Vlad Zamfir on the Dangers of Unstoppable Software and What People Get Wrong About Blockchains

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

So Tracy, obviously we've been doing a lot of crypto episodes lately, talk about Bitcoin and its future, a lot about DeFi lately. But of course, when all this got started, I remember years ago, people thought this was very dangerous, sort of provocative technology, that people are like, oh, are they gonna ban Bitcoin? Are they gonna ban all this stuff?

It feels like, I don't know, my opinion is that it feels like a lot of that stuff is like, now that dollar signs are in the air, a lot of that stuff has been sort of forgotten about or sanitized away.

Tracy Alloway (0:52)

I mean, I think you still see hints of it when people talk about the potential regulatory response on things like DeFi and the idea of people creating synthetic stocks that basically bypass regulations. Like there is a hint of it there, but you're absolutely right that Bitcoin and the associated technology blockchain kind of started out as this crypto anarchist dream that was very much about maybe not undermining, or actually I think you could say undermining or bypassing existing authorities and creating something that was sort of immutable and also outside of their reach.

Joe Weisenthal (1:33)

Right, like something that totally has its own internal governance that is permissionless, that anyone can access, that is extremely sort of durable to an outside attack, very difficult to thwart. Like this was sort of like the philosophical underpinnings of it, and now you have people on Wall Street talk about like, oh, is Bitcoin a player role in your retirement portfolio like gold, or can we trade synthetic soybean futures via Ethereum?

And like all that is like theoretically kind of exciting, but it doesn't feel very cypher punk, like at least like how we thought of all this stuff in the early days.

Tracy Alloway (2:12)

No, I think it's like that classic thing about if a technology lives long enough, it's eventually going to be co-opted by Wall Street and the thing that it probably sought to disrupt, right? Like I'm thinking again about peer to peer lending and how that was supposed to bypass traditional banks. And then eventually all the banks just got in on it. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I think with all the excitement over cryptocurrency prices as well as the potential for DeFi, we've sort of drifted away from the original crypto anarchist or cyber punk dream.

Joe Weisenthal (2:47)

You know, that raises all kinds of questions because there's like this marriage happening between crypto and Wall Street. And sometimes I think it's like kind of gonna be like oil and water. Like it looks good on paper, but can the two really interact? And then of course, like the question is like, well, what happens? Like, okay, like maybe they can be tamed and be used to profit, but nonetheless, decentralized distributed software databases still extremely powerful.

And perhaps we forget that some of the original motivation behind it at our peril.

Tracy Alloway (3:22)

Well, I'm gonna push back on that last point, but I do agree with you that like there is a tension between Wall Street getting in on technology, which is basically all about sort of decentralizing control, right? And Wall Street slash finance slash banks are very much about having, I mean, basically they're all about having control or risk control systems in place.

And so there's sort of an open question about how useful a decentralized technology is going to actually be to them.

Joe Weisenthal (3:54)

Exactly right. Well, I think after all this talk of money on recent episodes, it's good to go back to philosophy a little bit and what these systems really are. And we have the perfect guest.

Tracy Alloway (4:05)

Are we doing blockchain, not Bitcoin? Is that what this episode is?

Joe Weisenthal (4:09)

Kind of, kind of. I think that maybe one way to put it.

I think we have like the perfect guest. He's kind of a legendary figure in the crypto world.

We're going to be speaking with Vlad Zamfir. He's currently an independent researcher for the Ethereum Foundation. He's actually been involved in the Ethereum project since before it launched, actually in April, 2014 Before that, he was a very early Bitcoiner. And I think, you know, while everyone else likes to talk about price, Vlad writes these sort of more philosophical pieces about blockchains and the sort of the power of this software, which he seems to recognize both the potential and the risks for. So extremely influential player in the space. He also characterizes himself in addition to being a philosopher and a formal student of the law and absurdist. So we're going to find out what that means. Vlad, thank you so much for joining us.