tell us some of the things that you have lived through. Want me to do that now? I would love you to do that right now. Let's see what we've got. I guess it starts with psychedelics. Clearly it is not finished with psychedelics. Yeah, so I was in the thick blue kinokisi, merry pranksters. We organized the biggest acid test called the Trips Festival in San Francisco. And it put together all the creative artistic groups in the Bay Area in one place for one night and set in motion the idea that audiences should not exist as audiences, that there should be no spectators. And Burning Man carries on that tradition to this day. Probably, I should say that my sense of what I do in the world is I hack civilization. I'm trying to figure out kind of ingenious, low effort ways to make a difference that helps civilization go better. And I'm sure my best, at least most efficient hack was, again, on the effects of LSD, coming up with this button live when we've seen a photograph of the whole earth yet in 1966. And that was sort of strange because we'd been in space for ten years at that point and other Soviet Union and the US had taken any significant pictures from space. So I was trying to give a paranoid twist on it. And indeed, a year later in 1967, the first photographs emerged from a weather satellite, ATS. There was a newspaper and nobody paid much attention to it. But it was the one that was available when I started my major hack, I suppose, exactly 50 years ago, the whole earth catalog, where the image of the earth was lost on the cover, tried to be comprehensive, and the main event of it was access to tools. And I'll come back to that. But what really happened with the earth image was at the end of 1968, when homesick astronauts orbiting the moon took photographs of their home from our home from a great distance. And what made that photograph called Earthrise most powerful for everybody, it reframed everything, it replaced the mushroom cloud as the sort of standard icon of our times and of civilization. It did that because there's a dead planet in the foreground and a clearly living planet that happens to be ours. And it's surrounded by a quite frightening vastness of space. It's a hard vacuum. And you get a sense of finiteness and fragility. What I was doing with the whole earth catalog in terms of access to tools, I learned last night from Corey Doctorow that he based sort of the way Boingling does reviews on the way we did it in the whole earth catalog. And they were just short access to tools, to skills. The best book on learning how to fly was done in the 40s by Langewischer. A really important book that came out in the 60s and 70s was Our Bodies Ourselves from the Boston Women's Collective. And basically it went against what medicine had done up to that point is basically treat a woman's body as disease. And the female doctors and so on of this group put together a book that was a manual of having a woman's body. There's craft to it. It takes tuning. It takes maintenance. It takes enjoying at a cellular level. And all of that was in there in this book. And it was one of the core books of the women's movement actually. Fifty years later, I discovered after various people came to me and said, well, you know, reading the whole earth catalog got me out of Nebraska. It got me out of Indiana. It got me out of some small place where I was. And it got me going on, you know, what I do now. And they tell me these origin stories. And in summary, what I noticed it does, and I think that blockchain is doing this, is it confers agency. It gives people the sense of freedom to choose to do, damn you, or anything. And just go forth and try. And the opposite of agency is victimhood. So one of the things I wrote somewhere along in the process was a good project is to just un-make victims. Start with yourself, branch out from there. One of the things that grew out of the whole earth catalog was the hackers conference in 1984. The bearded guy in the top left there is John Draper, known as Captain Crunch. He was jailed for being a hacker. And in jail, the mob broke his back to get his secrets of how to do hacking. He was out by the time of this. There's a brand new Macintosh in the left, and two of the developers, the Macintosh, are leaning forward. They're looking at somebody's demo. I want to point out that hackers conferences go on all the time. This is, in a sense, one that we're in here, but also on the screen, is the iGem Jamboree, which is 10 years old. These are bio-hackers, and they're basically hacking bio-code, the genetic code. Currently, they're up to 3,000 participants and 300 student teams that come and create organisms that basically race them and get prizes. And this is the long-term project of 10 years of basically making the world safe for biotechnology. It's an awesome project. It is one of the most thrilling things to go to. It feels sort of like this event, in terms of just getting a sense of hope and excitement and lots of things you can do. What I'm involved in now is partly biotechnology, bringing it to wildlife conservation and then partly the Long Now Foundation based in San Francisco, where, among other things, we have been for 25 years now working on a 10,000-year clock designed by Danny Hillis. It is being installed, as you can see here, inside a mountain in West Texas in a mountain range that Jeff Bezos owns. And that clock will tick faithfully for more than 10,000 years. It's just a permission to think long-term. One of the things that emerged from all of that is our idea of a sort of a piece-layered diagram of a healthy civilization going from very rapidly moving fashion all the way down to very slow-moving nature and culture. And those are separate layers. They need to be respected as separate layers. And most of the power is in the slow part, and most of the learning is in the fast part. We can come back to this if you want. The customer of the Long Now Foundation, and I think the customer of Ethereum, is civilization. This is the local fragment of it. There's the kind of a big picture of civilization as a whole. That's who we're working for, in my view. Is that okay? We can go back to any of these. So you've been walking around. Yeah. So this is your first DEF CON, of course, and this is your first blockchain conference. Yeah. And you've come at a great time, it seems, actually. Yeah, that's fantastic. It's really a very special event. I know you've been talking to a lot of people as you've been walking around. You've seen a lot of talks. I'm curious to know, what is your impression of all of this? Is this how these things happen? Back in the day, another thing I did was called Global Business Network, and we pervaded scenario planning to corporations and governmental departments and so on, things that were big and slow and had to think ahead in order to decide what to do next. And they were always wondering what's going on, and one of the things I said is that we noticed is, look where there's new terminology emerging. And so with hackers, for example, there were a whole bunch of hacker terms that emerged. In fact, there was a hacker dictionary that was kind of carefully maintained because newcomers to that world would need to know what is this shorthand for. And I could well imagine there should be, if there's an already a blockchain dictionary, an Ethereum dictionary, and you see it in different, you know, new words, DAP, new word. You see it in words that are repurposed, wallet and fork and beacon. You see it in joke words like codle. And that's a sign to me that new words have to, it's not just for decoration. They are new tools, and they need new words to express them. And so part of what I've been doing as a guest here is just sort of learning some of the vocabulary. And with vocabulary, you start to learn the system. That's what I've been getting here. And since you've been a part of so many different, let's call them hacker movements, and especially, you know, you yourself have participated in providing these civilization hacks, as you described. I mean, you've identified some things that kind of give away the game that say like you're maybe wrong to something, give you a little whiff of it. But what I'm interested in here is having some of these folks who are doing this now to be able to have a perspective on this to see that, you know, they're part of a long history of this kind of stuff. To take this home, what is the thing that connects it together? Early on, we had no idea that the hackers in 1984, 1985 had no idea that hacking would eventually get industrialized and weaponized, and it would become a, so, you know, one of the things we're saying, well, there's black hackers and white hat hackers, and don't worry, and we did not prepare enough for the problems that might occur. I think blockchain is doing a better job of that than we did. I think the biotech crowd is doing a better job of that. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Why so? Well, so, you know, there's not a lot of talk of ethics here at all. There's no women involved at all. We had like 100 hackers there, two might have been female. Boy, has that changed. None of them were athletic, and I see a fair amount of fairly athletic-looking characters here, so that's changed. And it's also a good sign. There's, you know, across the board, health going on. What, Stephen Levy is the guy who wrote the book Hackers. He's in the far left there, up in the upper corner, and he was recently asked to reminisce about this, and he said what he remembered was the laughter. That basically these young hackers spent three days and all night just giggling away. It's the first time they've come together, and these kind of comings together have that quality of glee about them that I think is part of what makes it go. I want to apologize for overvalorizing hackers in what they tend to be the star of the personal computer show, but we are actually, you know, they thought of themselves as masterless samurai, but frankly, most of the real engineering was done by people who were narrow ties who worked nine to five, often with federal government money like the Doug Engelbart mother of all demos. Everybody worked at SRI, working with the Department of Defense money. And people in the Xerox Park, that was corporate money. That was, you know, devised the things that became the really graphic interface for what became the personal computer, and Steve Jobs came over. Steve Wozniak was at this thing. Jobs didn't, Jobs wasn't a hacker, Jobs was a marketer. But Wozniak was a hacker. And Apple then took what was going on and being completely wasted at Xerox Park by the Xerox company, and then deployed it, and then they got copied by Microsoft slash IBM, and you're off and running. So hackers are important in part of any of these stories, and they serve the glory part, but they're not necessarily the only part or even the main part. So that actually brings up something for me that I wanted to get your perspective on as well, which is what is the role of institutions in something like this? Because on the one hand, institutions have a lot of money, and they have a lot of power, and they have a lot of guys in skinny ties who can just do the work. But on the other hand, I'm going to read another quote from Finite and Infinite Games here. This was one that really stuck with me. That successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place in which they are guarding them as producers of property. And I think that extends to a lot of forms of revolution and forms of dissidents who schedule the protest. You know, it will be happening from 1 to 3 p.m., so find a different way home. And it's a very effective way to sort of disempower a movement to give it a safe place in which to have its revolution so that everyone else can go on about their business. And so there's that danger to me when trying to sort of compromise or trying to work with institutional powers that we maybe give up what's most important because it's also what's most inconvenient for them. Ethereum's an institution. Touche. But that's saying that, you know, what's the solution to bad code? Solution is better code. I think institutions is how humans collaborate on things. I mean, we say civilization is 10,000 years old and in a sense what that's honoring is the invention of agriculture and the institutions of towns and then the way that people could collaborate at more levels than just hunting and gathering. Oh, once you've got towns and you're off and running in the story of civilization is 10,000 years old and there's every reason to believe it'll go another 10,000. And in a way, anything that we do as innovators is blending in with that long story. That's institutional. And the things that corporate misdeeds and government misdeeds want to be, need to be called out, need to be answered, need to be worked around. It's just, you know, a lot of it's just class. Sometimes we try to get it where people would just behave better than we wouldn't have this particular problem. And the reason that a whole catalog had access to tools under the title was that as our function is that I had believed Buckminster Fuller who said early on if all the politicians in the world died next week it would be an exciting week but things wouldn't change that much. But if all the engineers and scientists died next week we would be at a loss how to carry on. And that human nature is very difficult to move. It's a very complicated and rich thing. Tools are easy to move, they're easy to invent, they're easy to deploy when they work. And so his approach was the hack is just make a better tool that works around the things that you think are not working well in the world. And sometimes that involves inventing new institutions and so you have nonprofits come along and you have a whole, there was the private sector and the public sector of government and the whole social sector that's emerging in different rates in different societies but there it is, it's basically a self-driving service structure. So these are all institutional inventions with tools part of what enables them to ideally be more benign or truly beneficial. That sounds really general. It does and I wonder what happens when they fight back when what they're interested in most is not being benign but just continuing to exist whether or not they serve a purpose? It is the case I know with corporations and probably with governments that a lot of us get worked up about how they're just about profits, they're not. When you actually work with these companies they're mostly about a survival and typically one is for them a very competitive industry whatever it may be and they're always figuring out what's going to come along and just blow them away and they either just fail and disappear like seers is in the process of doing in the US or they get gobbled up by another company and sort of disappear into that. So that survival instinct at the institutional level can get pretty tough and that is worth bearing in mind because they are legally people but they don't act like people and I think it's right to call that out. So head it off everywhere you can. Sometimes one of the things I love about Cory Doctorow's book Walk Away is sometimes just walk away. Find a way to live separately. This was the thing that was done very much in the 60s and it gave us a fair amount of one education. We went out and all started communes which failed and it was highly educational in how they failed and it also gave us a sense that there were a lot of things we thought we were dependent on that we were not actually all that dependent on and so you find your own freedom from these institutions. That's an ongoing process and it's not going to stop and I think what you want to do when you're building an institution is have in mind the institutions that have gone somewhat harmful or even pathological to notice how that happened there and see if you can head it off and recognize it early on and head off the things that are moving in that direction but civilization is an argument and sometimes blood is shed in that argument. That is probably with us for a while. So on the topic of walkaways you know the people here are building I would say like the next generation of human coordination tools. I think it's a good general way of saying it. And the thing about that is it may end up empowering a million subcultures for governance, for finance, for all these kinds of things which means that coordination itself amongst those groups may be more difficult in the future before it's easier. And I know that you're a big concern your greatest concern for the world right now is for example climate change. And we don't have much time according to you about this topic so how do these things work together? Well this is a question I keep asking blockchain people what have you got to help head off climate change and what have you got? Well it's a good question, good question. But I think the question is more about this narrative of let's say mass walkaways. If everyone walks away who's going to steer the ship so to speak. Yeah, walkaway is what adolescents do. It's what being in your 20s is about. It's the origin of a lot of all institutions are bad, all governments are bad I'm going to invent my way out of here and cryptocurrency is my escape from all of those things and then you get a little older and forms of collaboration start reasserting themselves is absolutely necessary and you get into politics and in order to get anything done you actually have to find ways to compromise with the opposition or you have a non-functional government which we currently have in the US because of failure to do that and that is not a diminution that is a growing into a form of responsibility and maturity and public service that just acknowledges there is no way. There are enough scattered applause. So that does get at something else that we talked about briefly leading up to this and it's what happens as people age within a movement because as you said it's young people it's people who get upset at their metaphorical parents and go off to do their own thing and after a while maybe they get tired maybe they have other things to worry about maybe they worry for their own safety or that of their families or maybe they just sort of stop caring what happens as people age who have started a movement and is there a way for movements to carry on even as they lose their youth? Most of the... Well this happened with these hackers the picture is still up here My rule back then was they never do a second annual anything which speaks to what you're talking about but the people at the high-risk conference lived so much that they two years later did their own and then another one and it goes on to this day and it's an old folks gathering which is kind of great it's like a class reunion or something they never... the web came along without really engaging them so other entities come along but frankly what happened is good scientists, good artists, good engineers keep moving we live longer and longer lives I'm 79 and good health and you know my parents pretty much checked out by the time they were in their 70s so just in a one generation we're getting significantly longer and I suspect your generation is going to live a lot longer than that and you're going to have three digit lives 100 plus and if there's children there's going to be not just grandchildren, great-grandchildren maybe great-great-grandchildren to deal with that if you're still doing the same goddamn thing through that whole period you better be doing it very well but most people that move on and actually being an artist in New York back in the day was the great releaser for me that if you're not... if you get stuck in a blue period so you're going to move on to something that is much more dangerous and much more interesting one of the Nobel Prize winners in economics that I got to know said that basically he changes his discipline every seven years and the thing that he worried about getting a Nobel Prize is that it would stop him and the way it stopped so many scientists who've gotten a prize like that so it's not walk away, it's keep moving Do you want to take some questions? Do you want to take some questions? Say again? Do you want to take some questions from the audience? Oh yeah! Alright, does anybody have any questions? Let me see, I'm going to move it If you do, please come up to the microphones Yeah, there's microphones, Heather and Jan and these guys will call you out We've got one ready over here Hi Stuart, really enjoyed this talk I just want to tackle perhaps you asked a very pertinent question What's blockchain doing about global change or climate change and perhaps from an engineering point if you're looking to make things more efficient perhaps cut down processes cut down wastage the other point as well which is how do we look after all these people in the world when they're getting more efficient at producing goods and perhaps you're digitizing the economy so people will have more chance to create stuff and create a digital economy which involves moving electrons around rather than atoms I think it's very abstract but we can't keep creating more stuff because we're running out of stuff in terms of iron or natural resources so perhaps there's a way out for us that we create a digital economy where people can still create in different ways and yet we serve each other without actually using more of the earth's resources so does it make any kind of sense to you at all? I'm not as worried about because I'm a life-long conservationist and I suppose environmentalist I think we overstate the limits of resources the bet that was made long ago by Julian Simon was my little teacher, Paul Ehrlich as to whether the prices would go up or down of a old basket of things that they were looking at and Julian Simon won the prices stayed down and Paul Ehrlich lost on that and Paul Ehrlich lost on population you're seeing a version of that now I'm sort of extrapolating from where you're going on this finite earth thing existential crisis there's an existential danger from AIs there's an existential danger from climate change there's an existential danger from extinctions which are not happening as rapidly as people think any minute now we're probably going to point out the existential danger of plug chain they already have how does it work? you know it's I don't think it's actually a real existential danger but it's the danger of being able to for example move value freely that could be a danger for someone I think the idea of say a private transaction is rather terrifying to many people or just the idea of putting more and more machines on the blockchain like what happens when they start to think without our help they start to be able to spend money without our help what happens when they just start buying things from each other I think that there have been many fears expressed a lot of them have to do with just sort of fear of the unknown because blockchains make a lot of things unknown by design yeah AIs that quality do oh god what's the AI going to do but I think there's also something very scary about allowing people to interact with each other without sort of coordinating powers without authorities telling them how they should do so and actually I'm just going to exercise stage privilege right now and bring this to a topic that I think I would like to hear you speak on a little bit as well which is informal economies, slums and squatter cities this is something that you've written about quite a lot and I think it's something that's extremely applicable to what we're doing we're talking about tools for basically for coordinating in a situation where there is no authority or maybe the authority is unnecessary or antagonistic or antagonistic and I'm curious whether you see any assumptions being made or sort of any conceits being held that might find us building the wrong tools or those tools in the hands of the wrong people tools in the hands of the wrong people I wound up writing about it's a book called Whole Earth Discipline which begins saying there's sort of three long long-term narratives that are playing out in this century that I was focusing on in the book it's urbanization, biotechnology and climate change those are not stories that are going to be over in a week or a year or a decade that are going to go on in the whole century and the urbanization aspect I sort of started with is that's the main event and the villages of the world are emptying out and you go oh my god those wonderful villages well you know, subsistence agriculture is a big drag it's why the communes failed in part it is a ecological disaster often because they're in marginal land there's a poverty trap and they're not in the cash society and so there's no way out people go to town and they go to town and where you begin in town if you don't have any money because you're coming from a village is you go to the squatter cities to the slums and then there's this informal economy going on there of talk about microfinance I mean these are you know, rickshaw ride fees that you're working with and swapping something into a teacher so that your kids can go to the private school 100 yards away from where shack you're living in and that is where the main demographic event of our world is going on it is where women are having fewer children because in the country you need seven kids in order to run a farm and in town you want to have two kids and they're going to be high quality kids going to try to get them education so they can prosper in town to or less and then the women if they're with a jerk in the village they're stuck with a jerk but they get to town they don't have to put up with them anymore they're gone they take kids with them and start things and women are doing the urbanization of the world as near as I can tell so then what helps that well I used to go to all these personal computer conferences back in the 80s and on into the 90s and they would always end with this last session and it would be about how we're going to fix the digital divide where us rich people have all these cool tools and those darn poor people they don't get to have these cool tools but we'll make sure that we get them and vows would be bowed and all that Kevin Kelly pointed out, thank God for the rich people who will spend insane amounts of money for a new tool that doesn't work yet and will help it down with their extra money help it down the learning curve to where it actually works rich people at which point, poor people, grab it and run to the horizon with it and so when cell phones hit the developing world they proliferated and you get a better cell signal in most of Africa than you can in most of the United States and there's more stuff going on with cell phones and now smartphones than in many other places and they invented ways to do money with M-Pesa in Africa and so on there is so much resourcefulness there is so much ingenuity it takes a lot of skill to be poor to manage poverty, to manage yourself out of poverty these are very able people and they will take any tool that helps them get up in the world and if you can generate tools and sort of make them accessible and they get invited in and say, hey, we're here to fix your culture situation or the way you do commerce here in Mumbai that usually doesn't fly unless it's really good so get invited and then watch it transform by the locals into local businesses into whatever it is that works with their culture, with their situation and when it works it can fly fast like cell phones did and I think potentially blockchain if it really, really can deliver value in an easily leverageable way people will grab it as they grab cell phones and if it doesn't, it won't Shall we take another question? Yeah, thank you I wanted to ask, what is underpriced or what do we not understand the value over the importance of whether that's culture or technology what are the things that we're not really getting the fundamental relevance of? I'm so hard of hearing, I need that repeated He asked, what are we undervaluing? What are we undervaluing or underpricing or misunderstanding the importance of? What are the things that we should be really focusing on that we're not paying enough attention to? I don't know enough to answer that well I'm still at the, oh my god, this is astounding level and so I see nothing but glory in all directions here and so I can't do critique yet and probably ever but there are other people here who can Stuart, that's not helpful at all I know it's not, but you know, if you invite a newbie he's going to just be all gaga and that's me I have one more question Thank you So this is a room full of people endeavoring to build very powerful tools historically those who have created powerful tools in earnest goodness have then seen those tools immediately weaponized by those who don't really care about that and then a power taken away from those with good will and moved into those who will use the tools for their own self-improvement Is there any advice you have to the people in this room actively building on how to create a nuclear reactor without creating a nuclear weapon? Nice way to put it This may be one of the functions of good government is a kind of a regulatory oversight and a book I'm recommending along with Finite and Infinite Games is a new book by Michael Lewis called The Fifth Risk It happens to be about the US government but it tells astonishing truths for people that didn't know things were out there Government Governments vary but a lot of amazingly valuable stuff goes on in government that is not actually taken enough advantage of data collection in particular and of course we all worry about data collection in terms of invasion of privacy and so on but a lot of it is just what's the ground truth of the society that you're in and then with that ground truth the tools you're making particularly coordination tools like yours can learn about reflecting stuff that's real in the world So working with government helping make sure that transparency is part of the deal One of the reasons this book of Michael Lewis is pretty angry is that the current administration in the United States is trying to shut down access to this information because they disapprove of it because it's science basically and that's the thing for the fighting Funny situation, suddenly instead of fighting government we're trying to fight for government at its best and I think this kind of and this is one of the things the Ethereum group is better at than say the Bitcoin crowd is figuring out what are the points of already existing institutions like governments that are worth not just honoring but really engaging in helping keep non-destructive, non-harmful There's lots of ways things can go wrong and one of the functions of government One of the things that governments do is collect weather data and people are much less killed by hurricanes now than they used to be because weather prediction has gotten good in the last 20 years, really good Likewise medicine, a lot of medical research goes on under the National Institutes of Health and things like this and that is why medicine used to be a flip of coin whether going to a doctor is going to help or make things worse now it's pretty much across the board it'll mostly help So finding institutions that are doing valuable things burrow in to where the good stuff is and help the good stuff and do what you can to head off or work around the bad stuff and, you know, eternal vigilance But don't solve a problem just because you can imagine it This is Jimmy Wales tells the fable of the steak knives where he was finding that with the programmers that were coming around Wikipedia when it was starting up I figured out all the different kinds of problems that would happen and they would design software that would see that problem and immediately head it off Well the problem didn't exist yet and what Jimmy Wales said is you are making the steak knife problem this is you hire an architect and you're going to run a steak restaurant and the architect says I hear you're going to have these sharp knives on every table Well, that's obviously very dangerous anybody could go berserk and kill not everybody at their table but everybody at all the other tables we've got to put these little cages around each table in sort of modularity that will at least isolate the bug Yeah, except nobody actually does that in these restaurants and so Jimmy says wait until you have a problem be really alert for the problems ask people to tell you about the problems early and often and, you know, go right after them but if you over anticipate them you will design freedom out of the system Thank you I think we have time for one more question Hi, my name is Matthew DeSolva and I'm a journalist for Quartz First I just want to say I feel privileged to be in the same room as you I just finished reading the innovators and I was astounded just by your history and I'm just, I feel so lucky to be here My question is about the kind of inequality even within the blockchain space Even in the blockchain space there's a lot of economic inequality like from the very starting point of a project whether it's in governance or distribution of tokens or just in, you know, social power and I was wondering how you might suggest addressing those kind of inequalities as projects grow I don't know enough I really try not to opinionate where I'm hopelessly ignorant this is one of those cases but thank you for the praise and it's a nice book that Walter Isaacson wrote Thank you for being here Well that was disappointing I wanted to challenge you a little bit though maybe we can end on this instead about not building for problems that we haven't discovered yet I think Wikipedia is the best example of what can happen if you don't build for problems that haven't happened yet Wikipedia is like one of the shining beacons of what can happen when humanity gets together on the internet I think that there are other things where we didn't anticipate problems that we maybe should have I think social media for example is a terrifying place and there are things that maybe weren't inevitable but that feel inevitable now given the decisions that we made and like is there a balance between anticipating the horrible things that could go wrong without building so many walls around ourselves that we can't have any fun I happen to live an early version of social media with the well back in the 1980s and we discovered trolls See you really were there for everything and we discovered the main rule which is never feed the troll we discovered flame wars we discovered mob action I got mobbed at one point and became so disgusted I left the well I felt like it was a failed experiment but it was a better experiment than many and here I'll get into I think somewhat controversial area here which is that anonymity is way better in theory than it is in practice and to the extent that blockchain can give verifiable identity that's going to be one of its great values in the world not only in the developing world where people need an idea in order to own property and get loans and things like that but that bots can be bots on social media the original idea of Facebook who's understood it is that you were basically verified by mutual friends who said this is a real human being and this is real name and I wished that we had done that with the well we had pseudo anonymity in the well because I'd already seen anonymity be really pathological on other systems and as soon as I can tell there are special cases where anonymity can be important for privacy can be important for private conversations can be important but general a lot of anonymity in general discourse is destructive and a whole part of blockchain is protecting privacy but I think a whole part of it is going to be in a sense the opposite of being to really be who you are and the thing I try to make clear in the well when we started is the byline I put out there was in words I didn't want to be sued for people insulting each other that got mistaken into thinking that you had property rights over your own words which is another stupid question you have responsibility for your own words but there needs to be a responsibility bearing creature behind that for that to actually hold and so that's where I come down on that one and I think we're at the end of everything I just would like to thank you again Stuart for being here it's been really a pleasure getting to know you and I'm really glad that this was the DEVCON that you came to because it has been amazing and to the organizers you are amazing this thing that you created has really been extremely special and so thank you and thank all of you and we'll see you next year at DEVCON