Glen Weyl, a political economist and social technologist, the coauthor of Radical Markets and a principal researcher at Microsoft, and Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth, discuss how blockchains can be used to create borderless democracies that can reach any citizen on earth and can be used not just by nation-states but in all kinds of communities such as the workplace, church or a social network like Facebook. We cover concepts such as quadratic finance and quadratic voting, and look at how forcing voters to have a budget for their votes changes voting behavior. We also dive into what needs to be put in place for blockchain-based voting systems to work, why identity solutions are crucial but also so hard to get right, and how we can prevent token-based governance systems from becoming plutocracies. Plus, we surmise that blockchain-based governance might be the 21st century political experiment and that someday, we may all be citizens of multiple communities.
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Episode links:
Democracy Earth: https://www.democracy.earth
Santiago Siri: https://twitter.com/santisiri
Radical Xchange: https://twitter.com/RadxChange
Glen Weyl: https://twitter.com/glenweyl
Radical Xchange conference in March: radicalxchange.org
Radical Markets: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html
Democracy Earth white paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sifogl4zimwkkei/Democracy%20Earth%20-%20Social%20Smart%20Contract%20-%20Paper%20v0.2.pdf?dl=0
Democracy Earth cofounder Pia Mancini on early work with digital democracy: https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era?language=en
Santi on how blockchains could revolutionize democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UajbQTHnTfM
Wired article on Democracy Earth: https://www.wired.com/story/santiago-siri-radical-plan-for-blockchain-voting/
CoinDesk feature on Glen Weyl: https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-most-influential-blockchain-2018-glen-weyl
Vitalik Buterin blog post on Radical Markets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html
Paper by Vitalik, Zoe Hitzig and Glen on quadratic financing: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656
Transcript
Laura Shin:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin. If you haven’t heard yet, Unchained is going live with a show onstage, with Vitalik Buterin, in New York City, on March 20. Check the show notes to find the link to buy tickets.
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Laura Shin:
My guest today is Glen Weyl, a political economist and social technologist, the co-author of Radical Markets and a principal researcher at Microsoft, and Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth. Welcome, Glen and Santiago.
Glen Weyl:
Great to be with you.
Laura Shin:
A lot of people in the blockchain space talk about the potential for this technology to be used in governance or to change the way we govern ourselves. This ranges from everything to how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are beyond the control of central banks to how privacy coins in particular could make it harder for governments to raise taxes. It could also be the way that blockchain technology could be used to change voting systems or even allow people to choose their own digital jurisdictions that they choose to participate in, but this technology is so nascent that it seems like all of this is a long way off, and yet people like you two are very active in thinking about how this could work and also in beginning to try to create the technology that could make all this happen. So, let’s start with a very general question. What problems are you guys trying to solve using blockchain technology?
Santiago Siri:
Well, in my case, what we’re trying to figure out…
Laura Shin:
And this is Santiago, for the listeners.
Santiago Siri:
Hello, everyone. What we’re trying to figure out, coming from the Democracy Earth Foundation, is what would it take to deploy a democracy over the internet, anywhere there is a connection to the internet that is censorship-resistant, that is fair, that can reach any member of society, and that can open it in a borderless way, because it’s digital, and the promise of blockchain-based networks is very promising in the sense that it can deliver the right infrastructure to build systems that are far less corruptible than the current electoral systems that we find anywhere in the world and that can scale to help us as a society, as a global society, to start thinking about governance in a borderless way or in a post-nation state mindset.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. Yeah, and I, just to reinforce what Santiago was just saying, I think one of my main motivations in what we’re doing is trying to have a democracy, a democratic society without a particular nation state being the place that democracy happens. Democracy can happen in your workplace. Democracy can happen in an open-source project. Democracy can happen in your church. Democracy can happen in all sorts of organizations, some of which are within a nation state, some of which are a nation state, some of which are bigger than a nation state, and many of which cut across nation states. Like, imagine Facebook wanted to have a democracy or something, or you wanted a democratically governed social network. So, I think what I’m excited about bringing about in the world and I think what Santi’s building the important technology for is how do we divorce the concept of democracy, which is incredibly important, from a particular nation state or whatever that organizes that democracy?
Laura Shin:
Interesting. I like that idea, actually, and yet, as you’ll see from my questions, like I have a lot of skepticism, too, about what you guys are trying to do, but I just wanted to bring it back because, you know, Santiago was using these words like saying that he wanted to help prevent elections that are corruptible and stuff like that. So, what are some kind of like everyday issues that people talk about or things that we’ve seen, frankly, in current affairs that you feel like would be either preventable or resolvable using this technology?
Santiago Siri:
Well, when you look at traditional elections, there are multiple ways of trying to hijack the outcome of what’s going on. Two very common attacks are particularly the spread of fake news or gossip or false information about the candidates, so, one of the challenges of democracy is not just being able to scale the ability to participate but also to scale the ability to understand what is being voted, and that’s one of the important aspects where blockchain technology, I think, at the end of the day, helps to be a much more _____ 0:04:20 channel to the institutional reality of what’s happening among organizations or within organizations than having these intermediaries like the press or the media that eventually can generate unchecked confusion in society.
The other aspect is related to having a strong consensus on the identities, on the voters that are participating in a democracy. When we originally started the Democracy Earth, doing simply open-source software for democracy, in high-stakes elections, we found that always administrators or the authorities that had to decide who were registering to vote or not in the electoral process, if they had a bias of their own, they would delay certain identities from getting access to the process and accelerate other identities or family members to get access to that process. So, decentralizing the voter registry, building a consensus that is able to grant voter rights that it works in a decentralized way can be extremely relevant to reduce these type of attacks that are actually much more common than we think of, especially in developing countries, when it comes to democratic elections.
Laura Shin:
Great, and yeah, actually it was…you know with all the research I had done before, I wasn’t even aware that fake news was something you guys were trying to tackle, because that seems a little beyond the purview.
Santiago Siri:
It’s not particularly the battle, the main battle that we’re picking. I think that the problem with gossip or false information is because of the distance of what happens when you have an institutional event, a transaction happening, and what gets communicated in the media. The interesting thing about blockchains is that these are networks that provide a public ledger that allow for society, in a permissionless way, to audit what’s happening in this ledger. So, the information about institutional events is much more transparent and accessible to everyone, but you know we obviously need better technology to parse and analyze what happens in these networks.
Laura Shin:
All right, and so since that was kind of a little bit of a detour, why don’t you talk a little bit more about what Democracy Earth is working on, directly, right now?
Santiago Siri:
So, our main project is an open-source project called Sovereign, which is a decentralized application that aims to make easy and accessible the ability to interact with blockchains for the purpose of governance. We are focusing our organization, right now, into being providers of governance as a service. We work with some large blockchain projects out there, like Blockstack, for example, where this is a blockchain project that is rewarding developers with a hundred thousand dollars every month in rewards to those who build on top of the platform, and those who decide how to reward these developers are the token holders of Blockstack.
So, this is an example of a blockchain project that has governance where the investors or the token-holders directly allocate capital through their voting to the people that are actually contributing work and developing for this network. This is a simple example of how governance tools are becoming more relevant as we are starting to understand that blockchains, at the end of the day, are like worldocracies. They are power structures, and power structures require good governance, and I would argue that good governance is democracy.
Laura Shin:
It’s interesting because I think that, in a way, that’s like taking the function of a corporation but just applying it to an open-source project, where you don’t have this traditional hierarchy where, you know, you could have a board of directors or the officers of the corporation deciding, like, this is how much we’re allocating toward this, and instead it’s just the community decides, like, this is how much we’d like to pay for this or that.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, well I think that that, in many ways, gets back, I think, to what Santi just said, which is that in our society we kind of have two types of organizations as the canonical ones. One is the nation state, which is like democratic, but it’s extremely inflexible. It’s like really hard to become an American. It’s really, like, it’s a fixed geography even if you do move there, and on the other hand, we have these like entrepreneurial things, but the problem with these entrepreneurial things is that they’re very profit oriented. You end up, in practice, having to spend 80 percent of your time like actually making your product worse in order to extract money from people, and you know only 20 percent of your time actually making the product awesome.
And so, you know, well, exactly 20/80, I mean, but a lot of your time you end up spending worrying about monetization and stuff, and you think about the number of people employed at Google sort of like selling ads versus actually coding up cool stuff, and so the question, you know, the cool thing about open source is it maybe has some of the flexibility that a corporation has, and it has the potential for participatory democratic-type things, but there’s a question of how is it funded, and there’s a question of how is it governed, right, which are open questions even though it has this cool possibility of being sort of both democratic and flexible, and I think what both Santi and I are working towards is building technologies and ideas that enable us to have both flexible and democratic organizations that are funded and governed in a reasonable way.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I actually, listening to Santiago talk, I had this question earlier where I was going to ask him, oh, I noticed you guys were given funding by YCombinator, but they’re an accelerator, and they’re trying to make a lot of money, so why would they fund a nonprofit, but I immediately, when you were talking, I thought, oh, this sounds like something very useful for all kinds of technology projects.
Santiago Siri:
Yeah. You know we’re lucky to be one of the few, actually, nonprofit projects funded by YC, and we’re extremely thankful because that allowed us to come to the US. You know my beginning with this exploration of the intersection between the internet and democracy dates back to Buenos Aires, where among with some colleagues and friends, we started a political party, and our mission was to figure out the way to do a Trojan attack to the congress by having candidates that will always vote in congress according to what people decide online. So, we had to figure out the political side of things of what it takes to build a political party that can bring this new kind of rhetoric in a context like Latin America, like Argentina, that it’s about using the internet to leapfrog our democracy to the 21st century and at the same time figure out the technological aspects.
What does it take to build a democracy over the internet? You know it has to be open source. It has to work in a decentralized way. You need a strong consensus from the identities, and because of YC, we were able to come to the US and start thinking about this in a global way, break the mold of the nation state, and understand that the narrative of the 21st century is definitely the internet no longer just taking over the cultural layer of society, which already the web won that battle, but I think that the blockchain “revolution” is about taking control…or the internet going after the institutional layer of reality, and that’s a much more powerful layer.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and reading some of the materials to get prepared for this, I was thinking that actually some of these problems we’re seeing with elections and such may come from the fact that our lives have moved digitally, but our voting systems have not, and so we’re kind of in this transition period where, you know, just all that infrastructure hasn’t yet caught up.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a general problem of sort of the formalism that governs our lives, like nation state and the corporation, whatever, like not really matching the society that we actually live in, and I think, yeah, I think many of our problems and not just the like fake news or whatever but all sorts of things come from the fact that like we don’t have formal institutions that are sufficiently responsive to the social reality that we’re actually living.
Santiago Siri:
The nation state is already in a big crisis, especially since the last election in America, where a lot of questioning has been put on the role that Facebook played because of the suspicion there was a foreign power interfering with the election, in the most powerful election in the world. The principle of the nation state is based on non-domestic intervention. Since the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century, it’s this basic rule that keeps an equilibrium of power that achieves a certain peace that you don’t mess with my domestic affairs, and I won’t mess with your domestic affairs. When you have a foreign influence being suspicious of exploiting this technology called Facebook that has actually everyone voting every day, but the problem of Facebook is that it’s a fake kind of voting, because it’s surveys based on the idea of satisfying Facebook’s profit needs, because it’s, at the end of the day, an advertising company.
Facebook’s surveying people, but we are voting. With every like, we’re actually giving a preference. Now, these likes only satisfy this advertising-based business model, and it turns out that whether we want it or not, now it’s breaking the very principle of non-domestic intervention, and Mark Zuckerberg’s being called to testify in Congress and explain what’s going on. Now, you know, Facebook has been an influence factor in elections anywhere in the world, in the Arab Spring, in many, many environments. Then the fascinating thing, in political terms, of what’s happening right now is that now not even the US is protected from what it has created. So, the nation state is no longer in place.
Laura Shin:
Wow. So, Glen, you kind of came into crypto in a really different fashion. So, why don’t you explain what you’re working on and how it has come to evolve together or evolve into working in the crypto space?
Glen Weyl:
Well, I mean, I think the way I ended up in the crypto world was that I was always really interested in what you guys might call decentralization, what I would call liberalism. It’s just the opposition to sort of random historical authorities running our lives without much legitimacy or reason for being there, etcetera, and an alternative to that is to try to set up new rules of the game that provide a lot of the backbone that we get out of these regulatory institutions or corporations or whatever but that embodies it more in something like the rule of law or some way in which we design our society, and I wrote a book about that, but I soon became aware that that was sort of the goal that a lot of people in the crypto community had was to try to replace a lot of these concentrations of power with sort of new rules of the game that would sort of more take care of themselves and allow things to be more decentralized.
And but the problem is while they were interested in those ideas, the actual rules they had by and large come up with didn’t seem to actually yield the outcomes they wanted. They ended up concentrating a lot of wealth in some people’s hands, concentrating power in other people’s hands. It didn’t work out the way that they hoped, and on the other hand, I had come at it not from a crypto perspective, just from the perspective of like, well, that’s a very old story, things not working out the way people hoped. We actually have a whole science and economics called mechanism design that is about trying to address that issue, and I, you know, through that set of things came up with some ideas for society, not particularly ideas for crypto, but ideas for society, but it turned out that it was like solving a problem that crypto people had had for a while, so.
Laura Shin:
And what are some of those solutions that you want to propose or have been proposing?
Glen Weyl:
So, some ideas are a new funding mechanism to create organizations that are neither the nation state nor corporations that, unlike corporations, are not about profit. They’re about the public good, but unlike the nation state, don’t have like fixed boundaries or some particular constituency instead that emerges, and the way that that works…
Laura Shin:
So, like a DAO?
Glen Weyl:
Sort of like a DAO, but yeah, but different than DAOs that currently exist, because it would be funded not based on some sort of capitalist profit principle but instead based on, effectively, a set of matching grants. So, you can imagine like the Ethereum foundation gives out grants. Actually, many of the cryptocurrencies foundations give out grants, and you could imagine that those grants could be allocated either as you were describing earlier, Santi, by like some board or something like that, or in this case, the way that they actually get allocated is that individuals make contributions to some project, like on Kickstarter, but then the grants come in as matching funds for those individual contributions.
So, you know, how exactly do you want to structure those matching funds? Do you want to match one for one? Do you want to match smaller contributions more, which a lot of people think we should do, right, because it’s more democratic? But if you want to match smaller funds more, like, how much more, and how does that work, etcetera? So, it turns out, from economic theory, you can sort of drive an optimal design for that, and that’s what Vitalik Buterin, this economist/philosopher/poet lady, Zoë Hitzig, and I have come up with as a sort of optimal system for doing that. So, that’s one example.
Laura Shin:
Which is what?
Glen Weyl:
So, it’s that the square of the sum of the square roots contributed is the amount that the organization receives. That’s a big mouthful.
Laura Shin:
And you guys call that quadratic voting?
Glen Weyl:
We call it quadratic finance.
Laura Shin:
Quadratic finance? Okay, so how does that work exactly?
Glen Weyl:
So, okay, if under a normal contributory system, the amount that someone would receive would be you add up all the money that’s given in by different people. Under this system, instead, you add up the square roots of the amount that’s given and you square that. So, what that means is that if you give small contributions, because the square root is concave, you get more matching funds. If there are many people contributing, you get more matching funds. So, it has this sort of democratic character that’s sort of like Bernie Sanders would get like a lot of matching funds and like Mitt Romney or someone who funded their whole own campaign would get no matching funds. So, that’s the idea, like something that’s popular and that has lots of small contributions will get lots of matching, and something that is just like one dude doing it will get no matching.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I guess, okay, well I’m not going to name political figures. I think the listeners might get mad if I say who would not fare well.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
But I really like that idea. Is anybody in the crypto space working on applying that in some fashion?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, so, actually this has been, by far, of all the ideas, the most quickly adopted. There are two implementations that I know of, and I got an indication the other day that there might be some higher-profile implementations that are more private, but there was one for charitable matching by WeTrust.
Laura Shin:
Oh, they were advertisers on my show.
Glen Weyl:
Okay, yeah.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and I’ve spoken to them before.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
They’re doing interesting stuff.
Glen Weyl:
And then Getcoin just completed a campaign.
Laura Shin:
Oh, right. Right. They’re an interesting project as well.
Glen Weyl:
I think yesterday, I think, was the end of the campaign for giving open-source software or really blockchain infrastructure within the Ethereum blockchain grants, and it appears that ConsenSys Grants, which is a much bigger version of that, is going to adopt their approach based on the results of that.
Laura Shin:
Right, but wait, ConsenSys systems?
Glen Weyl:
Consensus Grants. So, ConsenSys just announced a set of grants that they’re going to be doing. I think they announced it last week or maybe earlier this week.
Laura Shin:
Like ConsenSys in Bushwick?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. Yeah, and they’re going to give out a set of grants to…
Laura Shin:
Like, meaning they’re going to be the matching? That’s what I’m confused about.
Glen Weyl:
So, the first thing they announced was that they were going to give out grants, and then it looks like they’re going to…the way they’re going to give those out is by making it into this matching fund.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Oh wow. I guess we’ll have to watch that. Yeah, because it’s somewhat similar to quadratic voting, which is…
Glen Weyl:
It is very related. It came after quadratic voting, but it’s very related, yeah.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and I wanted to have you describe, like, I liked that part in your book where you were talking about quadratic voting changes, but voting behaviors, when compared to more traditional polling around the…I don’t know how to pronounce, the Likert, I guess?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. Likert, yeah, yeah.
Laura Shin:
Likert, yeah. So, can you describe that for the listeners?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, so, quadratic voting is a system that’s related to this, but rather than using money, you’re given a budget of credits that are non-fundable. You can’t trade them with someone else, and you use these to vote, say on issues or on candidates that you care about, and because it’s a budget, you can express a stronger preference on something that is more important to you, but it becomes increasingly expensive to do that. So, if you get four votes, that costs you 16 credits, whereas one vote only costs you 1 credit, so buying the fifth vote is way more expensive than buying the first vote.
Laura Shin:
And are you literally purchasing the credits?
Glen Weyl:
No, the credits are not fundable for money. You can’t sell them or trade them.
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Glen Weyl:
You’re allocated them by a system.
Laura Shin:
So, when you say expensive, what does that mean?
Glen Weyl:
In units of these credits. So, everyone gets a budget of credits, but then there are a bunch of different issues or candidates that they can spend those on, and the more influence you have on any given issue or candidate, the more expensive in units of those credits it becomes. So, it’s way cheaper to have a little bit of influence on many issues than to have a lot of influence on one issue.
Laura Shin:
And when you say more expensive to have that greater influence, is it simply because then you can’t use the credits?
Glen Weyl:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
Oh, got it.
Glen Weyl:
Right. So, like, for example, imagine there’s 10 issues. You could have 10 votes on one issue or you could have 3 votes on all 10 issues.
Laura Shin:
Right.
Glen Weyl:
So, then you would have three times as much influence if you spread them out more evenly.
Laura Shin:
Oh, okay. Okay, now I understand. Well, so here’s something that I was curious about when I was reading it. So, well, actually, so but let’s go back. Describe the Likert thing, how that changes…
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. Yeah. So, the Likert scale, which is something everyone probably is familiar with, is one of these surveys where they say do you strongly agree, do you weakly agree, are you neutral, are you weakly opposed, etcetera? Now, the problem with those Likert scales is if you look at the distribution of reports that people give, most people are on one of the two extremes, a good chunk of people are at completely neutral, and almost no one is at anything between. Now, maybe that’s actually what people’s preferences are, but it seems kind of weird. The thing looks like a W, which is not what any statistical distribution I’ve ever seen looks like, whereas if you put people under quadratic voting, and you have them vote on issues in a similar way, but they have this budget constraint, and it becomes increasingly expensive, the distribution of preferences looks like a bell curve, which is what most distributions look like, not a W, and so, in that sense, it seems to get much more honest responses from people.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, it essentially forces people into making trade-offs, whereas like under Likert, then they can sort of…
Glen Weyl:
Scream as loud as they want at everything.
Laura Shin:
Exactly.
Glen Weyl:
Right? Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Exactly, yeah, without having to do the trade-offs.
Santiago Siri:
It’s a good recipe for this age of polarization.
Glen Weyl:
Exactly. Right.
Laura Shin:
Exactly, but so this is why I said before that I was a little bit skeptical, because when I was reading about quadratic voting, I sort of, I got like how the budget constraint seemed really smart.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
And yet, at the same time, I have seen this time and again, it’s happened to me, it’s happened literally to a friend of mine recently, we saw it happen with _____ 0:24:14 in the Ethereum space, where he was sort of forced out, I think, because some people got super riled up, but I don’t know if they represented the majority, but and there are many examples kind of in our politics where you see that like there’s one very vocal and passionate small group of people that kind of force an issue, whereas maybe the silent majority…or the majority is probably silent because maybe it’s the status quo, and they’re sort of like happy with it, right?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
And so that’s why I’m a little bit like why is it a good idea to give minorities this greater power, because then essentially what we’re going to see happen is that these extremes kind of take control of things? It’s sort of similar to how people always talk about how the primary system in US politics is bad because then you get the passionate base that don’t represent everybody to pick the candidate, and then nobody’s happy in the election. So, I kind of don’t understand how this could lead to good outcomes.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. So, I think there are two extremes that we can think about. So, one extreme is one person, one vote, majority rule, and I think that that has the problem, which is endlessly discussed in the crypto space, especially Vlad Zamfir, for example, goes on and on about this, of mob rule and like the oppression of the majority and people who like really don’t know or care anything just go one way, and then everybody else goes along even if they may know and care way more than that. So, you don’t want to go to that extreme, but the opposite extreme is allowing a very small, passionate group to just dominate everybody else, right? So, clearly neither of those is the right place to be. So, what do we want? We want something that allows people to express their greater knowledge or preference but where it gets pretty costly if they want to dominate everybody else, right?
And it’s exactly that happy middle that quadratic voting strikes. So, in fact, you can see this if you…if you just give these Likert things, people go to the extreme. If you give people a linear budget, where they can just take points and they can put it on whatever they care most about, you get the same pattern. Basically, people put all their votes on one issue that they care the most about, and then you don’t get the rule of the majority or the right decision. You get the domination of the few people who care the most about that particular issue. Quadratic voting is this compromise in between it, but it’s not just a compromise. You can actually show, mathematically, reasons why, and I can explain that to you if it’s useful, you get exactly expression in proportion to how important the issue is to you rather than either going to the extreme or just completely forgetting about the importance.
Laura Shin:
So, essentially, what you’re saying is like some of the extreme behaviors that we see online or just in society get tempered even when you give the minority more power?
Glen Weyl:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
So, even if they are able to effect change, it’s not as extreme as it would’ve been otherwise or something like that? Is that…?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, I mean, look, you can have a situation in a room where you like have everyone be quiet and just have everyone raise their hands and take a vote, or you can have a situation where you allow people to scream as loud as they want to scream, and there’s like almost no cost to that. Both of those are not very good ways to make a decision.
Laura Shin:
Right.
Glen Weyl:
Instead, you want some orderly process where it becomes costly for you to be louder, but you do have the ability to do that if it’s really important to you. That’s how good decision-making processes work, and this tries to mimic that with formal mathematics.
Laura Shin:
Well, one other thing I wanted to ask about was in the way that you framed your answer, you sort of assumed that the people that feel passionately are also the most knowledgeable, but I think like we saw back in the Tea Party days, there were some people who were Tea Party activists who believed that, for instance, Obamacare was going to institute death panels, and they would like scream about this at these town halls, but obviously that wasn’t true. So, that’s another case in which I sort of wonder, like, does it make sense to…?
Glen Weyl:
Well, I mean, so, on average, what we know from the political science literature is that that’s not true, that like actually the people who tend to feel most passionate about things, on average, are more knowledgeable. That doesn’t mean that they’ll always agree with you, but in terms of answering factual questions, having read a lot about the thing, etcetera, on all those measures, the people who were most indifferent on the issue know the least, on average, and the people who have the strongest preferences know the most.
Laura Shin:
So, that example that I gave was just an outlier or…?
Glen Weyl:
Well, I mean, look, I think that there are people who are “knowledgeable” on both sides and have read a lot who believe things that may not necessarily be what all statisticians or what all, you know, like descriptors of the thing would do, but at some level, in a democratic society, like we have to settle disagreements, including disagreements about things that many of us believe are the absolute facts of the matter, and I think I could tell you a bunch of facts on issues that you might care about that, like, most economists would agree with but certainly are not what the New York Times is reporting all the time because it doesn’t go with the usual Left narrative either. So, I mean, like and we have to find a way to settle those disputes.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I mean I wasn’t saying that it’s only the Right that has misinformation.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. Yeah.
Laura Shin:
That wasn’t what I was saying. I was just saying that sometimes passion comes from misinformation, so.
Glen Weyl:
Well, I mean, I’m just saying on average, in our society, that’s not what like political science literature is consistent with.
Laura Shin:
Shows, okay.
Glen Weyl:
And shows, and in fact, like, you take the example…like a lot of people, for example, in objection to quadratic voting are like, oh, but you know Trump had so many passionate supporters. That’s just like not true. Like, as just as a matter of fact, like if you look at intensity-weighted polling, which they’ve done, where you have these extreme…you know Likert is imperfect, right, but even with its imperfection, if you just weight things based on that, and you do just a quantitative weighted polling, Trump came in dead last of all the candidates that were running, of the 20 that were in the primaries. Hillary Clinton came in second to last. Kasich came in first, and Bernie Sanders came in second.
Laura Shin:
Wait, Kasich came in first?
Glen Weyl:
Yes, because…
Laura Shin:
Wait, John Kasich?
Glen Weyl:
He would’ve come in first in that weighted polling, yes, and the reason is that like for every strong supporter of Trump, you had two strong opponents. For every 1.5 strong supporters of Hillary Clinton, you had two strong opponents. Kasich had some relatively small number of strong supporters, almost no one disliked him, and he had quite a lot of weak supporters. So, once you actually net all these things out and you think about the fact that passion of that sort is almost always as much negative on the other side as it is positive on your side, it’s just, like, a lot of the intuitions that people have are just not really right.
Laura Shin:
Wow. Yeah. No. It would be super fascinating to implement this and see how it changes outcomes.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
And so we’re going to discuss more about blockchain-based voting in a moment, but first, a quick word from our fabulous sponsors.
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Laura Shin:
Back to my conversation with Glen Weyl and Santiago Siri. Santiago, you looked like you wanted to make a comment about that.
Santiago Siri:
Politics would be so much boring if we had these systems in place, right?
Laura Shin:
Right. That is, well, I don’t know. Would it be? It might be more…
Glen Weyl:
I don’t know if it would be boring. Maybe it would be interesting in a less morbid way.
Santiago Siri:
Yeah.
Glen Weyl:
I mean maybe a little bit less like looking at the corpse on the side of the thing and instead watching a really beautiful art exhibit.
Santiago Siri:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Yeah.
Santiago Siri:
They say politics is show business for ugly people, you know?
Laura Shin:
Right. Right. Well, we would hope. So, to keep going on the voting track, I wanted to ask about, just in general, using blockchain technology in voting. This is a very controversial topic. Like, I’ve been at blockchain and crypto conferences where people who are super gung-ho for this technology, they work on it, they’re dedicating their lives to it, and they will get into these huge arguments. Some people say, and I’ve seen it on Twitter as well, they’ll talk about how dangerous and irresponsible it is to use blockchain-based systems for voting. So, for you guys, who are kind of working on the technology to try to implement your ideas, what do you feel like needs to be put in place in order for people to be able to trust these kinds of systems?
Santiago Siri:
So, when it comes to, for example, in the case of national elections or state elections, which are very big processes that involve all of society, ideally, there’s this long argument, long-time argument of e-voting or using electronic machines versus paper ballots when it comes to voting systems, and I think a lot of these arguments make sense in the sense that we need to create systems where everyone in society can have the capacity of auditing how the election is working and provide the proper mechanisms to reduce the likelihood of corruption or tampering with the ballot boxes or with the electoral system. Electronic voting machines, because of that, are severely questioned all around the world. I think, you know, one of the best recommendations that I’ve read on this subject is actually from the Supreme Court of Germany that argues, back in 2010, I think, that any voting system should at least have two kinds of support to store the votes.
So, if you’re going to do an electronic voting system, keep a paper trial so you can have the two supports that are storing the votes to take with each other rather than do only electronic or only paper. When you look at only paper ballots kinds of elections, especially in developing nations, you see all kinds of coercion and violent attacks, where from people stealing the ballot boxes, burning ballot boxes, and basically having, you know, you rely on party authorities to count the votes, which reduces the scope of people you need to bribe in order to win an election, and in that aspect, machines are actually better. If we can have systems that can electronically give the guarantees that the votes being counted are counted the right way, it’s probably better. So, in the argument, I think there’s this discussion of electronic voting, yes or no. It’s a false binary argument.
We need to think of hybrid systems, and we need to think of systems that can really include everyone in society, if we’re thinking about elections. That said, when it comes to governance of blockchains, there’s the governance of blockchains, and there’s governance by blockchains. One thing is how we’re going to guarantee the mechanisms that allow for the upgradability of these protocols, and in that sense, you know, finding the mechanisms that help everyone have a consensus whether we should implement SegWit or not, and then there’s governance by blockchains, which is using this technology to face the challenges that society requires to bring much better accountability to our democracy and really help elections happen not once every two years but technically we could have democracies where we could be actually voting or participating in a much more dynamic way than just going to a poll every two years.
So, I try to focus more on how these technologies can serve society. I pay a lot of attention to the governance mechanisms of the different blockchain protocols that are out there, but there’s, I think, a huge, tremendous potential to think on how these technologies can start paving the way towards global governance and to a new kind of politics that runs on the very same source of information that we use on a daily basis, which is the internet.
Glen Weyl:
I mean I would be one in the skeptical camp of actually literally using blockchains for important voting anytime very soon. Some of the things, I think, are real issues, and this is something we’ll probably talk about at some point, but and it’s important to both Santi and me, is identity, that there are no…like blockchain is fundamentally not a system based on human beings, and voting is fundamentally a system based on human beings.
Santiago Siri:
I couldn’t agree more.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, that was actually the issue…
Glen Weyl:
This is probably the most single fundamental issue, but there’s several other issues, as well, even beyond that. So, coercion resistance is a huge issue, because the truth is in almost any electronic voting system that is remote and is not in person, without really, really, really thoughtful hardware fixes, and I’m just not sure software is enough, I don’t know how you stop someone from just looking at your phone while you vote, like, and that’s a major issue. That’s a very, very serious issue, and that goes well beyond…
Laura Shin:
Wait, and when you say looking, you mean like a hacker?
Glen Weyl:
No, no, physically someone being there, with your phone, watching you press a button.
Laura Shin:
Oh.
Glen Weyl:
Like, there may be ways to have hardware that prevents that, but it is not a trivial hardware problem at all, and there’s no way, there’s nothing about the blockchain that can fix that problem. It fundamentally has to be a hardware issue, so.
Laura Shin:
And wait, I mean, what about just telling people do this in a private place, when no one’s around?
Glen Weyl:
No, no, but the thing is someone who wants to be paid by someone else to vote can easily circumvent that, whereas like if you’re in a private booth, and that’s observable to the election officials, that’s very different.
Laura Shin:
Oh, I see what you’re saying. So, they know that you are choosing to vote on your own will?
Glen Weyl:
Because a lot of people, you have to…coercion resistance requires not just that you want to resist coercion but that you are unable to prove to someone how you vote. Otherwise, you can be coerced, and so like I’m not saying there’s no way to solve that, and I go to things all the time about this, but like I think fundamentally it is a hardware problem, and there may be hardware solutions to that hardware problem, but they are like fundamentally different than the software things that blockchain can facilitate. So, even beyond the identity thing, there’s these really hard hardware issues, so, and I could go on, but I think there’s like a number of like really difficult challenges of doing this, and by the way, some things like that happen for absentee ballots, but there’s like huge issues with absentee ballots, as well, for the same reason, so there’s just a lot of challenges involved.
Laura Shin:
And so you glossed over the identity, but that was actually where I was leading with my question, so let’s…
Glen Weyl:
I glossed over it because I think we should dive into it in greater depth, and I wanted to go through it quickly.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, well, let’s do that now.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Let’s talk about that now, yeah.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, absolutely.
Laura Shin:
I mean my question, really, about it is just generally, I feel like something I talk about often on the podcast is the problem of oracles, you know?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
How can you verify, and in any situation, not just identity, but how can you verify that real-world data imported to the blockchain is actually true?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
So here, you know, obviously identity is kind of the main thing, but are you guys working on proposals right now to be sure that these identities are verifiable?
Santiago Siri:
So, one of the most scary papers that I read in recent times is this paper published in December that uses generative adversarial networks, which is this new technique of machine learning to create pictures of humans that are very extremely photorealistic, beats the uncanny valley, and that never existed, you know? These machine learning algorithms can learn the features that are happening in our faces and combine these features and generate new faces that look exactly like any random picture of any human being.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I think I saw an article about this, and it was really creepy.
Glen Weyl:
And it’s actually beyond photos. It’s actually…there’s also masks.
Santiago Siri:
Yeah.
Glen Weyl:
So, there are masks that have now been developed that with a 97 percent human success rate, from the distance that you and I are currently at, I couldn’t tell was not actually a real human face.
Laura Shin:
Yeah? Wow.
Santiago Siri:
So, the very nature of humanity is being challenged by artificial intelligence, and this is a very, very tricky race that we’re fighting against. In that sense, coming from Democracy Earth, we tried to think about what are plausible lines that we can explore and research to try to figure how to address this problem. When it comes to blockchains, there are a couple of entities that you need to care about when it’s about governance. One is you probably have to deal with bots, artificial intelligences that try to hijack the network, sybils, a human identity that is actually controlling multiple identities, and then the risk of money and bribing that can corrupt validators in the network. To address the issue of bots, a line of research that we’re looking into is this idea we call Turing impossible proofs, some kind of proof that is able to be validated by another human being, but an AI is simply not able to process or understand or parse that information.
I always give the example of how I did my daughter’s birth certificate three years ago already by using video, and it’s a video file that has me, my wife, two witnesses, which are my mom and my mother-in-law acknowledging the identity of my daughter, and then because it’s video content, it’s still hard for, you know, machine-learning algorithms require a lot of training for specific purposes. So, it’s not something that an AI can easily catch, at least not at the state of computing today. It won’t be the case in a couple of years, but it’s the first step towards figuring out a format that we know that only other humans can really…you know really required to understand and interpret and not just artificial intelligences. That’s an approach, you know, an initial step towards figuring out how to prevent bots. Then the issue of sybils is probably working with reputation algorithms or trust in the network.
The problem with reputation is that reputation is a codename for centralization, you know, reputation algorithms, mathematically, are centralization algorithms. So, a third approach that we’re also looking into is cryptographic lotteries, randomization, which actually, if you go back in the history of democracy, the Greeks, the way they implemented democracy was through lotteries. They elected public servants using this device called the kleroterion, which was an entropy device, a lottery device, and if you got picked by this device, you had to become a public servant for a year. I think that when it comes to blockchains, those who get the rights to validate identities, they should get that right after a cryptographic lottery, so you don’t know who to bribe in the network and you know helps keep the system protected against this kind of economic attacks.
These are all tentative lines to research and work on, but I think we definitely need to address this problem because when Satoshi Nakamoto said one CPU, one vote, that’s his quote from the paper, that’s fantastic, but that’s talking about power to the machines. If these technologies are going to serve society, we need to man up to the situation and figure out how we’re going to do one note, one human, or something that really takes into place the social layer of these networks and not just the technological software layer.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, and so I very much share Santi’s goals. I have a slightly different approach, which tries to go sort of deeply into actually sort of the philosophical level of like what is human identity, and the way I think about that is that what we are is basically a bunch of information, and all the information about who we are is already shared with other people. So, take the example of my mother’s date of birth. My mother’s date of birth is also my mother’s date of birth, and it’s my grandmother’s date of her first child’s birth, and it’s my sister’s mother’s date of birth, and in fact if you think about almost all the information about you, it is shared with different people already just by the nature of social life, and in fact if you go back in the history of the development of identity, that was the nature of identity verification prior to the emergence of the nation state. So, actually, most people didn’t have a surname. They didn’t have a last name. They sometimes had a first name, but often they would even just be described by their relationship to other people. So, you would be the person who lives, you know, the child of, etcetera, etcetera.
Laura Shin:
Right. Right.
Glen Weyl:
And in fact, names emerge from that. The reason that the surname is inherited from your parents comes from that, and the reason why, in many countries, there are patronymics, or matronymics in some countries, is precisely because of that relational nature of identity.
Laura Shin:
And oh, patronymic, that’s like…
Glen Weyl:
John Stepanovich, you know, son of Stepan, you know?
Laura Shin:
Right. Right.
Santiago Siri:
Right.
Glen Weyl:
You know what I mean, Stephen, right, and so if once you take that into account, then you actually start saying, oh, what is your identity? Well, the face is really not a good way to think about your identity. It’s just heuristic. The truth is that your face is a reflection of all of the things you’ve been through in your life, and all of those things that you’ve been through in your life are a way more rich and complex set of data that’s far, far harder to fake, especially when you take into account the fact that there’s always, for almost all those things, somebody else who knows it.
Laura Shin:
Right.
Glen Weyl:
And you’d have to fake those persons…you see what I mean? So, once you start actually embedding people fully within their social context, rather than in the way that the nation state and centralized institutions have done it, by trying to flatten you down to like your fingerprint or your face or your iris, but if you actually think about the full social context of everything, that is far harder to reproduce than is these thinner aspects that we’ve relied upon.
Laura Shin:
Well, so, I don’t know if I totally agree with that because, honestly, when you were describing those things, it reminded me of those security questions that you get when you’re trying to log into your bank account.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
And it’s like, you know, who was your teacher in first grade, or what’s your mom’s middle name or whatever, and so I feel like those are things that other people can find out, and that’s why they always say you should lie when you answer the security questions, so that way a hacker can’t, you know, gain access to your bank account or whatever. So, how would you use that, like using that theory, how would you apply that in a blockchain-based identity system?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. So, I think that the problem, and the reason why those can be problematic, is that there’s a very small number of those things that we usually ask about, but the reality is like you are billions of bits, not five bits. Like, your mother’s date of birth is so overused.
Laura Shin:
Right.
Glen Weyl:
Your social security number is so overused, right? Like, these are like ridiculously overused quantities, but the truth is that imagine that your cell phone was in a personal data store that was, let’s say, non-hackable, whatever, you know, really, really private, was tracking every GPS location that you did at every time, and every time you were together with someone else, a link would be established between your phones saying we both were here together.
Laura Shin:
Okay, no, this is just getting creepy.
Glen Weyl:
No, but it’s not in any centralized server.
Laura Shin:
It’s too…
Glen Weyl:
I don’t think it’s creepy at all.
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Glen Weyl:
It’s in your head, anyway, right? So, all that information is in your head, or maybe with less fidelity in your head.
Laura Shin:
Well, I mean, how would you keep that from being hackable?
Glen Weyl:
Well, okay, so then there’s a question of how do we secure that device, but the point is that like there is enough…like let’s not even call it a device. Let’s call it your head, and imagine your head just has an implant in it, and it’s securable to something, or you know, like the point is that the relevant information that’s actually useful, that actually shows you uniquely as you, is all the stuff that has happened in your life, and like that’s actually what makes you interesting and unique and different and so forth, and to the extent possible, we should have digital systems that try to mimic that process rather than ones that like come up with these artificial things that flatten us.
Laura Shin:
So, do you think that there is some way to implement this in a blockchain system, because like what you’re describing to me, I get it on some level, but…
Glen Weyl:
I don’t think it’s a blockchain system. I don’t think it should be in a blockchain system. Yeah, in a data structure, yeah.
Laura Shin:
Well, or not necessarily blockchain, but if we’re talking about trying to use blockchain-based systems for voting, then, and talking about the problem of identity, is there…?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. I mean the problem is I don’t really like the blockchain data structure for this type of an application because the blockchain data structure, even though things can be added on top of it, everything is either public or private in the blockchain data structure, and that’s fundamentally wrong for the applications that I’m talking about, because everything I was describing was…
Laura Shin:
Yeah, well, but what about like viewkeys and stuff like that? Do you…?
Glen Weyl:
Well, I mean, yes, so those can elaborate on it, but I’m saying like the basic structure of the blockchain is based on there’s me, and then there’s the global thing, and this is fundamentally based on exactly the opposite of it. It’s like every piece of information is shared by some small community, which is not the whole thing. To me, that’s what decentralization is about, actually, is about the fact that information is neither global nor completely individual. It’s shared within a variety of different local communities, and so I actually think that is…it’s a different data structure than a blockchain. It’s still a data structure, and it has a lot of the spirit of blockchain, in the sense that it uses mechanisms and uses data structures to instantiate social relationships, but it’s not a blockchain, per se.
Laura Shin:
So, essentially, your idea for resolving the identity issue for…if we’re going to ever have blockchain-based voting is to use some other kind of technology and then…?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, I actually want to move on to now also talk about, just in general, both of you are working on ideas where you’re essentially melding money and voting. So, you know, Democracy Earth has its vote token. We talked about the budget in quadratic voting. So, I was thinking about this, and this is sort of a new concept, and there was something about it that made me a little bit uncomfortable, and my mind sort of went toward like plutocracy. Like, how do you prevent the wealthy from just ruling? So, what are your thoughts on kind of the pitfalls and advantages of melding money and voting?
Santiago Siri:
I definitely agree that if you look at the governance protocols of most blockchains out there, they are, all of them, plutocratic, one coin, one vote, and you know that’s probably fine for a lot of projects where, you know, decisions are driven by different motives, but I’m particularly interested in figuring out what it means to actually deploy democracies over the internet, and that’s my personal mission in what we are doing with Democracy Earth, and the reason for attaching an economic value to the act of voting is simply because of the need to differentiate voting from surveys. When you participate on social media, I think actually voting is the main interaction we do over the internet, on a daily basis. Page rank is really an algorithm counting the votes that each link received from other pages on the internet. Likes on Facebook is a way of voting. Retweets on Twitter is a way of voting.
You know up-votes on Reddit, hearts on Instagram, you name it, we are always giving these networks this preference and this signaling what we are voting for. Now, none of this voting is capturing any economic value for the voters. It’s capturing all of the economic value for the centralized entities that control these networks, which 97 percent of their revenue comes from advertising. So, it’s really a mechanism of service. What we care about coming from Democracy Earth is finding a mechanism, and you know I think quadratic voting is one of the most promising ideas, by far, in this space, to understand how we can stop being subject of service and really empower the end-user with voting transactions that are able to trigger institutional change, that are able to trigger a cryptocurrency transaction or unlock funds, but you know the difference between a survey and voting is that voting does have institutional impact.
The US Election has a cost of six billion dollars, around 17 dollars per vote, if I remember the numbers correctly. It’s not a free vote. There is a cost attached to, you know, doing that process, and so when we look at how to bootstrap a democracy over these networks, identity, I couldn’t agree more, is one of the most important hurdles to overcome if we want to start having democratic systems of governance and not just plutocratic within blockchain environments.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. So, the way I think about it is, so, first of all, you should be clear, quadratic voting does not involve money in a traditional sense. It involves a budget of votes which is given equally to everyone. However, I think that it does involve some ability to transfer votes across different things or to have a budget and not just one vote on everything, and I think a fundamental problem in our society, and this is partly where we started, is this incredibly sharp distinction that we make between the market and the state. You know the market is flexible and adaptable and whatever, but it’s undemocratic and exploitative, and the state is democratic and equal but completely rigid and fixed, and that distinction sucks. It’s the reason why we have all the issues that I think that we have. The right way to think about things is we all have fundamentally equal dignity, but the notion that we should all have completely equal voice within every organization that we’re a member of is totally crazy. It’s like nobody wants that.
You know Hannah Arendt, who is one of my favorite philosophers, said one of the greatest freedoms in the modern era is the freedom from politics. A lot of people just don’t want to have to deal with all this junk, and but the reason we have representatives, the reason that we have boards, the reason we have everything is that not everybody wants to have equal say on everything. So, what we need to do is give people equal total voice but allow people to choose where they want to exercise that voice rather than saying that we’re going to flatten everyone down to a homogenous pancake. That just makes no sense, and then we’re in the marketplace. I can buy whatever food I want. I can buy a car. I can just do…I’m a free individual. I can do whatever the hell I want, but then when it comes to politics, I’m exactly the same as everyone else. Both of those are stupid caricatures. The truth is that we’re part of lots of different communities, and to the extent we’re part of those communities, we take on some notion of equality, but we should have freedom to choose which ones we exercise that in and where we belong.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I’ve talked about this on the show, but are you familiar with the referendum system in California?
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. I grew up in California.
Laura Shin:
Oh my god. Like, when I lived there, it was just like so annoying.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah, the most common complaint you hear from people in California is why are they asking me to vote on all this crap?
Laura Shin:
I know. I know. I would be like I have no idea, like, why are you asking me, you know, and it is a relief to like not have to do that anymore.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah. Yeah, so Hannah Arendt says that it is inevitable in life that not everyone can be like involved in and having a say on every political issue. Instead, we’re going to have to have some elites, but as much as possible, we should have those elites be ones that emerge from people’s personal desire to be involved in something rather than elites that come from somebody being in power and someone else being out of power, and I think that should be our goal is for the people who govern us to emerge from the public rather than from the top down, and I think that that, that’s true democracy, not one person, one vote.
Santiago Siri:
Borges, the Argentine writer, once said one day we’ll be worthy of not needing governments anymore.
Laura Shin:
That would be, yeah, I like that idea. Well, yeah, I mean I think that’s this emergent property that Glen was talking about. So, we’re kind of running out of time, so I want to actually bring it back to Ethereum, because Glen, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that you’ve said that Vitalik is now your closest collaborator.
Glen Weyl:
Definitely, yeah.
Laura Shin:
That’s something you mentioned to me in a pre-interview.
Glen Weyl:
Absolutely, yeah.
Laura Shin:
So, how so?
Glen Weyl:
Well, I think that Vitalik’s primary goal is to a large extent very similar to mine, which is that he wants to build governance institutions, ways of organizing society, and experiments with those that work way better than the institutions that we currently have, and he viewed Ethereum as a platform to enable those experiments, but ultimately those experiments were what interested him rather than like Ethereum, per se, and so I think he didn’t see the vehicle for generating those types of experiments, as much, before the book, other than just putting something out there, but now that like the substance of it, he sees a way to get into it, he’s been focused a lot on that recently, and I’ve benefitted a lot from collaborating with him on those questions.
Laura Shin:
And so that is, like, are you guys working on…how else are you working on applying quadratic financing?
Glen Weyl:
So, we had this paper on quadratic finance. We, you know, he’s giving a speech at this conference that I’m having next month.
Laura Shin:
RadicalxChange
Glen Weyl:
RadicalxChange, March 22, 24, actually, I guess, right after the event that he’s doing with you.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Glen Weyl:
So, he’s flying to New York and then to Detroit.
Laura Shin:
Yes.
Glen Weyl:
And then he and I, so, I’ve been writing a series of blog posts about my sort of political views, and he’s been giving me a lot of comments on those. We’re co-authoring another paper, which is sort of a methodology paper about how to come up with ideas like this.
Laura Shin:
How did you guys meet, anyway, actually? We didn’t cover that.
Glen Weyl:
Oh, it’s really funny. So, in October of 2017, he retweeted one of my papers, or he tweeted out one of my papers, and I got like more Twitter traffic than I’ve gotten from everything combined to that point, and he, I had never heard of him before. I was not into blockchain at all.
Laura Shin:
Oh.
Glen Weyl:
I looked him up, and he seemed like a Bond villain to me. He was like, you know, 23, 24-year-old kid, Russian-Canadian, living in Switzerland, made all this money on some shadowy business enterprise, but then I asked him whether he wanted to read a draft of my book, and he wrote back like 30 pages of the best comments I’d ever gotten.
Laura Shin:
Wow.
Glen Weyl:
And so I realized that there had to be something more going on there than just criminal activity, and so that was how we started hanging out.
Laura Shin:
Oh my god. I love that story. Yeah, no, he’s so thoughtful and incredibly smart.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
I’m sure I don’t need to say this to my listeners, but so one thing that I was so curious about is Vitalik has actually said that he prefers off-chain governance for managing Ethereum. So, and that was a while ago, so I’m just curious, like in your talks with him, has he expressed interest in testing or implementing some of these ideas in an on-chain way for Ethereum itself or even using Democracy Earth’s ideas?
Glen Weyl:
I mean I think once we solve these other problems that we’re talking about, he’s very enthusiastic about that, but I think it has to wait for these other solutions, and as I mentioned, I’m personally skeptical that there exists an on-chain identity solution, period. I think we may need fundamentally different technologies than are possibly directly on the blockchain without contorting it in a thousand ways that make it just like, you know, Brave uses the blockchain, right, but like that’s not most of what’s going on. So, I mean, you could say it’s using the blockchain.
Santiago Siri:
Yeah.
Glen Weyl:
But I think you have to use fundamentally different data structures to supplement blockchains in order to make this possible.
Santiago Siri:
Our very notions of what identity means can be changed, will change, for sure, as we become more familiar how to use these technologies. Maybe we can start talking about probabilistic identity in the sense that, you know, you are not full human or full machine but some kind of threshold in between and working around with that. There are many, many different ways of looking at this. Ultimately, what blockchains are, what blockchains are enabling is the ability to bring trust into computer programs. I definitely think that Ethereum has a tremendous ability to accelerate what is possible to think in terms of doing smart contracts and be able to compute trust in ways that Bitcoin, maybe by design, decided not to be Turing complete, decided to strictly stick to the narrative of money and payments and the store of value, and that’s okay, thank you, Satoshi, for all of that, but Ethereum took the bold step to allow for much more complex systems to be created because of what making a “World Computer” allows, and in that sense it’s interesting.
You know now we’re a couple of years into the experiment, and we’re seeing interesting projects to get traction that are not just an Eth token or it’s not just the ICO narrative of 2017 but actually new technologies of decentralized finance, and I’m hoping that we definitely also see decentralized politics, and in that respect, you know, we are building systems of trust. Institutions are collections of promises, and what blockchains allow is to guarantee those promises with cryptographic proof rather than the words of an authority or of a politician, and for the long-term of our societies where, especially, you know, I come from Latin America. My major concern after having dealt with politics in my country is how terrible corruption can be and what the impact it has on a culture, on a society, is really, really terrible, and my hope is that, you know, technology can help battle a lot of those shortfalls that happen in the way things are today.
Laura Shin:
You sort of very naturally led into what my last question was, which was like if this vision that you guys are working toward comes to fruition, what will that world look like?
Santiago Siri:
You know when I was in Devcon, this year, in Prague, someone told me this joke, a half-joke, maybe, that the political experiment of the 20th century was communism, and we can probably argue that it was a big failure anywhere it was tried, and it was tried on every continent, in every possible combination, and the dictatorship of the proletariat didn’t lead anywhere good after a whole century of experimentation with those ideas.
Laura Shin:
And a couple countries still trying.
Santiago Siri:
And a couple countries still trying, yeah.
Laura Shin:
But anyway.
Santiago Siri:
But that said, that said, a friend of mine told me, on Devcon, blockchain, like Marxism, is going to be successful in the developing world first. It’s going to be tried in the developing world first, because when you go to the developing world, you see this need, this demand for trying an alternative to the status quo. In my country, in Argentina, we are facing 40 percent of annual inflation rate. It’s what push me to get Bitcoin back in 2011. You know needless to say, in countries like Venezuela, where simply trusting the established institutions is not possible, so you have nothing to lose by embracing these new technologies that can help society work under a much better social contract, which works in digital form and is secured by computational capacity, and I think this is the narrative of the 21st century. The 1917 of the 21st century was 2009, when the Bitcoin clock started, and this is going to unfold, and I hope this is a much better experiment than experiments of the last century.
Glen Weyl:
So, the world I imagine is one that’s fundamentally beyond this binary between like corporations that are for-profit and governments that are democratic but rigid. It’s a world where…it’s something I call polypolitanism, where rather than we’re a citizen of the United States, you would be a citizen of hundreds of different communities, and these communities would own most things. There would be very little private property, but there would be all these diverse common ownership forms, and what would make you unique as an individual would be the set of communities that you’re a part of and that you gain value from, and most of the things that we currently buy with money, we would instead participate in communities that would provide them to us, and we would contribute to the democratic governance of all those communities. So, it’s sort of a radically democratic but also radically decentralized vision of the world where civil society as we think about it, things that are neither the private sector nor government and that are democratically governed and that are responsive and emergent takes up most of our lives.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, we did not get into a topic that I did want to touch on, but we’re way over time.
Glen Weyl:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
But I will link to something in the show notes, so people can read about it. It’s called Common Ownership Self Assessed Tax, which goes by the acronym COST, and it was very fascinating, but it goes into what Glen was just talking about, where it’s sort of like this kind of public/private ownership, but yeah, but we’ll have to save that for another day. Maybe I’ll just have you guys back, because this was so fascinating, but in the meantime, where can people learn more about you?
Santiago Siri:
You can find everything about Democracy Earth on Democracy.Earth, that’s our website, and definitely you can find me on cryptotwittter. I like to hang there a lot. I’m @SantiSiri, and feel free to drop me a line there.
Glen Weyl:
And everyone should check out http://RadicalxChange.org. That’s this conference that we’re having next month with artists, entrepreneurs, activists, academics in Detroit.
Laura Shin:
Vitalik.
Glen Weyl:
Vitalik, Zooko, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah, tickets are available for a little while longer. I hope many people will come, and you can also follow @RadxChange on Twitter or mine, @GlenWeyl.
Laura Shin:
Great, well thank you both for coming on Unchained.
Santiago Siri:
Thank you.
Glen Weyl:
Thank you.
Laura Shin:
Thanks, so much, for joining us today. To learn more about Glen and Santi, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. New episodes of Unchained come out every Tuesday. If you haven’t already, rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and if you’re not yet subscribed to my other podcast, Unconfirmed, I highly recommend you check it out and subscribe now. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Raelene Gullapalli, Fractal Recordings, Jennie Josephson, Daniel Nuss, and Rich Stroffolino. Thanks for listening.
