I'm not, I was not I've never, you know, not from 02/1011, or anything like that when it was true truly early. So I started, I I maybe I back up. I was doing my PhD at University of Toronto studying cryptography. I was in, doing my PhD in information science there. So I was studying cryptography, and I I had started hearing about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And, of course, I thought to myself, well, crypto is right in the name. Surely, this has something to do with with with cryptography and and especially its social implications. And so that's when I started getting interested in about 2012, and it was very niche at the time. I wondered how I could learn more about it, so I I I did the kind of ethnographic approach and started, invest investigating crypto, and that meant setting up a miner. Back then, you could use a graphics card. So I would use, I used the University of Toronto's free electricity. Got big graphics cards, started doing a little mining, not to really make money, just to figure out what it was all about. And from there, then I started I thought I saw people doing kind of what looked to me like day trading type, you know, in the traditional finance world. And then I thought, oh, that's interesting. Maybe I'll give that a shot. So I went on to, you know, at the time, it was Mt. Gox was the big exchange.

Yeah. I'm still part of the the, bankruptcy settlement from from, Mt. Gox. So that's really kinda that's an interesting thing on on its own. And and then I just, you know, I just continued following it as as crypto evolved. It was originally, I thought, oh, this is just gonna be Bitcoin. And then, of course, you know, Ethereum comes around, and and then I was part of the DAO in 2016, and I really wanted that to work. And, of course, I did not, all the way up to following up all all the way up to today where I'm still actively, researching and investigating every new and crazy wild thing that comes out. And and these days, I'm I'm I've continued back to, studying DAOs. So along the way, I published all sorts of research, everything from, you know, more technical kinds of work. I work with the IEEE, which is the world's largest engineering organization. I've helped set security standards with the ISO, on and on and on and on. So a very broad, interest in the in the field. And, yeah. So that's kind of my my personal biography or whatever, and I'm happy to dig into any any of those parts. That's no. That's interesting that you basically took part in a lot of these, like, very big seminal events,

Absolutely. I think that's I always remind fellow academics or especially emerging scholars to, to appreciate the value of getting your hands a little dirty, to figure out what it really means to go and to set up a MetaMask a a a wallet and, you know, start signing some, transactions. As simple as that, that process is revealing. If you've never, you know, used these technologies, it's it's it's it's extremely interesting. These days, I was I've been busy working with Gitcoin to understand quadratic funding. And, of course, I understand quadratic funding from a, an analytical perspective. You know? I I can read the white papers, and and I'm very familiar with the technology and the science behind it and all that sort of thing. But it's a different thing to actually sort of be in the to have some skin in the game is is is actually how I often think about it, which actually introduces me into we can talk about this later or now, some of the ethical questions that come up as a researcher or researcher and developer in this space because, you know, I truly believe one of the best ways to learn about these these technologies is to have some skin in the game. And in many cases, actually, the only way, depending on your where your research question is, the only way to understand these is to have some skin in the game. It's a bit of a pay to play scenario, and you can imagine all sorts of research that uses especially quantitative methods and things like that. You might need to buy tokens to be able to, manipulate them or to study them and so on and so forth, especially if you're a computer scientist and want on these way these sorts of things. And then, that puts you in a conflict of interest. And so this is something that's kind of haunted me from the get go in particular because I I really see a a tremendous value in in in engaging with these with these things. And so that, you know, eventually brought me around to thinking more seriously about the ethics, about research ethics, and I wrote an article on that. And and I offer some, kind of guiding principles as to way to ways to mitigate that. But, nonetheless, this is a an endemic problem, researchers, in particular university researchers who have institutional requirements to for things like, disclosure of bias and, you know financial, involvement and all these kinds of things. Very it is a very poor situation. Most scholars have not just skin in the game, but actually, a financial interest in the things that they're studying, which puts them in, I think, in a very precarious position and also, I think, raises, the specter of really meaningfully start to question some of the research from, otherwise really great academics. I think we need to kinda put it into its proper economic context, and and maybe that means questioning some of the conclusions that are derived as well. So I think it's a real serious issue and it's one I've and I it's one I came a little to naturally just simply because I thought it was important to get involved.

earlier affect. Right? Mhmm. I think this is really important to really feel what it means to to be engaged in it. So when I was doing some day trading, with, with Mt. Gox back in the day, I remember very distinctly. My my my wife actually hated it because I became a kind of a crazy monster. You know, the price of Bitcoin went from $20 when I first bought it to 300, and I, like, you know, I lost my mind. Right? I was like, oh my god. That's so much. Right? For 20 to $300. That was amazing. So then I spent some of it. And then I went to a thousand. And I was like, oh my god. This is great. And so and I would be, you know, checking my phone every minute, all these kinds of things. Right? And then, I mean, this is sort of very ancient history what is what's kinda makes it almost comical today. But the affect of that, I think, was a really important just just to feel what that means. Right? And especially when we start to talk about more heady things like how we wanna design a world that's, equal and fair and all these kind of progressive types of, activities, I think that's something that can't be separated from our analysis. And I think it's really, really important to kind of to to recognize that. And so the first way to do that is exactly, as you say, is to is to go about trying your hand at it and see what it feels like. And it's a it's an illuminating experience.

It's a little a little complicated to say what my PhD was on. You're you're more than welcome to read it, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. It has a it's sort of a it's a very flawed item today, but it it has it has its moments. It, I don't know how I would describe it. I mean, in some respect, it's kind of like if you could imagine, it's about the philosophy of cryptography. This I don't wanna go too much into the guy tribe on no. Not that not not not not the ideology, but truly the philosophy. Like, what is cryptography kind of Okay. Types of questions. And, this is this is this is something I could talk about for a long, long while, but it it it's it's, it it provides a way to start to think about the social implications, but it doesn't presuppose the sort of the my framework, the way of thinking about it, which has everything to do with, notation and notational technology. Some of this is written up in there's I have an article in meta philosophy that that talks about notational technologies, and that gives some sense of and and I there, I apply it to blockchain. And so it's about a kind of understanding how the sort of fundamental pieces of the technology work and not presupposing, for instance, mathematics. I have lots to say about mathematics that probably, we don't have time to talk about. But, suffice to say, I do not think that you can reduce cryptography or for that matter computation to mathematics. And, therefore, we need to look for other kind of, I don't know, ontological roots or something like that for for when we start to describe these things. It's not to say that math, of course, isn't a very important part of it, but it's, it's there's a there's a different approach that allows us to start to talk about things like affect or social structure or various kinds of dynamics that humans,

So, so cypherpunk is a very interesting ideology and a very interesting piece of history. And so to respond to that, first of all, there's a great quote by Julian Assange, our our our our favorite, you know, checkered individual there. He says the universe believes in cryptography. And what he's getting at is is something right that it doesn't you know, this is and this is why Cypherpunks goes get so excited about cryptography. Right? Because they say they wanna give the power to the weak or whatever. That it doesn't matter if you, you know, password is a password. Is this you can try to crack it for as long as you want. I mean, if there's the physics of it as it were, or at least in their imagination, it's it really comes down to, like, physics or math or some sort of real truth that, gives you tremendous power if you if you wield it. But, the cypherpunk ethos is one where the history goes back to, I actually so I've studied very carefully Internet history, and what's interesting is that well before cypherpunks were talking about cryptography, cryptography was actually already part of the Internet from its more almost its inception, almost. If, if you wanna know more about this, I have an article on, what's called what we call edge cryptography that traces the history of of the ARPANET and its transition into the Internet and and then and and increasing securitization that we've seen along this longer, timeline. And so if you go back to the seventies, there was this in the early ARPANET, there was this technology called the private line interface, a PL it's called PLI. And this PLI was the very first cryptographic, technology that was on the ARPANET, which then became the Internet. And they studied how this worked, and and, you know, it's very fascinating history and everything of this. But there's interesting there's some moves that kinda got made and that we, we've often forget about in part because most of the theorization of the Internet that we have now adopted as part of our history. So when we think about what is the Internet, we we talk about things like cypherpunk ideology and these kinds of, you know, things. That emerged our history, the histor this historiography emerged from the two roughly from the February when there was a bunch of important theorization that was going on. People like Manuel Castells and, you know, on and on, and all these sort of social theorists. They were writing at a time that actually they took to be a normal state for the Internet, but I actually think it's was an aberrant state. So the history goes something like this. We have the ARPANET, which was a Department of Defense, you know, like, it well, it was relate so there's there's the DARPA and DOD in The United States. They were sort of the shepherds of the ARPANET and then into the Internet, and there is actually a number of competing networks that were that were sort of confidential and completely secure, networks that later kind of spun off. But then in by about 1993, this is when we start to have that conversation around transitioning from ARPANET to the Internet, and there's we we see nascent commercialization. But what's really interesting about the commercialization in 1993 is that there was no the security part kind of got forgotten. It never kind of came along with the Internet. So we have this imagination that the Internet was made to be open. So this is the February, late nineteen nineties, February, the big tech bubble. The the these this moment where we see this technology seems to be this open Internet that's emancipatory, and it's gonna liberate people. And then now, of course, we're talking financial inclusion and on and on and on. And that's where all that theorization happened. And so we look at that, and we say, oh, it was naturally open or whatever. But then fast forward a little bit to 2013, you've got Edward Snowden, and by then, you now realize that this open network is, in fact, actually vastly closed. But what happened, it wasn't closed from its inception. It was it was closed by, the need for commerce, The need for e commerce. You can't have e commerce without having security. Right? You need that's that's kinda comes with that. And there's all kinds of interesting questions around how security relates to property and these sorts of things that sort of political economy that we could we could get into, but it was an aberrant state. And so post 2013, we now realize we're like, oh, look. It's all secure or whatever. And so now we have to sort of rethink how we feel big picture about what the Internet is supposed to be, what the technology, allows, and and and, you know, and and how that kind of the path dependency that we have out of this this sort of checkered history. And then Bitcoin kind of that when it came around, it really it changed that question again because ecommerce, at least potentially now, can move out of hands of, you know, the Google, and the Apple, and all those guys, or whatever, to the big plat from the big platforms down into peer to peer. Right? So that's that kind of evolutionary move we have. And the Cypherpunks, they, you know, they fit uneasily in there. Right? Because, I mean, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is an essential component of that. Right? The EFF, if you look at their sort of ideology, is a really, problematic, complicated kind of ideology you need to look at. And they were key. Barlow himself was absolutely essential to this commercialization period in in 1993. In fact, he had, a company, on the side that was selling, commercial services as it were during that period. So he had some skin in the game, to make sure that the commercialization worked in the kind of way that he wanted the commercialization to happen. And, of course, now we have the conversation with venture capitalists. AZ sixteen, and those guys, they have this sort of playbook around what we call progressive decentralization. Progressive decentralization is meant to be it was their sort of practical answer to, like, how can we do crypto in a way that I mean, they write it up as a sense of, like, you need to be legally compliant, need to be, like, regulatory compliant or whatever. And that means you need to be, you know, you need to decentralize in the right way so you can pass the Howey Test and all these kinds of regulatory tests or whatever. And so that's the kind of process they they offer. It's this progressive decentralization idea. But what's really interesting about progressive decentralization is they pitch it, is it leaves the venture capitalist in the mix. Because they say you need to come as a tight team first, and you need to take in VC money. And with that, you then can, over time, you know, grow, you know, grow the product, grow the community, blah blah blah, and then progressively decentralized. Right? Leaving, of course, the VC money from the get go. That's only one option. There's lots of other ways of doing that. Right? That's just their suggestion as to how how to how to integrate. And I think it's telling one.

Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. Finn's work is fantastic in in his book Digital Cash really describes that history of Bitcoin and the strange ideologies and the strange, collective identities that are part of that. I mean, one thing I think that we also do need to be very careful, though, when we describing such things in 2022 is that, especially when we're we're we're being critical, I think things like culture, technology, and regulation, if a criticism has anything that touches that relies centrally on technology, culture, and and and the regulatory environment. I I think it has it needs to be very, closely hewed in on from a historical perspective. Because so for instance, people like, good close colleague of mine, David Columbia, famous sort of critic of crypto, who I think is very astute and and says many right things. Many of those are criticisms don't really much make sense anymore because they're based on maybe some technological inadequacies. You know? Oh, it can't scale, or, oh, it has this or that kind of issue. Right? But But that's the interesting thing about to go to AZ 16 and, you know, software is eating the world. And I think that's true. And, in fact, those criticisms are just software upgrades. And, today, we have largely roadmaps, if not actual engineering solutions for pretty much most of those criticisms. Right? So most of the early kind of criticisms that focus on technology, I don't think are, really strong meaningful criticisms to kind of put the progressive hat on. Right? And the same with with culture. So that's the point about, as great as I mean, Finn Finn's work that never tries to do anything other than just capture a moment, and so it's sort of in perfectly good shape there. But many people, again, maybe like, Columbia would you know, in his book about, talking about, like, sort of the right wing of of Bitcoin, those cultures and ideologies may still exist. The cypherpunk ideology may still be there, but it's not the whole picture anymore. And it maybe maybe it was in 2013 or something, but it's not 2022. And so there's a specificity, I think, that is really important there. And same with regulation. Right? The number of times Bitcoin has been banned or this or that or whatever around the world is is astounding of, you know, a decade of research really kind of drills that message home. So I think those are actually fairly, weak kind of criticisms. And and so a lot of my work has been an effort to try to stand up stronger criticisms and criticisms, ones that are a little bit more foundational, that are not so easy to, to dismiss that aren't gonna change in just a year or something. And this is things like equality and, freedom and these big these big picture questions. The things that they cypherpunks are sort of, in many cases, usually often driving towards, but don't necessarily or or maybe because of their ideology or a little clouded with respect to some of the roads that they may take to be able to get to the often same goals. I mean Right. I have a lot of negative things to say about cyberpunk ideology, but I I do think there's in some respects, there's some good stuff there as well. Yeah. I I feel like like,

Yeah. I mean, we almost certainly would have had a a pretty cool version of or maybe it's the purely corporate version of of the Internet today. So you're absolutely right.

you know, you mentioned you said, oh, you know, when you started thinking about crypto, you were too broke to be able to do anything about it. Well, me too. I was in my PhD at University of Toronto. And and and, yeah, I bought I bought Bitcoin at $20, and I just say, I sold it at a 100. So I'm still not rich. You know, I I have a bankruptcy, you you know, proceedings with with Mt. Gox from however many years ago, which I guess on for the few few thousand dollars or something out of that in in the end or whatever. But no. And and in fact, I think but the more more kind of seriously, this is a big issue around ethics. And actually on my website, I do keep a a more or less up to date disclosure statement. Right? That's that doesn't I, you know, I don't say here's here's what I here are my assets or something like that. Right? But I I talk I talk about, exactly my financial, relationship. And then and still today, actually, even though I've it was been a few years now. After that article, I started to say, okay. I'm just going in. Right? Like, I'm I'm no longer free of bias, and I'm very I'm and I'm usually very, quick to tell people. Like, I used to be one who had no financial interest. Now I in fact, I now do. And but I still have very limited in part because I don't have any money and part because, you I don't know. I I investing in crypto is, I find, one of the least interesting parts of it if I'm being perfectly honest. Like I said, I did that years ago, and it was it was interesting. And and I'm and I'm and I'm not locked. I'm not really, that's not the exciting part for me anymore. So, yeah, I think it's a real issue, but it's one that I try to be very careful about and and that I to to to this day, I still do not have a, anything significant, even an even a, a noteworthy financial investment. But that's not the case. I mean, just to give you a little background on so I studied, I did a a a relatively large survey of cryptocurrency and Blockchain, researchers largely out of that are focused that were in, university settings, but also looking at, like, think tanks and this kind of stuff. And the problem is really it it is endemic. The majority of researchers have not just investments for research, but personal investments. Like, they would label them as personal, and they're the majority are undisclosed. And then there's all kinds of ways in which the industry has continued to attempt to well, I think the only way we can put it is by reputation, particularly and this is the role of the university. It's something that I'm very, concerned about is the role of the university in all of this. Crypto and universities have, an interestingly tight relationship. Right? I mean, they they're it's sort of from its inception has it's had a an academic kind of, vibe to it. And but, unfortunately, many of the university researchers haven't necessarily done their due diligence with respect to things like, disclosure or other other risk mitigating, measures that they might take. And there's lots they can they can they can do to to mitigate some of those financial, biases that they might have.

Yeah. I mean, I guess the only I think that's true. The only proviso I would offer is that well, this let's be really clear when we're talking what kind of people we're talking about here. Cryptographers are mathematicians. Right. Like, a cryptographer is a they they're in a math department in university. Right? They have they probably aren't really good at software development. You know what I mean? They're they're they're mathematicians. That's what they do. So those people less so. Right? I mean, that's they don't interact a tremendous amount. Like like, true cryptographic primitives and stuff, like, these have been battle tested. That's the whole point of it. Right? They the the ideas, they're meant to be old. And so, actually, there is a kind of a slowness to, the core technology. Of course, layering everything on top of that, making the cryptography usable, doing software development for like, to make it something that we, you know, that we interact with daily or whatever. That's a different story. And and that's and and and many of the researchers, especially people who are studying, security, measurements studies, all variety of those kinds of topics, those are the folks who are participating. Again, I mean, I I actually think it's right. I mean, I I think it I think some oftentimes, you have to pay to play. Like, you can't I want people to be able to study, you know, security at scale on a blockchain network. I think that's important. And if they need to, manipulate the market as many have done,

If you look back in even just from research from, like, three, four, maybe five years ago, the kinds of engagements that researchers were doing, and this is in my in my my paper that's published on, cryptoeconomic systems is the journal. Some of many of the practices would be considered illegal today, that researchers were doing, and some of them and then the rest would have been certainly we consider them pretty much unethical. Like, there were researchers who because these were small nascent networks. You could pretty easily, if you had a a decent if you had the resources of university, you can you could easily manipulate the market. You could move it around. No problem. And they would do this. And and they were doing this for research purposes. They kinda wanted to see what they wanna see what the network's resiliency. They wanted, you know, these kinds of things. And, but today, now that these are sort of essential core systems and stuff, systems that people rely on, systems that people have big investments in, I mean, that would not be permitted. You can't you couldn't in the same way you can go to the New York Stock Exchange and start, you know, hacking it and and and start doing DDoS attacks and all the rest and just being like, oh, this is just research. Don't worry about it. Right? But that's what they were doing. I mean Right. From just a few years ago. And and so it's an interesting it's an interesting, research challenge.

Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. You know, I mean, so just to be clear, I ethics is I don't think ethics is you know, I don't have some, I don't take strong I'm actually a pragmatist when it comes to ethics. My sort of philosophical pragmatism. And so things like, you know, really strong accounts of ethics and stuff, I don't think make, a lot of a lot of sense. So I'm just kinda trying to offer some, like, I say, the guiding principles, and and and I've got there's eight of them. And and so just briefly, I can go through some of them. Things like some of them are obvious. Like, you're supposed to do develop a research life cycle. Like so one of the things that people often forget about is what happens with these tokens when you've done your research? In fact, as I know, a number I have a number of colleagues who their lab bought, you know, ETH in 2014, 2015, or whatever. Right? And so they got a fair chunk of ETH that they they maybe just kinda forgot about it because it was so cheap. Right? I mean, I we would have these conversations back then. I would be like, hey. Let's all just throw in a 100 like, this is what we did with the DAO. There was a number of us who were like, hey. Let's just, like, get a $100 or whatever and put it in the DAO and and see and see how it spins kinda thing. But if you do research properly, you should be thinking about, like, okay. So research is done now. Now what do we do with these with these assets? In the same way, you might question what you do with all kinds of research assets when when their sort of life is over. But here, we're now dealing with and this is kind of if there's a conclusion in that paper, we're dealing with values of technology. That and that values of technology, I in that paper, I actually draw parallels to other ethically problematic technologies like nanotech, technology is very small, biotech, technology of the living, cryptocurrencies and blockchains, technologies of value. And value is so deeply baked in that you can't separate yourself from it. Right? That's that whole that's that challenge. So we have to start to think about these these kinds of things. And others would be disclosure of of interest, like conflicts of interest, Thinking about, methods is really important. There like I mentioned before, there was a lot of this research that was happening earlier that would often not use, review boards. So at a university in North America, a little less so in Europe, I have no idea what happens in in Asia and Africa. Probably not a lot of institutional review. But, you're supposed to whenever you're engaging with what are called human subjects, you're supposed to go to an ethics review board, and you're supposed to say to them, this is what I wanna do. Do you see any ethical issues? And they're supposed to get back to you being well informed or whatever and say, you know, you have to adjust like this and make sure you're taking care of privacy and no harm and all these various kinds of principles, and there's a whole literature about how to do research ethics properly, these kinds of things. So oftentimes, people aren't, first of all, using their IRB, their institutional review boards, so they should. That's an obvious kind of one. But then things like your methods that you're deploying. Early on, there was, and there's still today, are a number of, for instance, de anonymizing methods that are being used. So people so researchers are developing ways of de anonymizing cryptocurrency transactions, like, you know, figure out who who is who on on the pseudonymous Bitcoin network, for instance. Right? Now, on the one hand, that's just interesting primary research. And that's security research. That's the that's research where arguably the researcher wants to say, oh, I found, I discovered a way of de anonymizing people on the Bitcoin network. This is important so that the people who develop the Bitcoin network can strengthen that and and and, you know, make make that not possible anymore, whatever. Right? Arguably, that's sort of the end game, and that's why this research is important. But that's way too simple. Many of these methods so they're very risky and dangerous because, for instance, people might be using I mean, we all know what people use Bitcoin for, you know, financing terrorism, you know, money laundering, drugs, you know, all this sort of terrible stuff or whatever. But if we also know that it gets used otherwise. And and then sometimes, you it's used by people who might be in situations political situations that are, dangerous. And you can imagine if, a bad government came along and went to a researcher and asked them, can you turn over your de anonymizing methods here, your your technologies that you're able to de anonymize people? We we need to hunt out some dissidents that we think are using Bitcoin or something like that. That's a real problem. And if you haven't made that, if you've just allowed you know, maybe you're working in some kind of country that's not so cool, and they ask you for your take your laptop or whatever, and they got those methods, that's a huge problem. And so one has to be really careful about those kinds of practices, because of the sort of knock on effects. Similarly, things like disclosing soft software vulnerabilities. Disclosure software vulnerabilities is a a really complicated topic in computer security more generally. But as people like Imogen Sur say, in crypto, it's like a choose your own adventure. It's like a it's like a a billion dollar choose your own adventure. And we see many examples of people working, like, challenging ones. Like, in the paper, I talk about, this hack that was on the Bitcoin Cash wallet. And, and it was an MIT researcher who discovered it, and And and he was stuck in this really interesting spot where he had, found, an exploit in the Bitcoin Cash wallet that he could have exploited and and used to, you know, you know, help her. Yeah. Millions or billions or whatever. Right? But, you know, he's a good guy. So he wanted he would wanna do the right thing. But he was really worried that if he just sort of came out and said, like, oh, hey. I found this thing. He wouldn't be able if some other, you know, bad guy had found it before him, he wouldn't be able to deny that that was him. Mhmm. So he was stuck. So he wanted to do proper he wanted to do the right thing. He wanted to disclose the software vulnerability that he found. But he he had and and he ended up having to do it anonymously. And only after the fact, after after everyone, like, after he revealed it and everyone looked at it and said, okay. Like, when they fixed it and all that kind of thing, then he sort of said, oh, that was me, by the way. And that's a real that's not a good situation for, the security vault security vulnerability disclosure is a is a problem across the board for, security researchers. And there's lots of ways that gets dealt with bounties and all sorts of things. But when you're dealing with the with the technology of value, the stakes are much higher. Right? Because, like or like another one, Philip Diane has asked on Twitter and has been engaged with, like, in in classroom settings, and, you know, he'll be he he was a PhD student now. I guess he's not anymore, I suppose. He he was asking, is it okay to have your students like, to teach your students how to hack into a smart contract, for instance, in a classroom setting. Right? And on the one hand, this is vitally important information. If you wanna secure these technologies, you need to be able to you need to teach students how to, you know, how to hack and defend these sorts of things. On the other hand, we're not this isn't toys. This is like the bank. It's kinda like saying, hey. We're going on a field trip. Put on your ski mask. You're gonna rob the bank. Right? I mean and so it's and I don't I'm not faulting people. I don't think it's, like, the wrong thing. It's just a it's just one of those really, really difficult problems. So, anyways, that's a kind of a sample of some of the guidelines.

Yeah. I mean and you could you could say that would be a very fine classroom activity in in some sense. It would be a very, very learn one where you learn a lot. Right.

But maybe ethically problematic.

is. Yeah.

Yeah. So the first thing to, pay attention to, I think, is is the the specificity around, here I'm talking about Web three. So, again, not to imagine Bitcoin from 2013, not ETH from 2015 in that culture or whatever. Part of it, I mean so there's a kind of a question of, like, what is the research subject here. Right? But so web three seems to be I mean, there's many things, and I'm working on we're we're putting out a a collected edition on that we're calling defining web three, with sort of 25 top researchers where we're all taking our stab at what it means to sort of define, you know, Web three. And so from from my own essay in the collection, I'm really interested in, like, a progressive Web three. And so what would it mean to take everything that we've got from up to this point, all the history, and and and all the various, overlapping strands, everything from, you know, like, we talked about cypherpunk to the newer stuff in web three and like, you know, regenerative economics and and, you know, various kinds of DeFi types of mechanisms and interesting things like I mentioned, Gitcoin before and quadratic funding and all these kind of cryptoeconomic mechanisms. What can we do with that as a and and is there an opportunity for a progressive Web three? So it's not to re it's not to warm over that two thousands era theorization around the Internet and being an open Internet. I think that's a bunch of bullshit. I don't think we ever as I mentioned, I don't think we ever had an open Internet. I don't think that's the natural state of the of of anything. I think we're actually dealing with with security technologies that, especially once we have crypto, they are, environments that are secure from the get go. Right? But so how do we then think about the political economy of these sorts of things? And in the paper, I talk about, some of the extent critiques, and then I offer three of my own that I think are stronger and more difficult critiques that have to do with the political with political economy. And so they're a little they're not gonna be easily fixed with a technology upgrade. And so there are things like financialization, assetization, quantification, you know, commodity fetishism, and the third one is digital inequality. So these these big meaty things, the big meaty problems that we still see in Web three. We see with the Bitcoiners. We see with every other kind of blockchain, culture that's out there. These are the big challenges that they're facing. Is that how do we go about, like, moving from where we are today to a, a progressive web three? That, this is like I'm still working on this part, but some of the ways about thinking about it are well, first, it is important, I think, to start to redevelop, social a sociological model that can make sense of the phenomenon. Then we need to appreciate the research that's been that's happened around governance and good governance, and many, researchers talk about, Elinor Ostrom's work around polycentric, governance and how and and as people who are in Web three know, if you want a DAO or, you know, any of these or, you know, d DeFi types of, projects, governance becomes super, super, super important. And governance is interesting. Right? Because there's a switch off of them talking about government to governance, and so there's a very much a downloading responsibility that happens there, and there's a regular term component of that and so on and so forth. So that's all fine and well, except one of the problems with looking at governance from a from the perspective of Ostrom is Ostrom is interested in material or the context where Ostrom was writing. We're, you know, looking at, like, overfishing and things like, you know, environmental concerns and and these kinds of things. But these are material constraints. And what's interesting is that in Web three, blockchain, or generally, or whatever, we don't have material constraints. We definitely can produce artificial constraints. Right? Token economics. We can create scarcity if we need to. But by, you know, kind of naturally, it is an economy of surplus. And that starts to change things. We start to think about, oh, this is this is an economy of surplus. And why is it an economy surplus? Because we have magic Internet money. Right? People sometimes say to me, they're like, like, Bitcoin seems like such a scam or whatever. And it's like, okay, fine. If it's a scam, I mean, like, if you're feeling left out, it's magic Internet money. Go make your own. Like, or people say it's a Ponzi scheme. They're like, oh, only the people who are early on, it's good for them and everyone's sense. And it's like, well, maybe, but you also just described, like Every market. Capitalism. Like Yeah. Yeah. Every market. Like, I didn't buy Tesla five years ago, and I kinda wish I did. You know what I mean? Like or or per very personally, what if I had to hung on to those Bitcoins from a decade? I would be, you know, much better off today. So that's the economy of surplus that I think emerges out of it. And so the model I'm working on is one that I draw from, the autonomous Marxists since, particularly mostly from Hart and Negri, but some others as well. And I'm looking at this, thing they called social coproduction. And it's a it's a model of, sociality that I think fits web three very well. And it moves us away from talking about resource management like Ostrom would, especially resource management under scarcity and constraint, and gets us talking about social dynamics, in particular social movements and collective identities. And when we start to talk about social movements and collective identities, I think we now we enter into a richer theoretical space where we are able to explain some of what we see in web three going on and start to make a little bit more sense. You know, things like, like, there's a bunch of questions, like, to what extent are collective identities constructed in and through protest rather than preceding it? Or how does, like, is the identity a group of a of a group that it projects publicly? Is that the same as the one that the members experience, you know, being inside of it? Right? Is there a disconnect there? Or do you come about your identity first? Are you a cypherpunk first and then find crypto? Or is it the other way around? And and these kinds of, like this helps these kinds of social dynamics, why people, join, how, you know, how how these projects can can can grow and change. Those, I think, are the ones that need to be captured when we start to think about a sociological model. And a progressive web three can take those, and there's a few, you know, I do believe that there's an opportunity to not eradicate inequality, but to to to engage in something that resembles a progressive web three and, yeah. And so I it also starts to get into questions around post work and anti work. You know, this is, something that gets talked about in web three, in leisure class. Right? The leisure class has been emerging for a hundred years. We're now starting to engage in, situations of economics and of material abundance, especially for people in Web three, in part because many of them are just sort of rich because they, you know, are really, you know, whatever, Bitcoiners or things things like this. But that they the political economy is different for them. Right? And and some of these people are genuinely trying to use maybe their early fortunes to set up an environment that is more equitable, for instance. So, yeah, it it's, there's a kind of a lot of threads a lot of threads there, but the the key is here to try to understand the political economy of of Web three and, come up with sociological model that can explain the emergence of, for instance, DAOs. And from there, look very deeply at what the real criticisms are, and then, of course, what some of the opportunities for a progressive Web three might be. Everything from hustle culture to, as I mentioned, surplus, anti work, post work. Of course, you know, a history of automation and AI, informs that. Right? We're we're sort of and and I think there's also just, like, to be honest, to have an honest sort of reflection on this, many people in web three, they their work starts to look a lot different. Like, it's an interesting question. If you're just if you're big into Dows, what your day to day is is not is is really a very new activity. And and Hart and Negri talk very one of the sort of essential key insights is that I think it's very important to talk about the biopolitical. So the ways that you can be oppressed by a state or or a corporation that don't that aren't part of what we would have traditionally labeled in the domain of work. So, there's, you know, the the biopolitical is is the every the whole experience of life, and that includes leisure. So I think gamification is really important here, and, it it it includes everything else in your life that isn't just that that interesting domain. And and I think from this is kind of, like, stunningly obvious for most people who are part of, like, the precariat or part of a hustle culture. Like, yeah, you've got two, three jobs, and and, yeah, you are always on. And and, I mean, look at a YouTube influencer. The burnout rate is so high because they're just, like, they're just always having to produce. And that's, like, an obvious kind of thing, but it doesn't like, it's not, like, work anymore. Like, it doesn't like, you're not out there digging a ditch or, like, working a JOB from nine to five. And, and so that's the biopolitical. It's the whole life, experience that needs to be understood. And Web three ties very much into that, right, because the blurring between work and not work and making money and not making money completely like, you could be playing a video game as it were in web three, and that's your like, you're earning money. And, yeah, that's not new totally because people were farming gold in World of Warcraft in 2002 or whatever it was. And so but there is a, this is a continuation of many of those same kinds of, political economic impacts.

the only the only thing I think that's interesting about many of these political economic criticisms that I had to really kinda deal with when I was thinking through these problems is to be true to, the sort of source material not the source material, but the source theorization. So commodity fetishism, this is, like, we have to talk about Marx. Right? And that's all fine and well, and I think we should we should study Marx, or we should study these other, you know, you know, Hayek and Smith and all these, like that's that's great. We should we should we should engage in that literature, and that's that's that's that's our guiding light. But we also need to appreciate that when Marx was writing, you know, I mean, it was like horses walking down the road and stuff. Right? Like, it's a kind of a far stretch to imagine that. So the labor theory of value out of Marx, for instance, that we've got, you know, you've got surplus value, and it's it's it's it's encased in in in in labor practices and this kind of stuff. I think that starts to break down actually when you get to web three. Right? And so commodity fetishism and and and and, you know, it it's I think it's a it's a serious and real critique. I think it's, one that's not easily defeated. And, you know, just to kinda give my angle on what commodity fetishism looks like, I'd say, basically, it's this idea that, people believe economic abstraction, that's to say value. It's found in some they think it's found in some object, but it's, and so they think come to think that that object has some intrinsic value. And I think that's a right that criticism is right, but we also need to appreciate that when labor, for instance, has so dramatically changed, we're not talking about the an industrial setting anymore. You know, I think that's where we can start to pry that criticism open. And when we start to look at newer, post Marxist thought, for instance, like, you know, as I said, I think autonomous Marxists have a lot to contribute here. I think then we can start to, you know, we we can start to question that a little bit. Right? It's not, it's not so cut and dry.

Yeah. In in part, I think that underexplored nature is because of the to go back to, you know, your comment about cypherpunks. Ideologically, like, the political economy of of the cypherpunk is is, comes from very different origins. Right? I mean, people like I mean and this is where Columbia is right. I mean, looks at the right wing side of this. Right? The, you know, they're informed by Hayek and and the sort of the this notion of of extremely sort of pure powerful markets and things like this. And and and and and that's not to say that markets aren't that. They they are very powerful. They are information processing mechanisms and all this kind of stuff. It's just that you, it's hard to then put that into dialogue with some of the concerns of of Marx and and after.

I mean, part of this because I, you know, I know I know these people, whatever. Part of it also is one of the things I've learned studying crypto for as long as I have is, you know, most crypto research doesn't age well. And Parker's crypto has changed so dramatically. Like, I remember very distinctly the number of times I've been sort of stupefied that, like, I'm like, oh my god. Like, this thing is still going. Like, this Bitcoin thing is still like, it's changing. It's evolving. It's growing. And I have no way of predicting it. You know what I mean? Like, I'm following along with everyone else or whatever. But, a lot of the literature that get that gets written, if you go back and you look at it from just a a couple of years, it looks really dated. And and it looks dated not just because the world has changed, but rather it's because probably there were sort of foundational mistakes. Like, we thought the world was like x when it turned out to be like y. And so I'm always very cautious when it comes to things like criticisms because I think each you know, to go back to Columbia's work. Great great stuff. It explains its its moment, but it's very out of touch at this point. And it seems to me like it's out of touch for because it missed some of the sort of foundational critiques it should have made. As I mentioned, critiques of technology, those are those are solved with with a software upgrade, regulation, regulation changes constantly, and we we exist in the neoliberal global capitalist world where the regulatory mechanism is precisely the one that the state is going to use. So also that that those are not substantial critiques. Right? And then culture. Well, culture changes. Right? We have, I wrote when I wrote my book, cryptocurrencies and blockchains out with, with polity, at the time, this is when I was doing research about 2016 or so, I mean, 2015, 2016. I wanted to speak with people that were in crypto that weren't white men. And, you know, it was actually really hard. I actually had to find like, I did, like, seek out like, I wanted to speak to, like, women, for instance. I found this one woman, and she she it was very fascinating because she got interested in crypto or Bitcoin at the time, and, simply as a social, exercise. Like, basically, around the water cooler, she was working, you know, at her job. There were, like, some guys, and they were always talking about Bitcoin or whatever. She wanted to be part of the conversation, so she went and kinda started, you know, going down that road. And then, of course, got into it because she thought it was great and all this and and, you know, whatever. That's not the case anymore. Right? The latest Pew data from in The US anyways, 2020 late twenty twenty one, they did a very large survey of, we may call market penetration of crypto or something like this. And, white men are now actually the minority Right. In terms of, holding or or or accessing or using or whatever that you know, lots of, sort of, you know, exactly what using or being part of the, you know, crypto I mean, we have to kinda define that very carefully. But according to, you know, the they did a nice nice study of the Pew the Pew folks. And and, in actually, I think black and, I think maybe Asian, sort of in terms of, like, racial demographics are now the number one in The US. And if you look at the sort of household income Like, proportionally, I guess. Yep. Proportionally. Yep. And if you look at household income, who's who's accessing, who's using crypto, who's buying, who's investing, this kind of thing, Household income's dropped significantly. Right? So now we are actually facing I think we need to sort of be aware of the fact that as the technology democratizes, to put it that way, right, or whatever, more people using it, we need to think about, problems that we never would have thought about before, like, exploitation. These are poor people now. They're not the rich whales that we're you know, we don't not too concerned about or whatever. The these are potentially people who have taken out credit card debt to buy some Bitcoin, and we've seen this we saw this happen in the 2019, bust. There were a number of, 2018, 2019 bust and, number of people who really lost it all kinda type thing. Right? And, of course, now that we get increasingly, gamified experiences, gambling, and people with addictive, personalities and these sorts of things, I think we now we need to be very concerned that so it's not so on the one hand, we can and maybe we can keep two conversations going at same time. We can talk about financial inclusion, making sure, everybody has access to the financial resources that they need or whatever. Right? And I just did a study with, some credit unions actually with this, think tank called Filene. And I was in we're looking at credit unions, very conventional banking types of situations and their worries around crypto and how they wanna service their members and all these kinds of things. And, they, you know, that is, the reality is that today is not the same crypto that we had from before, and we now need to worry about, not just bringing in new people into crypto, because I do think that there are like I said, I think the progressive web three is possible. But we also need to worry about how are how this technology is democratizing, how people are using it, and things like exploitation and various kinds of these are powerful dangerous technologies. Right? We have behavioral technologies that are able to manipulate how people, think and and and engage with one another. And so, yeah, there's a balance there. We have to keep these two conversations going. Mhmm. Well, I will say is that,

You can always be cynical. I think and I think I think that's a real criticism. And and and especially in the DeFi VC investment space, the programmer type of Bitcoin stuff, I think that's definitely the reality. I think Web three at least attempts something different. Now, we also saw a progressive Web two movement and a progressive Web one movement. You know what I mean? Like, this is not the first time we've been down this this road. And I think web three is a little different in that regard. There are there in my experiences at the very least, there are people who are genuinely attempting something new, something progressive, and inclusive. And you'll if you spend any time in the web three world, join some DAOs or whatever,

Mhmm.

Yep. Yeah. I think that's right. And and I don't know what that's gonna grow into. Right? Like, I started with the DAO, and its conception of what a DAO was Very different. Is very different. Very different. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's so that's why, like, I think, like, sort of academically, I've been lately thinking a lot about social movement theory and collective identity rather than other, like, rather than, like, Ostrom's governance model or various kinds of, like, status or legal types of, models when we wanna think about these these things. But as a social movement, you know, in put it you can put DAOs and web three in conversation with everything from, you know, 99% in zoo Zuccotti Square type of thing to Arab Spring to the just the longer, broader history of of progressive social movements. And that for me gives us some, specificity to be able to talk about the opportunities for for for for being progressive that are a part of the bigger crypto blockchain world. But, again, I don't know what they're gonna kinda grow to. And in many in in many cases, Web three doesn't, you know, realize its own potential. There's lots of examples where we see people I mean, it can be being inside of a DAO can be also very it can be alienating. It can be very cliquey. Right? Getting, you know, how do you join these groups and and and all that kind of stuff. There's still all those sorts of things to be. I so I think there's a lot of unrealized potential is maybe one way to put it. And that's part of the reason why I'm in so interested in trying to draw a bit of a road map as well. And that's what this article is supposed to do is to be able to help people that are the leaders of these to think about different ways of of organizing them. So one of the, like, just a basic kind of thing that Hart and Egry talk about. They talk about this nest like, governance needs to invert, strategy and tactics. They say that, like, long term, like, strategy should be for the movement, for the masses, for the people, and that tactics should be relegated to the leadership. And that's an interesting and they do this, of course, to say they wanna destroy the sovereign. Right? And why you wanna destroy destroy the sovereign is so that you could not represent yourself, but rather, have a post representational, political, situation. And and that's, like, that's one of those things that's, like, a practical lesson I think that leaders of DAOs could start to think about. Like, this is how and this in so far as that is a, a true conclusion, that may help, this nascent effort, grow. And it's also a part of I mean, if we wanted to we're we're no longer in the world of political, there's not a political economy where you have to be somehow pure and perfect. We're talking about, like, we are talking about, like, cooperatives. We are talking about ways that people can, make money. We can you know, they're it's not it's not all just sort of kumbaya and and and wonderful

yeah. And, I mean, like, hustle culture is part of that, for instance. Right? Yeah. The optimization and and and and and there's tons of negativities that happen there. And there's, like, you know, hustle culture will take his pound of flesh from from burnout and alien different kinds of alienation and these sorts of things as well.

institution? Yeah. It's it's it's main Alumni Labs is just my effort to its its primary goal is one that's born out of this question around identity. So, you know, as sort of sure many people know, nobody on the Internet knows you're dog is the old joke. The identity layer of to go back to that kinda history of of of the Internet, when it that commercialization process I was talking about. Identity was never part of that. We sort of understand that. We know that today. And Blockchain has a potential identity answer. Right? Self sovereign identities and so on and so forth. And so it's a contribution. Alumni Labs is an effort to make a contribution to that story, to that side of things, this growing need for identity, and specifically an identity that's not controlled by, third party, you know, giant platforms, Google, and so on and so forth. And the number and I sort of I thought about this project this this identity question for a long time. And and as a the education chair at the IEEE, they have there's, like, 400,000 members. They're engineers, and they have, like, all sorts of educational activities. And, you know, basically, I just want their members to be able to get, like, credit for taking courses and this and that or whatever. And so they approached me and they said, I think blockchain probably has solution here. Like, tell me about, like, what what would it mean to do to do that, to get a blockchain solution for I triple E credentials for taking courses and these kinds of things. That led me from one one thing to another to eventually realizing that, this is a bigger problem, and that I think one of the most important strategic assets that Web three needs to sort of go after are university credentials, and particular in part because, as I mentioned before, there's this interesting relationship between academia and crypto, but also because the biggest university credentials, the is, you know, university diploma. Right? And it's a very important trust asset. It's an, you know, IRL trust asset.

Sure. I mean, reputational rep Yeah. Reputational currency as well. And and reputation and trust are interestingly intertwined. And there are all kinds of, challenges here. I mean, things like, you know, you can reputation and and and trust can also be very problematic and negative. Right? You know, elitism can can emerge out of these kinds of things and but putting all that aside or or may managing maybe keeping multiple conversations, you know, going on the same time, would be a better way to put it. The, yeah, getting the question becomes, how does one get a university diploma on a blockchain? It seems obvious. The technology is there. It's very simple. In fact, you can there's, like, tutorials. You can do like, if you wanna learn, like, learn, like, basics of solidity, you can, take a one hour course, and you can make your own university diploma. So the problem is not above the technology, and this is one of the classic crypto types of problems. People think, oh, it must just be the we just need some, like, perfect piece of technology. It's the social stuff around it, in particular, the broken business model. So without going too much depth here, there is for instance, there was this, MIT developed a university credential platform that was then I don't know if it was bought or given to or whatever. Some company, I think they're called Hyland or credential company. And now we have this, quote, unquote, open standard that's kind of, company is sort of is languishing under a under the, you know, domain of this company. And their business model strikes me as as being something along the lines of, well, you know, we'll go approach universities with our sales team, and we'll try to sell them, you know, per seat, you know, whatever. You know, $10 or a $100, however much it might be to issue a university diploma on a blockchain or something like this. Right? But that's, like, the the business model isn't is not a is not one that ever will work for, like, lots of obvious reasons. Universities have high integration costs. They they're just not too much doing this despite massive fraud. That's the other the other part of this, of course, is universities have massive fraud problems. They know that university diplomas are continuously using a fraudulent fraudulent settings and this kind of thing. So how do I do it? So and so for me, this is where I'm like, okay. If the answer if if the question becomes, how do we get a university diploma on a blockchain, the answer seems to me to be, like, with as much crypto as possible. And and but, like, in the right way or whatever. And so my effort there is I'm gonna be working on submitting the next round actually of, funding through through Gitcoin because Gitcoin is a is a a public goods funding mechanism. And I think that's right. I think a a university diploma is one that ought to be developed as a public good so that ideally, once we have, like, whatever, say, all or most of the university diplomas on a blockchain, they're public accessible, and you can I could and if I wanted to interact with you, I could actually verify you are who you are? So it's a proof of humanity, proof of personhood, but much deeper because it also has all kinds of relationships. It says it says a lot about who you are, in fact. And this is where reputation starts to get really important. Right? Like, you know, there's a sociological fact about hemiphelae. Right? People like people who are like themselves. And your social net like, the university, setting is for many people, not, of course, all people, but especially in the developed world. Many people, this is one of their, formative parts of their life. And, you know, that you went to an Ivy League university is a significant social fact. Right? Or whether you didn't or or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, that's that. So there's a lot of, like, trust and reputation that are built into this this asset. So I think it's one of the more important ones we need to think about. There are other, like, government identities we need to start to think about or various kinds of, yeah. There's just, like, the whole self sovereign identity movement, I think, is is an important one. But I think this is this is one of the more important parts that we need to think about.

Sure. I'm on Twitter, Quinn DuPont. Generally speaking, you can just Google Quinn DuPont, and you'll find me. My book, cryptocurrencies and block Are you the only one with that name? Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I think so. My book, it's called cryptocurrencies and blockchain. It's out with polity press. It's the I still think the only soup to nuts, critical account. I mean, it's it's not critical in the sense of negative. It's critical in the sense of it's meaningfully engages with the subject matter in a way that doesn't just cheerlead it, as most bit, you know, books on crypto do. They do they're effectively just, you know if you wanna hear someone confirm all of your own, positive feelings about, crypto, then there's many other books I would recommend. But if you wanna actually understand what's going on, then, I'd recommend my own. And, and and yeah. And as as I said, I'm working on next one coming up for me is a little, collection that'll be available, open access, online called, Defining Web three. And we were successfully funded by, little bit of money from Gitcoin, and now we're gonna be, it's a collect edition 25 sort of the top researchers in the field talking about all variety of of of questions and issues around Web three. And my own contribution there will be my essay on progressive web three. So that's something people can check out as well.

the series as well, but part one, I'll definitely have that. Cool. Thank you.