Nicholas Fett traces the history of market neutrality from 1889 Oklahoma land runs and Adam Smith's moral sentiments through Keynes, the Mont Pelerin Society, and into crypto, arguing that protocols designed to be neutral (Bitcoin's decentralization, Ethereum's 'crops' ethos) inevitably get captured by economic incentives like mining and block-builder centralization. He uses the 'tunnel' and 'one more lane' analogies to argue that building for neutral principles without a defined societal goal leads to outcomes divorced from original intentions, and that protocol designers must instead encode explicit purpose rather than chase an unattainable neutral equilibrium.
0:05 Cool. Go for it. Um, does that look good? Or see, why is this not working?
0:19 Sorry, I have to figure out how to actually move back slides. Um, okay. Can you guys We’re all good. You hear me? See? All right. Um, so the first thing to note, I did change the title of my talk. Um, and it it actually goes really well after Mike’s talk. So, um, hopefully you guys en enjoy it just as much as as the other one that you are hopefully going to get. Um, but for you guys, I’m Nicholas Fet and we’ll just kind of hop into it. So going to go over a lot of economic history um and kind of the journey of thinking about markets differently throughout kind of America’s history, which is what I’ve been focused on studying. Um so to start with the story, uh the year was 1889. Uh 50,000 people lined up along the starting line, horses, carriages, and runners. They were all carrying a flag. Um, see for weeks the these mainly white men, they they lined up along the railroads that represented the line from American to Indian territories and today was their day. At the sound of the cannon, these these men all just raced on. They rode across 1.6 million acres um and they would ride to where they wanted to go, plant their flag, and they would get a 160 acre plot of land. Um, the guy would then race to the nearest land office to get it officially registered. then he would go grab his family and begin building his new life together.
1:50 So, uh, of course, disputes in this land process, they were very common and the entire process actually took years to sort out. Uh, but it was actually generally looked at as successful. This this town in Oklahoma, this is 10 days old when it got built. Um, and over the next decade, land runs actually became a really common way to distribute what were the unassigned lands. Uh, mainly the land that was given to Native Americans over the previous century. Uh, but just to be clear, like this wasn’t something that like happened overnight. So, uh, before the land run, there were there were quite a few competing views on what should actually be done with the land. Um for most of the the previous century and even even before that you know most of the farmers who would go out west you were squatters. Uh for early America there were two issues at play. There was preeemption and distribution. So preeemption meant should you give these squatters the first right to the land that they were farming on. Um and then distribution obviously if you were going to sell off the land what should you do with the proceeds? should you give it to the state governments or to say the omnibus federal budget? Um, now for Oklahoma it was a little bit different because the land is theoretically free from squatters. Um, but it was now just being debated as far as how it should be split up. So on this topic there were two main sides. There were the northerners who had fought for this program of land grants and then there were the slave owners of the south and they were mainly fighting for selling parcled land to the highest bidder. So the free soilers uh they actually believed that land was a given right for families. So this idea of a yman farmer or in modern speak the the self-sufficient homesteader. This was this was alive and well. So they believed that land should just be you know this was for individual families and it was it was actually a god-given right. Um, everybody saw that, you know, if the other option was giving land to wealthy plantation owners or corporations who would just develop the land using slaves. And in addition to the rich southerners against it, there was actually another group who was against free land. And this was actually the employers up north. So I know a lot of you guys probably know who this is.
4:04 Um, I think radical markets did a segment on him. Uh, this is Henry George. He was a famous economist at the time of land runs. Uh he actually wrote on how the ability to just for workers to just leave employment and go out west. This was actually the best way to keep wages and labor practices fair. Um anyway, that’s Henry George is for another talk, but excellent guy to look into him. Uh to wrap up the story, you know, after decades of debate and the civil war was finally over, the North won out. they didn’t have to listen to the south anymore, so they could just give away the land. Um, and homesteading was turned into a very popular practice. Uh, fun fact, uh, you could actually homestead in Alaska all the way up until 1986, which was slightly before I was born, but [snorts] just missed it. Anyway, so there there’s kind of a lot that you can talk about here as it relates to to protocols and um, sort of distribution in general. you know, this was literally new nature being made available to the American people and there were decisions that actually had to be made. So, how the land would be distributed, who would be eligible, how much they would be able to take. Um this of course says kind of nothing of the Native Americans from whom the land was stolen from. But you know the lesson the lesson that you’ll see is that you know this this is kind of there are choices that can be made you know especially come when it comes to how things are distributed and which of those pieces are subject to the free market uh decisions need to be made. Um, all right. So now, how did we get from homesteading and just deciding land should be a given right for families to today? You know, nowadays any talk of restricting innovation is kind of met with accusations of communism. But, you know, regardless as kind of the reason we’re here and this is such a good conversation is is that there there are actually things that we need to set up.
6:06 So property rights regarding IP, natural resource distribution, regarding the data centers, even you know coming from crypto, the financial laws that govern investments and resale rights. All of these things need to happen. And in many ways, it’s actually what’s going to determine the outcome of AI and this whole boom. You know, just as it was predictable that auctioning off land to the highest bidder in Oklahoma would lead to slave owners, kind of running the show, giving some things to the market can be done in a way that that will probably lead to a predictable result. All right. Now, to kind of do even more history, um I guess uh we’re we’re going backwards in time. Most of you know who this is, even if you don’t recognize the handsome gentleman. Uh this is Adam Smith. So the landrun story that was in the late 1800s, but about a century before came Adam Smith, the wealth of nations, the American Revolution. This was kind of the formalization of free markets.
7:11 Um so you know, listening to libertarians today, you would probably think that Smith was all for a minimal government and just kind of the virtue of leaving things alone. And in some ways he was, but in his lesserknown work here, this is the theory of moral sentiments. Um, he actually caveats the entire argument. So he wrote that society actually needed a foundation of morality in order for markets to function. So they were a tool that worked, but only if people honestly cared about each other. So he frequently and it cites the golden rule. So you know, you need to think about how others would feel about your actions. And to him this was actually the primary feature that would allow markets and all of our interactions to to work so that way society could grow wealthy and successful. So all right uh the American founders who we all know quoted Smith and his view on markets they knew these assumptions of Smiths. So and and this is why like there were kind of different rules back then. So this is a a poster for prohibition.
8:14 um you know they were pro market but they they were very much fine with the government legislating and helping cultivate that morality. Uh in early America and Europe it was it was very much still the government’s the local governments job to educate and even help maintain a moral population. So the goal of the system was a prosperous society. Apparently you needed markets for that but markets definitely needed a moral foundation. So as a result you saw things like prohibition and gambling bans but even there were there were laws against working on the Sabbath, laws against laziness, indecency, profanity. Um you know the whole idea of like a free society was was very much different in in early America than it was today.
8:58 Um but that didn’t say last forever. You know eventually we we transitioned here. So around what what many would call the progressive era. This was say like the late 1800s through the great depression. Uh things really began to change how we looked at economics and markets. So this is John Maynard Kanes here in the middle. This is him actually talking at the original Brenton Woods conference. So a little bit after the Great Depression. Um but but I I love reading him. He’s uh he believed that markets worked and and they were one of the best mechanisms to create technological progress and but they were neutral and he said therefore immoral. So one of my favorite quotes from him is averis and usery and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still for only they can lead us out of the economic of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. So he wrote how basically we should allow ourselves to be self-interested, immoral, and partake in markets, but only because they were really good at creating technological progress and growth. So once we were free market for long enough, we could basically solve scarcity. We could all work 5hour weeks and then we could go back to implementing morality in our societies. Um, you know, of course, the the free market argument that that this was also came from a moral point. So like in the late 1800s there was this the group ran uh not group uh Bastiat if you’ve read the law. So his main argument over in France was taxation is theft. You know it’s immoral because you’re stealing from people and even you know more mainstream free market economists they they started dropping off what society needed to look like underneath. So it became one much more about efficiency and pragmatism. So this picture here, this is the foundation of the Mont Pelerin society.
10:54 So post World War II, there was Frederick Hayek, Ludwick von Mees, uh even a young Milton Friedman is there. Um and what they saw was there were dangerous socialist revolutions happening all throughout Europe and they needed to set up think tanks and an intellectual framework to combat it. um to them they wanted to they quote return to the Smithian practice of free markets that you know that ruled the industrial revolution. So, so they were already trying to think, you know, how can we combat the ideas of Marxism and socialism and to them it wasn’t necessarily that moral morality was missing. It was just that governments and society, you know, you couldn’t plan because the economy was too complex. It turned into an argument. The the left and the right began arguing about like, well, which one was actually better for growth? you just made this assumption that listen what we actually want is economic growth and we’re going to now argue about which is the best way to go. Uh by the 1970s and 80s markets are clearly the efficient way to allocate resources regardless of the society underneath. So you know people like Milton Friedman and Einrand they they took it even farther. So not only were markets more efficient but they were good by virtue of what they did. So participating in markets, you know, that the government didn’t force you to, that was freedom and you couldn’t really separate the two. So self-interest was in many self-interest as a virtue. I think Einrand even has an essay called that. Um, you know, basically any interference by the government or any collective action, this would actually interfere with the natural outcome which was best because that’s what the markets would say was best. You know, to be fair though, these guys weren’t anarchists.
12:40 So like Milton Friedman by no means was you know saying we should abolish the government. They still believed that whatever this nature of markets was or the protocol of markets it needed a protection. So you needed a military in courts to protect private contract law. Basically, you need to enforce that people’s private contracts stay enforced forever and then you get out of the way as much as humanly possible and the government is there to make sure that other people stay out of the way of this. And you know this this wasn’t say like a right or left thing. The idea was just becoming that we we could model the economy. The the market was good. Growth in and of itself was the goal. So we should just focus on getting markets and the surrounding systems better. You know, the right would say any any interference by government is affecting the outcome. And and then the modern left, you know, says that the government can actually be used to help the markets grow. You know, a fun thing that I was reading while researching this. This is actually Marxist Prasantra Mahalanovas.
13:44 He actually came up with this model here that that you could perfectly model the Indian economy. He said, “So if you expanded the thing, the you could properly allocate investments and capital to all of the various sectors and everything would work out.” So, you know, it’s important to note that like whether it’s this model or just your basic supply demand model, they they say nothing of morals, the society underneath, who who it actually is, what it’s for, um, or what the society looks like as a result. We’re just growing the number, putting it in. So now we obviously have to fast forward um get us to today. You know, you eventually get to crypto and modern finance. So crypto I I love I’ve been in crypto for kind of the past decade. It it’s not just digital markets because it’s kind of idealized, right? Like for the cipher punks that started it all and in many ways they kind of still run it. There’s this idea that we can create digital systems that are free from human interaction. So, you know, everybody here especially knows the story. The bailouts of 2008 showed that the governments would co-opt money. So, we need to escape to our own world where pure free markets won’t be be captured by the political structures of you know whatever it may be corrupt people and you know what these systems was for was kind of always evolving. So, Bitcoin was what was Bitcoin for originally? Now it turned into digital gold. You know, for Ethereum that that most of us here are more involved in, they they recently shifted to this idea of crops. So censorship resistant, open source, privacy, security. And this was kind of the purpose of crypto became this mantra of neutrality. So we’re building systems to run any program on. The idea of Smith that markets needed moral people or the idea of canes that markets should just be tolerated. you know, this had not this has nothing to do with crypto. It’s it’s really not an economy because there’s there’s not really a specific purpose or a specific person it’s for.
15:45 It’s just kind of a system that we can interact with. And and this as long as we make these systems that people can interact with and opt out of other systems into it, it’s going to be best for the world. And of course, you know, we have this for every industry. This isn’t just crypto. So, you can’t place place the blame on them. But there’s this idea that kind of global contract laws that supersedes all courts. So, you know, rules of interactions that don’t change and this is what sort of makes a society prosperous. So, you know, especially with I the idea of like network states, you know, we’re creating these places that you can opt out to and you can leave with your digital values and move away from these non-market interactions. Um, sorry. Uh, I just saw you guys are commenting. I don’t know how to look at those right now, but if you are, let me know if anything if I need to stop. Um, oh, it’s Trent. Hi, Trent.
16:45 Um, all right. But, but yeah, we we see this with AI um, too. You know, regulation and and democratic input in many ways are being framed as like counter to growth. Um, you know, growth in many ways seems to be the goal. And but but to kind of reflect on crypto, you know, we can just kind of look at like, okay, well, does just focusing on growth get us to to where we want to be? And I’ll be a little bit hard on crypto here. I still love crypto, but um, you know, looking back like like we can see what happens if you just build a system and and let it go. you know, does the focus on just building a great product actually lead to the outcomes that the founders wanted? Uh, this is this is the distribution of Bitcoin mining, you guys can read it. Um, two parties control over hash half the hash power. This has been for quite some time now with Bitcoin. Obviously, crypto did grow. Bitcoin really did grow, but you know, if you look at their own stated goal of decentralization, it’s it’s kind of hard to see. So if you break it down by, you know, where where these things are, one of the goals was running from the power of the United States government and the US owns over a third of the hash power.
18:02 And if you look at some of these other chains, you know, most of the dollarization that’s going on these, it’s it’s tough to say we’re really running from much of the control of the US government. um you know maybe this will change later but at I think the point is the idea of running from the governments is really hard because at some point you actually grow so large that um you know real resources and real contracts matter so we we can’t kind of separate these things out um and and just to be fair to Bitcoin uh you know this is a this is Ethereum um Ethereum block building is a similar story so and and it’s not anybody’s fault like the protocols get sort of centralized and captured. And um a lot of people here have been working on research that that shows exactly why they get captured in in some ways. But you kind of continuously have to upgrade and pivot either, you know, how they work or in Bitcoin’s case, the goal of what the whole thing was just to avoid the narrative of capture. Um so in some ways it’s like we’re we’re not really, you know, over history. It’s not like we had morality of a society and we replaced it with some perfect formula that could fit it. It’s just that things kind of always get messy and captured because social interactions are are complicated and these these systems are a little bit bigger. We we constantly find ourselves having to fix things. Um and sorry if I’m triggering anybody. We can I’m yes moving along. Um, but you know, if it’s this weird cycle, but you know, every time you hear a lot of times you hear from people that were trying to to get these protocols to something that we can walk away from.
19:48 Um, and it’s really really hard because a lot of times, you know, you we just need one upgrade and then everything will be fine. But but then that upgrade breaks and we need something else. It never quits get there. You know, I I think Humboldt said this was was one of his laws on the first day, like you know, the market cap the market sort of centralizes and then and then it will go and capture the government and then people have to fight the big government to to get back to to free markets and the system sort of always needs this correction no matter how big or or small I guess it it stays. So, you know, I but to kind of refocus on on where we started with like this idea of like morality and a decent society, to me, it kind of comes back to like what the goals are. What are the shared goals of the society that that we’re actually building for for crypto? What should this what this actually be used for? You know, I know a lot of times like I started in 2016, uh there was talk of like protests in banking the unbanked. you were, you know, then it turned into making stable coins and finance more efficient and then uh 24/7 stock trading and prediction market seems to be the hot topic at the moment. You know, no one could really agree. So, we turned it into this thing of we’re we’re just going to actually be building a principled product. So, you know, if if the main use cases were any of the above, it was sort of okay because at least, you know, somebody along the way might be able to use it for for something. Um so so one one way to think about it kind of I I I use a story of a tunnel. Um imagine if instead of focusing on say the use of the tunnel we focused on the principles of good tunnel building. Um you know we we want to build the biggest most secure tunnel with open access the best lighting and no stops anywhere inside the tunnel. um this is noble but you know the question of what it’s actually used for does matter. So you know if the tunnel’s used to help maniacal you know people escape some maniacal government or even if it’s just used to shorten commute times you know we we should probably keep building the the perfect tunnel. Um, at the same time, you know, if one of the exits is controlled or, you know, if the majority of your tunnel’s traffic is say to, you know, smuggle weapons for cartels, like maybe the principles of good tunnel building like shouldn’t apply. We should probably just step away from maintaining the tunnel. You know, if there’s no goal or if the goal is some related metric unrelated metric like say traffic or you know, the amount we can charge to use the tunnel, the entire the protocol say of the tunnel can succeed. But it it will probably have little or no benefit to the actual society on either end of the tunnel. It’s it’s just like the use case and the goal. It’s the classic Stanford beer quote. Like it’s it’s really hard to to separate out.
22:47 All right. Think I got it. Um another analogy I I love is the concept of one more lane. So most of you guys have heard this. It’s it’s the tale of induced demand. You have a nice little city. So there’s traffic on your way in and um then people clamor it to their local representatives. You know, we need to add more lanes, widen I270 or whichever one is in your town. Uh they do this and the expressway gets built, but but then things begin to change. So, you know, now poor now more people get downtown faster, so offices turn into skyrises and um you know, condos will slowly replace the row homes. If you eventually, you know, more subdivisions get built along the road and before you know it, traffic comes back and they’ve shown it basically the same, if not even more. And the biggest difference is is that now that nice little city is a car riddled metropolis. So you were kind of neutral to the city that you wanted. So it just got developed that way. And it’s this thing, you know, the market demanded roads. So you let someone build it or you built it yourself. You built the roads. market sees demand, you build the thing.
23:56 Um, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. So, this is actually a data center. Um, you know, this is the market is definitely demanding these things and there’s lots of push back on this, but but to be fair, this is kind of a positive part of the talk. I love the data center protests just, you know, regardless of where you stand on the issue of data centers, it’s it’s actually really encouraging that people are standing up because just because the market demands something or someone somewhere demands something and asks to to buy some land doesn’t mean that you actually need to to give it to them. Um, you know, we saw this a little bit with crypto, like some people would push back on the energy uses, but um, now with data centers, we’re really seeing like a broad-based push and um, people want both the input and the outcome, you know, they they want to have a say in and I’m kind of all for it. Uh, so, you know, I’m I tried to like relate this to kind of the topic of new nature a little bit, you know, as we’ve been discussing on at the conference. You know, I keep thinking about how we should change kind of our interaction with some of these entities. Um, you know, when we make things up like corporate charters, IP laws, markets in general, just that abstract ownership and responsibility.
25:11 It seems to me that, you know, how you describe nature is just as important as describing say, you know, how we interact with both the inputs and outputs. you know which parts we subject to a market which part we allow it to trade you know even in things in actual nature you know how we look at it affects the outcome. So like as an example like if you have a river and society needs to decide who has rights to it but then you can also decide what they can actually do with those rights. So a river with an owner is very very different than a river where the owner can digitize and tokenize and sell those rights across the globe. So, you know, even even having a government regulate what those rights on those tokenized rights can do, say, can you swim in it, drain it, pollute it, um they aren’t obvious choices and and they might change over time, but I I think the ultimate thing is going back to the goal, like if what’s the goal of the river? If the goal of the river is an AI cooling mechanism, because that’s what everyone in society wants, then then it’s probably going to have a quite a different outcome than if the goal is to maintain a river.
26:17 So, looping it back in quickly back to Adam Smith, um, you know, they kind of believed that markets couldn’t necessarily function without a homogeneous society underneath. So, kind of they they would have shared goals. and Madison and Jefferson, some of our some of the founding fathers here in America, um they echoed this even in terms of setting up a government. So they believed that a government wouldn’t work if if you didn’t have kind of everyone having a common goal. So like whenever they were writing the constitutions, you know, a lot of it was just sort of a formalization of the social contract of the time. So you were just sort of writing down what we all felted, what we all wanted and felt. And this is why in honesty most of them liked the local government. The society really did have shared goals and common understanding of things. It’s getting more difficult obviously as we move to an international world. But the piece is the same you know which pieces which goals do we have in common and can we sort of agree on and enforce and you know nature nature is neutral.
27:25 This is the picture I picked for this one. Um, you know, for the new nature of AI and protocols, I I I just hope we kind of are picky, you know, in kind of the pendulum swing of social input versus leaving things alone. I think we’re probably more on the side of we could be a little bit more picky and having a little bit more say. Um, but yeah, anyway, thanks for listening. Hope I didn’t trigger anybody too bad. Um, shameless plug though. I I did write a book earlier in the year, so if you guys want to go check it out. Um or you can reach me at Twitter or um sort of Substack, but and then Jenna wrote punctuated disequilibrium at some point in the talk, but I think that’s the only thing besides me triggering Trent on the Ethereum stuff, which yes, I [gasps] I know I simplified a lot of it. I I hope you forgive me on some of that. As far as the I know centralization is always tough but any questions.
28:33 Um yeah just one you know question. How was it writing the book? Was it was it hard? Did it feel good to have it done?
28:42 Felt great to have it done. Um, well, no. I mean, probably not cuz like I I probably took about a year and a half to write it. And it was just I’m I’m kind of a I was really I really got like I had to get myself out of the perfectionist mindset of like, oh I want to go change this forever. Um, and you just keep looping in and finding new stories. Especially, you know, this kind these kind of topics like I know what you guys do. like it’s just there’s so much you could add in so many good stories and you you could make a 10,000page book with everything um and you want to include it. So, um it it was hard picking [clears throat] kind of which pieces to include and things like that, but yeah, it was I’m very proud of how it turned out. So, and and do you have any um like contemporary economists that you really like? like you clearly know quite a few of the historical ones.
29:41 Um, contemporary economists. Yeah, I mean I love the MMT school. They’re they’re super cool. So, you know, the um like whether there’s like the Minsky stuff which is slightly newer and then even um you know, Stephanie Kelton is usually the intro to MMT, but Rohan Gray, he’s one of those guys. They talk a lot, you know, a lot of times just just kind of understanding the monetary economic stuff, but they’re really really good. So, definitely recommend looking into them. But the other one I just read uh if if you’ve never read Kenneth Golra, he’s he’s more of a neocclassical economist, but I I recommend him because he’s an excellent writer. So if you like good writing, um [laughter] you’ll very much enjoy him, which I did.
30:38 It’s almost one of those things like even if you disagree with them, you’re like, I I really like this book just because of um how you wrote the thing. And and you know, Mike Mike brought up Michael Hudson and David Greyber. They’re they’re both excellent, too, just for they have crazy ideas and the stuff that they write on. Um it’s just really out there and brings Yeah. much better than talking about treasury yields or something like that.
31:01 Yeah. Do you uh how do you think about um kind of like this is all like domestic looking economics? So like okay like you have a government that has like fiscal policies and making some decisions about markets relative to their policies. Um have you thought a little bit about like how crypto relates to um like international relations in banking? Like a lot of people have been making comments about like what it means for the US to have like dominance in in stable coins for example.
31:41 Yeah. I mean, it’s really tough cuz at some point it’s it’s all about like, okay, so what who’s the actual [clears throat] jurisdiction that holds rights over this thing, you know? And this is why like crypto adoption is is relatively for younger people who who tend to be okay with giving up say local control over the ability to freeze assets and move them. Um, you know, on unlike the international scale, yeah, it definitely looks like the US is is dominating. um the stable coin aspect and but but in some ways I I think it might be good like in some ways I I think we are moving towards a more global society. So what that looks like is is going to be really interesting. I I think I actually come um so I had worked you know a little bit on like derivative stuff like I don’t know if you’re familiar with Maker Protocol back in the day like early um early decentralized stable coins. So, you know, the vision was like hopefully we we can get away from states being the way to create money. And and I really do think we’re still going to get there. Um just this idea like um just the role of okay, there’s one government that controls the money supply, I think that’s going to go away. Um and I think that’s going to be the big unlock of crypto. Um because it’s it’s just yeah I I could go into that for like days but I know Trent has his hand up so he probably has thoughts on the topic too.
33:12 Yeah. Um thanks for the talk. Uh obviously well I can’t say obviously but a lot of my work talks about or looks into Ethereum governance capture. Um so um yeah I was very interested to hear you talk about capture and how as it relates to protocols. Um the question that comes to mind is uh how do you think about the difference between capture and an open protocol just being used? You know, obviously it’s not my first my my preference isn’t for, you know, uh, Kouchy and Poly Market and sports betting apps to be
33:56 the the face of an emancipatory technology. And yet, this is what most people know of as like, you know, there’s just scammy gambling apps that um, you know, this is this is what they know crypto as. So how do you distinguish I mean in the internet broadly right uh people use protocols for shitty things all the time. So yeah what’s what maybe some nuance on that and then I have uh one other comment but I’d like to hear that first.
34:24 Yeah I mean I I think it’s a lot of times it’s really hard to tell whether something’s captured or or some or the face of it is bad. you know, like obvious kind of like you said with the internet, like the internet, the face of the internet now is Facebook, but the internet’s still clearly a good thing to have and you know, similar with Ethereum, but I think a lot of especially when it comes to like financial value and you know, there there is there are limits to some of this stuff like like we you know the the whole goal of you know, if you look at some of the original goals of banking the unbanked or something like that like I know for me the Ethereum the main Ethereum protocol at least has gotten it at times very very expensive to use and it can be really hard to um to say okay at what point is it too expensive to use um would that be capture um and and then there’s even the other line of capture you know you could talk social fork choice capture you know if we we’ve talked about it before like if if USDC wanted to move in one action, would we possibly be able to say no to them or would we, you know, we would probably justify it in some way? Um, but it’s really hard to tell what what capture looks like. Um, just because yeah, I guess it it’s one of these things like if there’s no goal of the system, like if it’s not actually being used for the thing you want to use, you have no idea if it’s actually being good. And you know like with Bitcoin like there there is no tangible goal. So it’s even is it succeeding? Like sure like if you you know it’s Yeah, I know that’s kind of a wishy-washy answer but it it’s it’s definitely tough. Yeah, I guess I maybe we would agree the definition is like there’s a difference between permissionless usage happening on top of a protocol and then like the actual aims or goals of a system being subverted at like the the foundational um layer like the the definition of the protocol itself. Um the other comment I just wanted to leave with or end on is to to echo what you said about uh stable coins and US US agy. I made this same point in my talk yesterday and um you know Ethereum is effectively an extension of of USY with it holds I think almost 60% of all stable coins and the vast majority of them are all uh dollar dollar pegged. Um this will be interesting to see how it plays out for the next couple years. But I think in a world of things changing quickly uh I wouldn’t be surprised if suddenly we get some kind of you know the the foundation for new forms of value and new forms of currencies are being laid now with people getting private keys understanding how to custody self custody or even just like the infrastructure for digital assets.
37:31 Like I think it there will be a time where we’re able to revisit like what is an energy dollar or like you know what is a CPI dollar like all of that stuff is being prepared now and it feels like we’re in the middle of the inevitability of again this extension of US hijgemony but um totally totally I’m on the same page with you of like I I wouldn’t be so certain that like everybody’s just going to use dollars until the heat death of the universe like there’s going to be some way for people to coordinate on new forms of value and transfer I think that’s incredibly exciting.
38:03 Yeah. I mean, even like I another one I I like to push is like one of the biggest innovations to crypto for me for for me is like like I I don’t hold any gas anymore. Like I pay you you can basically convert to gas like at the time of sale. So like you you can imagine like in the future like everyone you just hold your favorite crypto and stock portfolio and then when you go to Walmart and buy it it sells a fraction of your portfolio converts it to whatever the hell you know the shop wants to hold and now the the need for dollars just plummets. Um and I can see just financial efficiencies moving moving things like that along um to where like we don’t really even need this medium of exchange currency anymore. I think it’s going to be a weird a weird thing that we don’t even need, which is going to be cool.
38:53 Yeah. Or everything’s in flight. Everything is interestbearing. Yeah. It’ll be super interesting. All right. Thanks for the talk.
39:05 Yeah. Thank you, Nick. And again, I just disclaimer, I don’t know anything about crypto. Uh so but I have a question um about the tunnel example and in general when you’re pointing towards the you know the in you haven’t used the word moral but I think you are you’re kind of pointing towards the good or a greater good. So my and this is a thought which came to me like why can’t we use some existing um philosophical frameworks like the utilitarian principle and if I’m building a protocol and this protocol has a score from 0 to 100 or 1 to 10 of this is a utilitarian score of this and if it doesn’t satisfy then there’s a quick kill switch kill switch kind of thing for that protocol then you’re not using it anymore or you have a wheel of uh ignorance kind of protocol wherein if I end up on the receiving end of the bad things that protocol can do like a robot killing another human. So then do I want to develop such protocols? So is there any thought process on those lines? Like do I make sense?
40:14 Yeah. No, you do. Well, this is I don’t know if you followed Albert Wagner at all. Um he he’s another kind of modern philosopher. I guess he’s a VC too. Um but his whole thing is his his new pitch is that that we need to develop a universal moral core. So like everyone we all need to agree on universal morality so then we can pivot everyone into agreeing and and move along these lines um to be able to model it out and figure out which one’s the best. Um
40:42 but I but I even I I don’t know if you really have to go there because there are some technologies for example we all agreed that nuclear weapons are bad and the mutually assured destruction is not something which we want and we kind of like step back from it right so we we realize that for this for the greater good of the world this doesn’t help right so like if I am developing a technology a protocol and I’m able to like come up with existing frame frameworks, philosophies that on a score of 10 like yeah this utilitarian principle for this technology or this protocol is zero out of 10. Do I really want to contribute my energy towards it?
41:24 Yeah, it’s um it would it would be an interesting topic I think for sure. [laughter] Yeah. Like like I always it’s it’s super hard though because it’s you know that that’s like back to the markets. It’s like I I always, you know, I I agree with myself about this. You know, how much do we need to allow, you know, markets to just sort of run on their own and have self-interest take over versus align them towards some societal goals and things like that. And like like it’s you know it’s really a fundamental debate of like how selfish are people versus unselfish and like would you work on something if it slightly helps society more than you if you did the other thing. Um and I think it like depends on like what we eat that day. And so it’s um yeah so so it’s really I I don’t think there’s a solid rule that you could put in place or even govern but no thanks for the thought if you have any information on it or
42:24 No it’s just a thought which came to me while you were presenting so I’ll look into it.
42:29 Yeah. Awesome. Well Nicholas I that was super good. We’re almost back on schedule here so I’ll get the um the other Nicholas to to get going. Um.
Amber Case presents the Calm Technology Institute's 81-point certification framework, arguing that human attention operates like a law of nature—distinguishing prefrontal-cortex-demanding 'center' attention from pass-through 'peripheral' attention—and that products (from car buttons to AI interfaces) should be designed and governed accordingly. She traces the framework's lineage to Mark Weiser's 1995 calm technology principles and discusses the legitimacy problem of building certification authority without statutory power, comparing CTI to Underwriter Laboratories and the Good Housekeeping Seal. The session closes with audience discussion, including Venkatesh Rao connecting the talk to Kairos/Chronos time and AI's 'staircase' temporality.
Daniel Kronovet presents 'Chores as Complex Coordination,' introducing 'regenerative labor' as a concept distinct from maintenance or care work, and detailing Chore Wheel, a Slack-based protocol suite (chores, hearts, things) built on Elinor Ostrom's commons-governance principles plus four digital-era additions: no privileged roles, simple inputs, humans-for-sensing/machines-for-bookkeeping, and continuous asynchronous participation. Drawing on his Los Angeles co-living house Sage House as a real-world case study, he argues that separating task definition from task performance (akin to double-entry bookkeeping) allows a fixed, continuously-replenished point economy to turn dish-washing and trash duty into a system of social computation that generates social capital alongside physical upkeep.
Yuhan Liu (Princeton PhD student, presenting work with Varun Nagaraj Rao, Sohyeon Hwang, Janet Vertesi, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández) presents OpenCourier, a protocol-based alternative to centralized delivery platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats, built after mapping 495 'indie' delivery platforms that share homogenous but siloed software. The architecture uses registries, app-instance layers, and instance-requester communication (inspired by ActivityPub/Fediverse) to let independently-run courier instances interoperate, giving workers like a hypothetical 'Bob' the ability to move across platforms with portable reputation data while enforcing transparency requirements such as mandatory deactivation reasons.