 We've got to save this planet and our civilization. Let's not let the robots take over. Money is not the kind of thing you want to hold. This is what keeps the global poor poor. This is David Choum, a visionary computer scientist known as the godfather of crypto and the father of online anonymity. In his Berkeley dissertation in 1982, Choum pioneered the idea of anonymous digital cash shaping the future of electronic payments. His work not only influenced cryptocurrencies, but continues to drive innovation at the crossroads of cryptography and economics. We spent some great time with Choum during these years, United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai. In our discussions, he told us about his latest projects, including Better Than Money, a protocol that aims at revolutionizing how value is exchanged. Here are the highlights you don't want to miss. I would love to start with a personal question. What is that you are most proud of out of all these great achievements? To be really frank, it's maybe a little bit out of the realm here, but I did make a very fundamental scientific breakthrough called multi-party computation. And it's a kind of thrill that you only get if you're really like a world-class leading edge science just that stumbles on something that's really big. And so that was awesome. And I've received this award of the best and most enduring paper of the last 30 years in theoretical computer science. Now, when you dissect that, theoretical computer science hasn't really existed for much more than 30 years. And it's the first time they gave it. And it is a big deal. And it turns out that when I created this, it was kind of theoretical, very satisfying, because it fully characterized what you can do with information security, but it now might really turn out to be the way to kind of tame artificial intelligences so that they can kind of duke it out so we don't have to have warfare or conflict in the physical world. We'll be talking today about better than money. I think it's still questionable whether there is anything better than money. I think there are a lot of things that are better than money, but let's maybe start with this criticism and what was your journey to understand that money is not perfect? And when you started thinking about this actively in the sense that you wanted to change it? Yeah, well, thanks. I mean, I've been working on electronic money for 40 years, really. I've never really realized how important money is to the global poor and to the inequity, which is kind of really destroying the planet, I think, but creating this pose. It's feeding a lot of fragmentation and polarization, so I realized this is what keeps the global poor poor because money is not the kind of thing you want to hold because you're not accruing value. It's a kind of money slavery, basically. You're not investing, and then you're subject to inflation and possible collapse of currencies and so forth and so on. So what I could say is that historically, really you have two kinds of situations that people are in. The public one is there. They feel like they're gaining prosperity, and there's the other kind of situation where they feel like they're not able to reach the kind of level of prosperity of their families, their parents, the expectations they had. They feel like they're suffering a loss of prosperity, and if you look at what those people do, it's very different. The one group defends democracy and the free market and so on and so forth very vigorously and without hesitation, look at the last century, and then the other group, look at Italy in the 30s, or I don't want to get into all that. This gets very, very evil, and when people feel that the system's not working for them, it's not working efficiently. They don't feel a gain in prosperity for themselves then. They just give up power to the nearest entity that seems willing to take it. Yeah, let's delve into it. So what is better than money? Well, that's enough. OK, there's a little bit of puffery in that name, but I didn't choose it, but many people use it. Well, it's BTC, but BTN. Yeah, it's very close. And so it's simply the idea that you can pay someone by transferring value from your portfolio of assets directly into their portfolio of assets. And that means the value is not traveling through money, but it's totally, I'd say, inter-fungible. It's a universal medium of exchange, and so everyone gets to hold all their value in an asset portfolio to curate it, if you will. They can get the help of AI in curating it, which, of course, can make it be managed better than banks and others have managed your value for you in the past. So holding assets rather than someone else's debt, who's sort of ham-andedly in a uniform way trying to one-size-fits-all make money off you, it's just so much more attractive. So when you want to do any kind of future payment, then doing it with a mutually agreed portfolio is so much better and will lead to so much more economic prosperity. So decentralized ledger, blockchain, cryptocurrencies have made this step. The aim was to decentralize, democratize access to investments and, as a consequence, obviously redistribute wealth in the world. So how bigger is the step from the current cryptocurrencies to this better than money? I love the blockchain space because it's a place where many people really believe strongly in the ethos, and it's so inspiring to be a part of it, even though it's, of course, maligned by some other mainstream media from time to time, where they find that expedient. But so the truth is that better than money is just actually a slight incremental step above what the fintech world has been building, has been aiming to build. And it's not all that public, but there are actors that have been just trying to tokenize everything. There's a vision for that. There's a lot more happening in that space than you see. And the tokenization of these assets, that's, I don't know, three quarters of better than money. The final part is a way to create this interfungible, immediate finality in value transfer. Let's maybe talk a little bit about other crazily ambitious ideas that you're working on. But I'm not going to avoid that characterization. But since we're at COP 28, we do have the Astro Cool project. And it's a very simple idea that I had. Basically, you can simply move moon dust. The moon is covered in 5 to 15 meters of dust, the whole moon. It's a very fine powder because it's being pummeled by asteroids for billions of years. And you can move that dust to what's called the Sun Earth L1 point, which is the gravity balance between the sun, which is massive. The Earth is tiny. So it's about 1% of the way to the sun from the Earth. So as the Earth goes around the sun, and the Earth orbits, and the moon is involved a little bit, that point always stays blocking sunlight that would hit the Earth. And so that was my idea to move the moon dust there. And it turns out that other scientists have thought of related things about building mirrors and stuff there. So it turns out it's actually feasible to bring the Earth to pre-industrial temperatures, to reduce the average temperature of the Earth by two degrees centigrade by moving. It's a lot of moon dust, but it's not, as McKinsey said, oh, it's going to take $10 trillion a year to maybe make it down and all that. No, we can go back to pre-industrial temperatures from way under $10 trillion. And probably we can make a profit doing it. Because if you sift through all that moon dust to launch it over to the L1, you're going to find some interesting stuff in there that with the same technology, you could also send it back to Earth, and then you can kind of let it waft its way back down with these existing technologies. So you can deliver these whatever precious metals, isotopes, things people are interested in, even if just there's water in moon dust. There's a certain moisture level. And water on the moon is extremely valuable if you want to make conventional rocket fuels, hydrogen oxygen, but you can also use it to get oxygen for people and stuff. So do you consider yourself a scientist the first place? Yes, actually I do. Ladies and gentlemen, how do you measure your success? And how do you measure your own satisfaction with your thoughts and your scientific activity? Well, I think that being judgmental is not really conducive to a creative process. You know, when you're doing basic science, the things you find were already there before you got there. So you really can't take credit for them. You know, you could take credit for your effort to find them or the fact that you have directed yourself towards these things of significance. But the ideas themselves, they were there already. So, you know, yeah, I don't really, I wouldn't want to judge myself by the quality of the things that I've achieved because I think there are things I've discovered. How do you see the better than money system can contribute to this elimination of greed as a very perverse concept in my opinion that is totally human, right? Like animals do not have greed. Or do you think that there is such an ambition? Do you have such an ambition with better than money to eliminate these perversities? Well, yes, I think better than money can naturally lead to a slightly more decentralized power and so a richer set of things that individuals can aspire to and distinguish themselves with respect to. We really have to think of the world as being a very precarious, you know, we have the liquidity crisis, we have the giving over of control to AI, we have the global warming, we've got a number of issues and if we can, you know, we can do a kind of jiu-jitsu move on that, take that energy, turn it around with better than money and maybe a little bit of, you know, astragooling or whatever and use that energy to emerge with a great civilization that's, you know, I think that this planet is a wonderful, wonderful place to live. I cannot imagine making something on Mars that would be more beautiful and more fun to live in. You know, honestly, please people, let's be real, you know, we've got to save this planet and our civilization and all the cultural things that we've developed and the diversity of the animals and don't pay any attention to people who say, oh, you know, we've got to leave here because maybe we'll be wiped out. Let's fix the place up and let's not let the robots take over, let's make sure this is a human-centered civilization and we can do it right now with we got the privacy technology for it and that's the kind of the thin edge of the wedge as we say, that's the way in and now is the time. I like the rematch, this optimism coming from pessimism, I think this is the way we should use this energy and money is just a tool and better than money is just a tool. I think it was Jonathan Swift, who once said that a wise man should keep money in their head, not in their heart. So I would say that better than money as well is a tool, right? It's something that is an intellectual power and then we should keep the happiness and equality and inclusion in our hearts. That's the meaning of life. Yeah, but we got to be just a little bit careful that the plumbing doesn't get away from us and take over. It's gonna serve us. I think it's a great note to end this conversation. Thank you everyone for being here, it's just so great. Such a pleasure. Thank you so much, thank you so much, David.