hi this is mike maloney and i have a very special guest dan larimer dan's mission is to secure life liberty property and justice for all how are you doing dan doing great it's great to be on good so this talk we're going to cover sort of the future of freedom uh my audience some of them are very savvy but some of my audience uh it doesn't really follow cryptocurrencies too much but they've all heard of bitcoin uh and you were one of the original bitcoin guys there's actually


uh uh postings where you are chatting with satoshi nakamoto the creator of bitcoin and i believe you uh actually pointed out some potential flaws in his system didn't you yes we i was concerned about the scalability of bitcoin and satoshi responded to me saying that uh if i don't understand he doesn't have time to explain it to me so i uh i went on and um created three of the highest performance blockchain uh out there yeah yeah um so this conversation we're gonna cover freedom liberty voting legacy government


systems uh blockchain's role in redefining individual freedom and uh because people don't realize that blockchains aren't just about cryptocurrencies everybody thinks blockchain means bitcoin and it doesn't uh block chains uh are basically the future dan rubok my producer director uh calls them the rails of the internet the future rails of the internet the internet will run on uh blockchain technology or something very similar distributed ledger technology and it will secure the internet commerce


legal government pretty much everything uh what's your opinion on that well blockchains give us a whole new way to add accountability to our database systems i've already said that they're the future of database um and they do that by putting control in the user so you actually have private keys for everything that you're assigning and those private keys are stored in your cell phone uh or i guess usb devices or various wallets and what that means is that there's not a central database that can forge


something you said uh one of the examples i always give is when someone posts something on twitter did they really post it or was it somebody that hacked their password or did a twitter admin take over the account and post it as them how do we actually know that these things are being said by various people now it might not matter for most people but if you're donald trump or elon musk or any of these other folks then it becomes a very big problem even for social media to how do we know that things are


actually real and that they can't be tampered with after the fact and you know ironically enough just past month twitter had a whole bunch of accounts hacked by insiders and they used it to do a bitcoin scam so it's a very real problem and i think that blockchain is the solution to just making all of our systems more secure it also takes out the middlemen out of the process right uh yes it can blockchains can be used both for private completely centralized systems and in decentralized systems the thing


that makes them powerful in the decentralized sense is that it's actually a public record everyone has a copy of the database everyone can derive the state which means that if you don't like the direction it's going uh the community always has the option of forking and launching a another chain that follows the original rules or perhaps new rules and that freedom to fork is what actually provides the accountability the transparency is what provides the decentralization um and we saw that recently happen with


the steam blockchain it was taken over attempted to move to the tron chain the community rejected it forked the whole thing and and they continue with their blogging so transparency and um in public key infrastructure is what gives blockchains the power to decentralize and to make sure that the people have options whereas if uh twitter or facebook go rogue and they start going in a particular direction no one can just fork them and create a new site with all the same user accounts all the same content


but controlled by new parties that's just not possible with with the centralized systems okay for our viewers a lot of them may not know what a fork is but if you've got something like uh bitcoin for instance the original uh and uh there's a bunch of uh participants that the the miners the people that run the programs if they don't like a set of rules they or a change that people are voting for they can just make a copy and go off on in their direction with their set of rules am i correct


yes yeah absolutely so um uh you know i just want to give people a little bit more of your background i see my self as a uh i don't like the word freedom fighter i want to be a freedom convincer a uh free let me see i had a great term for it a little while ago and now i don't waiter a freedom persuader exactly i want to be a freedom persuader i view you as a freedom engineer you engineer systems that create freedom for all of the participants and so uh that's something that i find admirable


but i see us like playing on the same team here we're both trying for the same things so um you started the first decentralized blockchain financial product bitshares uh you created the first widely used blockchain product that felt like an ordinary website steemit uh so people when when you're interacting with the website you can't tell that this is on a distributed ledger you created delegated proof of stake which we're going to cover more of in a second which is a consensus mechanism


that's very fast and very efficient i want to get into that efficiency and then you put everything you you learned everything that you knew into eos uh and uh recently you launched something called voice you your company launched voice which is a decentralized blockchain driven media platform so um getting into uh delegated proof of stake uh just tell you i first want to cover for for the audience people don't realize how inefficient bitcoin is and bitcoin was the originator of blockchain


and so it's great but there's been tremendous strides improvements in the meantime and right now uh bitcoin's energy consumption to create this consensus network its energy consumption uh is uh if you if it was a country it would be number 43 in the world uh just consuming a little bit more than switzerland and kuwait i mean it's it's extremely inefficient the uh energy consumption for a single transaction the footprint is 573 kilowatt hours and i'll tell you i've been driving teslas since 2010


and uh i can drive a long way on that much energy this is a lot of energy yes it is uh tell us about uh the delegated proof of stake its efficiency its speed and its uh safety sure well the first thing that uh you know i've been way way back to another concept that i introduced to the space called a decentralized autonomous company corporation organization right they become the range of um the entire space is uh i viewed bitcoin as basically shares in a in a company and i view the mining awards the the bitcoins they


issue to the people that are uh making blocks yeah the incentive that they that bitcoin uses to get people to run these distributed ledgers all over the planet and make it right supposedly this safe fair system right so bitcoin can be viewed as a company that issues shares bitcoin uh to people who's who burn electricity the more electricity you're willing to burn the more shares it's issuing uh and then uh it's it's uh governing the the company according to how much electricity you're burning on any


given day and that's um and that's all uh i guess the miners these are the people that are using electricity to create the bitcoin blocks they collaborate into mining pools now mining pools kind of like you know you've got your computer running mining and then you join a pool so you can actually get more consistent income uh and so that's kind of like a voting proxy in a company and and all the shareholders the people that own the computers doing the mining go to those proxies and then you've got


like three proxies that have a 51 control of bitcoin uh but with delegated proof of sake i said well why don't we just take all the lessons we learned about how corporate governance can operate where you've got shareholders shareholders can delegate their votes to proxies and then they can elect a board of directors and implement that on a on a blockchain where the top people that are elected take turns producing a block uh it's got all the exact same mechanics of you know thousands tens of thousands


hundreds of thousands of individual people delegating their vote which is the two people either voting for the block producers directly or indirectly uh and now you've got a group of say 21 people each of which has an equal stake in producing a block so you've got more decentralization uh and because you know who these um people are the algorithm can actually be much faster bitcoin produces one block every 10 minutes ethereum does it every 15 or so seconds eos does it every half second so there's


massive difference in the latency and that's absolutely necessary if you're trying to build applications that feel just as competitive as the centralized alternatives whether it's an exchange or a social media platform yeah i've uh had bitcoin transactions before that took uh hours actually to uh settle because you're supposed to wait for it to get buried behind so many blocks to make sure that a fork hasn't happened or whatever uh to make sure it's permanent uh and uh


there are new systems out there uh eos among them that get this permanency immediately you're currently isn't eos like processing a majority of the well they're not all transactions because blockchain can record pretty much anything that can be written in computer code including video and voice information am i correct um it can record any data the magic of blockchain is that it records the intense intent of people um and then you can derive whatever state you want from it so for example on social media i can say


here's my post if it's a tweet you can put that on the blockchain but if it's a video file you can put um a hash which is a a like a fingerprint of the file so everyone says that this is they knows this is the file you wanted and if they can have a copy of it they can verify that they're the same but it allows you to have authenticity and verification of data so right now eos is actually making more recordings the the blocks then uh the all of the other cryptocurrencies combined


am i correct i have to check blocktivity.info which tracks these things in real time but yes it has i'm on there right now yeah and uh when i click on uh all of the they've got uh you can compare all of the major uh cryptocurrencies and i've got them all clicked and it shows eos as doing 78.7 percent of all the processing out there and uh let me see what um bitcoin actually it doesn't even show up i'm sorry so so for perspective it's uh 68 million uh actions a day on eos and 757


000 actions a day so it's about uh 70 times the daily transactions of bitcoin and bitcoin has no room to grow eos is used in a fraction of its capacity yeah and bitcoin is 80 roughly 80 of the market capitalization of all of these uh cryptos 75 something like that uh eos is less than two uh this uh you don't know this but eos is actually my uh largest investment in cryptocurrencies oh wow no pressure on my part [Laughter] you know it's interesting um the different cryptocurrencies you've got the


technology uh but you also have i guess um brand and bitcoin's got this brand that is almost uh you know almost more important from a money perspective than the technology the technology you can build um all kinds of things on it uh and um so if you if you want to build a monetary system you know technology is key but you know there's old technologies like gold and silver that also are great for money but you know no one's going to say that one thing replaces another they're all


fitting different niches so if you want programmable money eos is the place you can go because bitcoin is not programmable anywhere near uh as much as programmable money to the audience because uh they don't understand that you can do things like create your own escrow uh there's there's a whole bunch of things that you can do uh with some the reason uh eos is my uh largest investment in kryptos uh is because it can do almost everything that any of the other cryptos can do but many of those cryptos are limited to


a specific function or a set of specific functions uh so i just think that there's a a huge future in only a few cryptos and i think there you know because there's thousands upon thousands of them you can't keep up with it anymore exactly it's a real problem yeah uh the most of them are going the vast majority are probably going to go to zero just because there are so many and some of them are deficient in design and don't have the ability uh to constantly evolve either um yes so there's a number of


different factors you've got to look at when you're evaluating cryptocurrencies the community the technology the governance the adaptability uh so eos is designed to be a governed blockchain because we've got delegated proof of stake it's possible to reach consensus and upgrade it whereas bitcoin is basically stagnant it's not going anywhere now those are two completely different value propositions some things like money you don't want people changing that willy-nilly because then you end up with things like


the federal reserve but other things uh where you need to adapt with the changing times uh and respond quickly uh particularly with things that are programmable because you know there's always going to be bugs and when there's bugs what do you do how do you recover uh and so they're like they're both filling different niches and so eos strength is the ability to combine governance combine high performance uh and the ability to have anyone who wants to deploy code onto the blockchain to implement uh


exchanges like you said escrows auctions um you know games or insurance plans or social media um there's all kinds of things that people can do and it's programming your money uh and that is an incredibly powerful uh let me just uh um emphasize this for the audience you could buy a house with a cryptocurrency that is programmable and uh you could select a third party that has to verify or a number of parties that have to verify that that a certain number of criteria have been meant before so you would be able to put up


the currency but the party that you're buying from doesn't get that currency until a whole bunch of criteria are met and when third parties verify that that criteria has been met then the transaction happens but because it's in escrow you don't have it anymore so the selling party can trust that you're you've got skin in the game you're going to complete this transaction so uh that's just an explanation of escrow and dan just went through a whole list of of other features that you can program into


a cryptocurrency that you can't do with euros or or dollars or yen or yuan or accountants or whatever correct yeah there's so there's several things here uh when it comes to to programming things into cryptocurrency it's really come also comes into like the transparency aspect of it but uh before i get there i want to highlight that it's possible to move bitcoin uh onto the eos network in fact you could create an entire bitcoin client inside the smart contract uh just like we can run all of uh ethereum


which is another uh um blockchain we can run their smart contracts emulated within eos faster than they can be run on ethereum itself right so uh we can both emulate these chains and move their currencies on there what that means is that in the future bitcoin is going to live on the eos network and they're going to be uh transacting on exchanges and smart contracts and doing all these things trading against eos natively and that is that's the power of having a programmable high performance chain


is that you can kind of become the hub of all activity across all the other chains because you got fast settlement and decentralization uh in one spot so i i really see that that is a a future for for eos okay um you know very recently there's been more and more stories about central banks uh getting involved in uh well they call it digital currency because they don't want to call it cryptocurrency uh but basically it would be blockchain driven uh central bank currencies and you know i've got a story in front of me here


fed's direct money transfers are coming says brainerd uh brainerd is a fed governor um fed collaborating with mit on hypothetical digital currency and then just uh recently there was a video released by the imf promoting digital uh promoting cryptocurrency and how and and all of the benefits so we're getting ready for this do you see this how do you see this is this a good thing or is this a bad thing i think it's a bad thing and i i think that blockchain technology is actually neutral to to goodness or badness


you can use it to implement a ponzi scheme and you can use it to implement a 100 reserve bank with integrity uh and when the fed moves their ledger onto a blockchain they still have the power to control uh and enforce negative interest rates or whatever other crazy inflationary scheme they can freeze your accounts right bitcoin was created so that people who the banking system wants to cancel have a way of transacting outside the system and can do so internationally but uh when the central banks come and they


propose a system they're not proposing a system that they can't control um and that is a night and day difference they're also not proposing a system that's free from their ability to print endless amounts of money or to completely change all the rules now my mission is to create voluntary solutions free market solutions for securing life librarian property and that actually means that people have to be independent we need to remove our dependence on the system so when you're dependent upon the


federal reserve or a central bank and they control all the money you don't have freedom it's impossible to have freedom while you're dependent upon one entity and that's the beauty of things like gold and silver is that when you have them in your physical possession it's no one else's liability and it's not dependent upon any technology it can go thousands of years and it'll still be there but even even so it's still just a consensus um or a consensus among people that this


thing is scarce and we're going to use it as a means of exchange in account in some ways bitcoin and eos are um have more integrity than gold and silver because it's easier to authenticate the integrity of bitcoin than it is of gold you know we recently found all these tungsten or fake gold bars that have been traded like billions and billions of of fake gold and it's and all the hassles of dealing with the physical metals mean that people end up having to trust banks which then create fractional


reserve systems and and basically turn gold into a promise for gold which is not the same thing uh and and then fraud occurs and and basically you have the whole evolution of how we got from gold coin circulating to where we are today um and bitcoin and cryptocurrency say well hey the rules are there everyone can see it uh it can't be counterfeited unfortunately the achilles heel of all these decentralized blockchain technologies is the internet itself it is the dependence upon the infrastructure


that increasingly governments are taking over um and if you can't uh you know if there's an emp bam your money is gone if uh there's hyperinflation and the uh you know people starting to steal copper from all the wires to figure out how to survive internet goes down you're not being able to transact with your with your bitcoin or eos so it's it's this balance between currencies that work well when everything's um operating and we've got this technol technological world with


functioning in internet and relative stability and then there's things that work well you know when there's there's chaos and and you need the mixture of the both so i see bitcoin and eos as the currencies of the future and gold and silver as as the money uh that is the fallback when all else fails that's the reason i've bet on both uh i was the first dealer to start accepting crypto the first precious metals dealer to start accepting cryptocurrencies and i you know i should give people


uh just a little recap on my background with cryptocurrencies because i don't talk about them that often uh you know my background is precious metals monetary history economics and uh and so i focus on those things but i was introduced to crypto to bitcoin by trace mayor you probably know trace right and he actually came to my house i think in 2010 i think bitcoin was below a dollar then yeah and tried to get me into it and then it came back in 2011 and tried to get me into it it was still below 10


bucks and this was back when you could plug a computer into the wall and start mining just any computer and you would actually ever once in a while win some bitcoins and then he came to my office when it was uh still below 100 bucks an ounce in 2012 or whatever uh and he kept on trying to get me into this and i finally in 2014 he got me to uh go to a bitcoin con crypto conference called bitcoin on the beltway in washington dc where i bought my first bitcoins and and it's in uh my i made a documentary on it uh episode


8 of hidden secrets of money and uh i went back and announced to my insiders that i was going to put 10 my insiders are people that have purchased a certain amount of precious metals from goldsilver.com and i announced that i was going to put up to 10 percent of my portfolio in it uh then in 2017 when bitcoin was peaking uh i think the week before it peaked i took some profits and i bought some of bitcoin uh and bought some silver with it i also bought eos in 27 2017 and uh a few other uh cryptocurrencies


and i released the uh documentary i think just a day or two before bitcoin peaked in 2017 uh and uh we we had learned about a new technology called hashgraph which uh has speed and uh is is uh quite versatile such as eos is and i i made an investment in that not nearly what i put into eos however and uh and uh then uh you know uh since then i've been in it but i still uh lean heavily toward gold i'm you know gonna be 65 shortly and uh i i just came from a different era i know that uh today uh people uh trust


virtual assets and uh and it's virtual assets may as well be real assets to them but as you said uh it does have a reliance on the internet for settlement so i've got both i've got something that does not rely on the internet and when you talked about um all of the games in precious metals that go on such as all the paper gold that exists and then yeah there was some counterfeit uh tungsten bars out there i'm sort of betting on those i have uh most of my gold is either in my possession


i i'm mostly in silver actually but it's in my possession or it's it brings security in uh an account that i have there uh that i opened through my you know i was the first precious metals dealer to start opening third-party storage accounts for people uh and uh made a deal with brinks when it goes through brinks it gets assayed and so when everything remains in the vaulting system like that it's much safer than stuff that's going in and out so when you've got something that came


from a refinery uh and then went directly to the vault you pretty much know that it's real and as the paper games start to implode uh and uh and if there is more of this uh counterfeit uh stuff out there then that raises the value of the real stuff that you have so uh and we're seeing a whole lot of stress on that system right now with uh deliveries at the commodities exchanges and such so um to get back to uh blockchain the purpose of blockchain governance is to make decisions this is something that you wrote i


believe the purpose of blockchain governance is to make decisions that uh in the best interest of as many people as possible while minimizing the opportunity for a small group of people to act in ways that benefit themselves at the expense of the community give our viewers a little bit deeper dive into that you know i've done a lot of consensus work in in blockchain and focused a lot on on the technology but at the end of the day consensus is a as a human process and uh and governance you know my my ideal vision is create an


alternative government that is voluntary non-violent but so powerful that it can actually reign in existing government like no one would want to work for the irs because you'd be in bad standing with this new parallel government that's completely non-violent uh that's the kind of system and incentives that i'm i'm striving for where no one wants to go to the government courts because you know they're corrupt but this parallel court system it renders a judgment whether it's arbitration or


whatnot and if you don't comply you're basically uh cut off but i figure what i what i realized is that peace in society is is dependent upon the people being able to reach consensus if and the way that dictators control things is that they take control of an existing consensus that mechanism in which case you know we've got the constitution in the two-party system and and so forth that's our consensus system on who's president who gets to make the laws and what everyone follows


they take control of it and then they undermine the ability of people to reach a new alternative consensus right they prevent society from forking and so even though 70 percent of people for the past 50 years disapprove of how congress is doing we have been unable to change things we have a captured broken consensus algorithm so one of the things i hope to achieve is to introduce a new means of bringing people together to actually reach consensus because if we can't come together right we can't live


together we're going to die alone uh and you know we're starting to see this with the civil unrest and and everything going on is you know everything getting more and more polarized and people are getting violent and it's because our consensus system of society has been hijacked by the federal reserve ability to print unlimited money to fund special interests to grow media control the message and so you know combination of propaganda and censorship is being used to divide and conquer and prevent society


from reaching consensus on any other leadership other than dumb and dumber or bad and worse right those are the choices we have these days uh when it comes to to governance and so you know we really need a new way of reaching consensus and so that's that's what i spent a lot of my time thinking about that's why i got into blockchain because i saw it as a means of creating a transparent ledger upon which we can define rules of consensus and everyone can can validate that this is the new


consensus yeah you've uh touched on uh the next topic that i was uh going to i was uh sort of finishing up with eos here uh beca but you've gotten in to not just governance but government and uh eos has a user agreement that you used to call a constitution uh very simple a set of rules that people can read and all agree to that these are the rules of the space that they're going to live in when they're uh dealing with people in this community uh um you know before we uh get on to uh freedom and government


uh can we go back just for a second and uh the system it's free transactions and they're paid for by by a very small uh form of inflation uh versus uh having a and that makes it something that people want to use because it's free and it's super fast uh yeah and then uh what are the benefits so what are the benefits of free transactions paid for via inflation and what are the benefits of a platform like voice all right so let's let's start with just the let's start with eos because eos and


voice do things slightly differently um on eos the idea of free transactions things have to appear to be free because every micro transaction even if it's for a tenth of a penny has this cognitive load on it uh you're actually spending money and the system has to do all the accounting for actually spending money uh not to mention potential tax consequences the environment that we're in so uh for having a really good user experience people don't want to be nickeled and dimed on every little thing


that they do they want to use a system and transact you don't want to pay a fee when you update your password you don't want to pay a fee when you change your profile right it's just there's this psychological aspect to usability that means that you want the appearance of free transactions in reality nothing in life is free somebody is always paying for things right so you always have to ask yourself all right who's paying for it why are they paying for it uh and and what is the true cost so when we


launched eos the idea was it's it's sort of like um a gym membership yeah you stake your eos and you can use the if you have one percent of the eos you can use one percent of the capacity of the network for all time um and then more recently we added the ability to say hey if you've got you know one percent of the eos but you're not needing uh you know to do hundreds of transactions a second forever you can actually lease your your eos to other people who can then use your transaction volume uh


and and that's when we introduce the resource exchange um and that allows you to effectively pay a small monthly rental fee and get a large number of transactions right the cost of transacting on eos is orders of magnitude you know 100 times less than tran transacting on other blockchains out there so much so that's practically free and because you can take your staked eos lend it to the rex and earn interest on it effectively uh earn a share of the rental fees uh it kind of makes it free right it's like


uh having a house that you're renting generating income allows you to go rent a house from somewhere you get you get used to the house for free um so that's how we created an environment uh that really makes things usable and this was actually invented originally on steam we're not i was creating a social media platform no one wants to pay even a fraction of a cent for every comment or like or upvote and then we took that concept we brought it to eos uh and and we generalized it so that's


that's what the uh resource model is so um where all of the other social media platforms are basically their revenue comes from using your data uh they're basically mining you where on on these platforms uh you have a system where you can uh the the system gets rewarded and you get rewarded at the same time making it a zero cost for you without marketing your data and without you being the resource that's being mined yeah effectively yes awesome do you have a patent on verifying the identity of somebody that somebody


is actually a human and not a bot and that somebody uh can't uh make a whole bunch of accounts so that they can scam a system and try and tilt the odds in their favor by uh so what tell us about this tell us about patent on identity all right so you know as we are creating voice one of the concepts there is that we wanted to have unique users so that we could give every unique user effectively a a basic income and i've got a whole economic theory of how that's consistent with libertarian


principles uh and and not stealing money from people but the idea of a unique verified person is actually critical for all democratic processes and the best we have today is trying to tie things to your government id that completely centralizes control uh in the hands of of the government and the issue of these ids and they have these massive databases and they can basically create as many ids as they want which they do for all their secret agents i'm sure so uh i created a system that effectively


would have two people get together and take a picture together and when you take a picture with someone you establish that uh these two people at the same time and place and by using technology on your phone uh you can verify uh that you actually were indeed at that time and place because my phone can prove that it was next to your phone using uh speed of light communication right they can only be so far apart before the latencies start uh expanding so i can prove the two phones are next to each other i can prove with


the camera and face id and uh other things that you were there with your phone like you got the biometrics there and and we can do this over time so it's not just a one-time thing uh so you can that kind of builds this graph which gives you very strong evidence of uniqueness very high cost of reproducing because that's what your identity is it's really your position in the social graph relative to everyone else and how can we establish that in a decentralized way and so it's a that's in general what the patent


covers using a phone to capture data potentially video of you with other people and then doing it over time combined with some other cryptographic attestations and things like that and now everyone in the world can look at this public record and say yes i've got a high degree of confidence that all these different actors are are unique to with some measure of uniqueness um and that could be a fundamental building block that prediction markets or voting systems what not can do i also have a patent on cryptographically


provably honest elections elections where every single person if they wanted to could write their own client write their own software to cast their own ballot and to uh verify the results of the election uh unfortunately provably honest elections are actually illegal explain that honest elections are actually illegal um the requirements they put on elections around the concept of secret ballot prohibits you from having any information that would allow you to verify that your ballot was cast as you intended and


counted as cast so they uh even if it's secret like no one else but you knows knows what your vote was and can uh can tie it back to you you can so you still have privacy over your vote but if you have the ability to prove to yourself that your vote was counted uh that's that's actually not allowed in the election systems wow um and and so as a result it's it's uh basically we have logical proof that's impossible to build an approvally honest election system uh under the current rules under the


current rules but hopefully you'll change them i you know we have to build a parallel system but yes absolutely um so i i don't know if we covered this what is d5 yes d5 is decentralized financial uh systems that's kind of what bitshares was this first decentralized financial platform it's the idea of using smart contracts on blockchains like eos for building insurance for building bonds for building options basically the entire financial system on a blockchain uh and decentralized that's the concept


of defy sort of what eos was built for wow okay um i have to say that i do admire your level of disrespect for the federal reserve your level of contempt it's this is a healthy thing i think uh you it back in march you uh did a tweet that says running out of toilet paper question mark try your local atm but yes on the subject of uh tweets uh you have taken on um several different uh issues and i wanna uh read a tweet from august uh 17th can any system of governance govern an immoral population with integrity


and the system that i'm talking about you wrote a brilliant article recently on uh hierarchy say tell us what you call it randomized randomized hierarchical representative government yes this is the most brilliant system it it takes away all the power from special interests from the media from uh the incumbents that are already in the government uh and it is a way that we could come up with uh the way you've got it laid out uh eighty percent of the popular right now what what is the approval of government


uh the the populations of most uh countries in the world how much do they approve of their government how do we end up with the worst of the worst the you know you look at the every time we elect somebody i'm going oh my god how could this be true yeah dumb and dumber that's not worse bad and worse those are the options we have uh it's it's a it's a symptom of attempting to uh how do you scale decision making is actually the problem right and so what we have is uh somebody decides who


the choices are and then we all get to vote on on who those choices are and it's sort of like henry ford you can have any color car you want as long as it's black it's not really a choice anymore right we have these two political parties uh which um you know it's there's all kinds of papers that demonstrate that when you have a voting system they have two parties naturally form uh and they and they get polarized and they can't possibly have any principles because they're coalitions of large


groups of people that aren't based on principles and then these parties become the government it doesn't matter what the constitution says about you know 300 you know how many representatives and senators and things like that because all those people are members of parties and the parties are governed by a different power structure uh where they set all the rules and where they change the rules anytime someone like a ron paul or bernie sanders challenges the desires of the party leaders


um and that means we we have a binary choice between and we don't even it's a false choice and and that's the problem in the united states uh and so it's a problem in most countries yeah yeah uh and so it's the illusion and the wrestling countries uh it's it's a different problem but it's a worse problem exactly this is the best of the worst is what we're stuck with right now and you've come up with an alternative to that i can describe that process real quick


and then i can get back into like some of the philosophy that goes into it because everything i do is based on first principles and philosophy and building blocks here so um the idea is you randomly divide the population into groups of of 10 people each group of 10 people has to deliberate amongst themselves who from within their group is going to represent them that person and then they have to agree by two-thirds majority that person then represents them at the next level you take all the representatives


uh randomly assign them to groups of ten and make them come to agreement which of those representatives will represent them at the next level and with eight or so levels you can reach consensus among a hundred million people uh but here's here's why it's so great uh there are no there's no campaigning because the only people you can vote for are the people in your group that you're talking to uh the nine other people in your group you're talking to on video conferencing and stuff


on on right it could be it could be a consumer yeah yes or in your web browser or it can be in person meetups right i've got an entire uh i've been working on how to do this low-tech not not a high-tech process because it's for a system to work well it has to work you know you have to be able to implement it in 1800s as well as today so one of the the challenges is let's say you wanted to uh fix the world uh let's say you let's say you're the wisest man around your socrates and


and you've got this you've got the solution and you you run with it you're not going to get elected right because most people haven't had the time to study and become an expert in the fairest possible system and if you did get elected and you were made dictator for a time eventually you're going to be replaced by some other dictator that's going to be the worst possible person you can conceive so we need a way of you you can't win or or introduce a platform that's got a whole bunch of


ideas that people can disagree with you've got to start by introducing a process on how we're going to make decisions right you have to say well there's got to be disputes we're going to agree that there's going to be disputes that's self-evident how are we going to resolve those disputes among us in the past we said we're going to have democracy we're going to elect candidates and that's how we're going to reach consensus and that's going to be perceived as fair


and so the constitution and our governance system that is our dispute resolution process between the republicans and democrats and hypothetically a bunch of smaller minority parties but that system's not working anymore right we're realizing that wait the judge the game's rigged it's not actually resolving our disputes and so now we're starting to see all these riots and everything else which means the solution has to start with a very very simple idea something that everyone can get behind


and the idea that is almost universal today is hey democracy right it's the worst form of government except for everything else now the idea of democracy is that every individual is a unique person a unique is intrinsically valuable right uh and therefore they should have equal weight regardless of everything else you know they should have input into the system uh the idea that government's legitimacy comes from consent of the governed into some sense if you've got a democratic process


you've established that there's consent what are you consenting to you're consenting to the democratic process but not all democracies are equal a democracy that gives you a false choice or that gives power to the media or power to incumbents or all these different things is taking the the consensus that hey we all i consent to democracy and and turn it into i can i'm consenting to a game that's rigged and then people want to pull their pull their consent back from that um so the idea is come up with something


very very simple that people can get behind and two you have to say how do how can i guarantee that this system is not going to devolve into something that's corrupt as best as we can predict so that's when i came up with randomized hierarchical representative voting the randomization is important because it prevents people from organizing into parties right it creates a statistical sampling of the population in each group so if this if the population is theoretically half republican and half


democrat each group is going to be approximately half republican half democrat some groups might be 80 20 some you know occasionally there might be a group that's all one or all the other way that's the nature of randomness but each group has to come to a consensus and they can actually have discussions and talk about their principles and come to consent which one of them is best to represent them at the next level up and if they can't come to the consensus that group's opinion is


basically defaulting to the consensus everyone else's reaches so you know there's a lot of incentive to come to a consensus on a representative whereas today's system is very polarizing there's no incentive to come to consensus instead they appeal to their base and they try to get that 51 percent so they can roll over the 49. um and so randomization is a critical component it's also a critical component uh and of nature you could write this into into code or you could just put a bunch of


names into a hopper and spin that around and pick out 10 names right yes yes the system i i'm proposing uses a deck of playing cards right and and you you hand out the cards and you just group people uh you know everyone's got the same suit everyone's got the same uh same face same number on it that's a way of doing small groups and then you just repeat it hierarchically and it scales and there's also some like information theory built into this when you have a candidate running


it doesn't scale from a computer science sense it's everyone has to evaluate all the facts and and the candidate and try to figure out are they the right candidate there's too many choices there's too much information um and and your voice and your input is is relatively small compared to the whole so there's a concept called rational ignorance where the cost of doing the research necessary to cast a valid vote is higher than the benefit that you get than the impact your vote has on the


whole and so therefore people are rationally ignorant uh and um you know just this cost benefit of responsible voting is not there so most votes contain no information whatsoever uh other than they're just people uh responding emotionally to the news of the day uh there's no way that they could actually process it but when you're in a group we tend to pick candidates that uh are semi-good-looking and can at least string together two words without putting their foot in their house and even that is questionable these days


keep on going i'm sorry i interrupted um but when you when you're in groups of 10 you can actually have a discussion you can use the satori method to persuade people in the group and and the best you know the best rise of in each group um so imagine if in our debates right you have a stage and you've got 10 candidates for for nomination imagine if they had to select among themselves who they're who the leader was and they weren't trying to persuade all the other voters you're not going to have appeal to


the base emotions of society and things like that you're trying to persuade other people that are seeking the presidency to support you instead of them to yield and it's much richer you deal with much smarter people because in order to persuade you know 10 random citizens or nine random citizens the next level up you have to persuade 10 citizens that were able to persuade 10 others at the next level up you have to persuade 10 people that were able to persuade 100 others or the representative of 100 others and so


it's kind of like a playoff where your skill at being persuasive representing a group a small group that you can actually talk to is what allows you to advance and so in theory you should have articulate persuasive intelligent people emerging at the top and not people that can tell people what they want to hear and and play off of the masses and and persuade people who don't have the time to actually do the research to find out those things so it's a very very different dynamic that


theory should allow us to identify the best and the brightest um and there's another aspect of this um you know we talk about constitutions uh you know the idea of the constitution is supposed to limit the power of government but as uh spooner said either the constitution we have authorizes the government that we have or it's been powerful powerless to prevent it in reality the nature of government depends on the people in the government the people running it you could have a totalitarian dictator with libertarian


ideals and get a very different society than the same dictator with marxist ideals right uh but then you have to play this game over multiple generations and so we know that you know having dictators eventually fails even if you start out with a good one eventually you get the bad one so you we need to have this dynamic self-correcting process and the thing that needs to be preserved is the people's ability to change who's in power and people need to agree in the principle of this is the process


that we use for determining the legitimacy of who's in power and just like today if elections are cancelled people immediately reject the legitimacy of whatever is going on but hold an election even if it's completely corrupt and people say well i can't prove it's corrupt so i guess i'm going to kind of lean and it creates this ambiguity that there is no who is the real leader if you don't have an election uh who's legitimate uh and then it has to be enforced by force you know and it just


evolves but if people can say hey follow this process and if we follow this process i agree with the outcome and if we don't follow it then uh then i know the system is corrupt and you need a very simple process and that's what randomized hierarchical representative voting that's a mouthful looking for better names and thinking like political playoffs or or you know something like that but it's it's really about a bracketed system for identifying from the entire population who's the best of the best and instead


of allowing the media and the rich and the famous and the incumbents to determine our choices of who we can vote for instead of self-select selecting out all the individuals like i i don't want to run for office many people many good decent people don't actually want to run for office because of this public spotlight it puts on you and the the slander and the it's just terribly the responsibility i mean it's it's a huge responsibility right but if if if the governance process could be kept


uh local and in discussions of groups of 10 then there's no you can't bribe people no one's going to be there long term every election season there's a different random group that you're assigned to so you're not going to get gerrymandering and and other things that uh steal your ability to have influence and you can have tremendo good people can have tremendous influence without all the pitfalls of of playing the politic game right without pandering without campaigning and raising tons of money


it completely changes the power dynamics and puts it back in the hands of the people yeah let me just recap this again for the audience so you divide the entire country up into small groups of ten so you're only dealing everybody can participate if they want you don't have to participate but you're only going to be dealing with nine other people that you have to meet with over the process of a month and pick one of you one of one of the ten you included to represent that group and then you go to the next level which


eliminates at that point ninety percent of the population and so this ten percent of the population that just uh got basically elected to the next level this is the playoffs uh does repeats the same process where they each have to pick one of them so uh you have if you want to be the president you have to convince the other nine people uh and then uh you eliminate ninety percent of those and ninety percent of those and it takes roughly eight levels to get a president fewer levels to get uh congress and senate fewer levels than


that for uh local things state and and uh and uh city uh and so very efficient but because it's so small 10 10 people the media isn't going to spend a ton trying to influence you uh they they don't know what your discussion is so they can't go and try and slander one person or manipulate their tweets or uh or or choke off their youtube access or take down their wikipedia page or whatever i think yeah so yeah and you're not going to get vote corruption because when there's only 10 people


casting votes at each level yeah how can you corrupt a vote of 10 people and it can all be recorded on the blockchain verified and proven and there's no possibility of somebody voting twice uh there's uh there's basically no possibility of voter fraud whatsoever with this system minimal possibility yes yes particularly yeah it comes down to the identity problem people try to participate in two groups at the same time uh and and that can largely be eliminated by having a zoom call where everyone's on a zoom call at the


same time they can't be on two calls with uh at the same time because you know everyone's kind of verified are you in any other groups nope uh but you can only be in one kind one place this kind of identification that you've patented uh couldn't you make it so that the blockchain could identify when somebody's participating in two groups um yeah there's there's lots of elements i say it's nothing's perfect so i don't want to present the idea that okay it's impossible because someone


wants someone always might find that yeah and that's the thing nothing has to be perfect but compared to what compared to what we have today absolutely we've got pets and dead people voting uh and we got we got mail-in voting where you can't verify it you know it's not who votes the counts the two counts the votes and since provably honest elections are illegal uh you know at least this system would actually present a means of having this is another system for provably honest governance processes


um yeah you you tweeted uh democratic voting is only meaningful if the people have a democratic process for selecting the candidates until we take control of the candidate selection from the political parties and the media our democratic choice will it will be an illusion a fraud a covert tyranny yes could have said it better myself you did say it i did another thing you you said recently that i absolutely agree with uh perhaps it's time to end representation without taxation and then i when i was talking


with my producer dan i said the only thing that i would add to that is the word net and then i would uh he said told me to look down in the discussion and it it you said if you aren't paying net taxes if you aren't paying net taxes why should you have a vote on how the taxes are spent and i could not agree more with this uh you know i know somebody that um if government michael we have to help these people and but uh their their income comes from representing those people which means their income comes from my


taxes so it's not we helping these people it's somebody hiring government to point a gun at me or anybody that uh makes more than they pay that pays more net taxes than they consume in government services the government uh before this crisis used to spend two thousand dollars per citizen in the united states now they spend about thirty three and so if somebody isn't paying thirty three thousand dollars per person and so this gets to be a hefty price tag uh you know when you've got


a family of four or something like that it starts to become a very hefty thing and people just don't realize that it's very very few people that uh pretty much pay for everybody else's ride and uh but everybody has a vote on how much we're going to take from those people and how we're going to redistribute it yes so i i made that tweet because i was thinking about the american revolution and it's all about taxation without representation and and uh but i i flip those words around i'm like


wait representation without taxation is equally bad um but since it's governments if it was only just about how to allocate money that would be the case but government's more than about allocating money it's about defining the judicial processes and property rights and all these other things that um that actually mean that everyone does need to have a say in a democratic process um so that tweet was just more to highlight the the irony of an aspect or or the consequences of a society that allows people to vote


themselves money from other people um and and that gets back into can you have a uh a good government with a corrupt population and i don't believe that is uh the case and i actually believe that bad government corrupts the population uh and a a honest population can institute things that will create a good government and a good government can actually increase the virtues of of society and i think an element of the hierarchical representative voting is is that it can bring out when you're


in a group of 10 people how are you going to pick which of the 10 of you is going to represent the group you're going to look for people who are persuasive but also people who you think have integrity and you're going to be able to judge because you look them in the eye and actually have discussions with them um and so that will tend to promote people that you're going to judge based more on their virtues than based on more on their principles than the memes and the platitudes and the


promises that they're making when they're campaigning so i think that the process has the potential to put more virtuous people uh in power they'll create more virtuous rules and then those rules in turn will uh be absorbed by society and increase the virtue of society that's theoretical you know until we run some of these experiments you know we don't see how stupid people can be at corrupting things but the in principle it could be a an opportunity to restructure things and


this gets back to you know having a constitution that tries to limit government is a fool's errand because uh the constitution says only gold and silver should be money what do we have today right we're not following the constitution even when it's written in plain english right what matters every day congress and the senate pass laws they they spit on the constitution and completely ignore it uh about probably much great far greater than 90 of all the laws that congress and the senate passes uh


are unconstitutional laws and uh like ron paul used to say you know what is the use of having this uh if if you want to do something that the constitution doesn't allow then modify the constitution don't just ignore the master set of laws that all other laws are supposed to flow from well and that's the the challenge you know the constitution's powerless to prevent or enforce itself only the people can enforce it and how do the people enforce it well in theory by the people they elect


but we've seen that you know 70 of people disapprove of how congress has been operating it's been that way for 50 years it's not possible for people to elect people they approve of the system established by the constitution for electing the parties enable the two-party system enable the corruption which enables the constitution to be ignored so it's more important the process for putting people in power than the actual power that they have because they will not respect any other


document and people have no way of enforcing it other than the process of putting people in power or i guess in theory the second amendment but no one really wants to to have a civil war right you know the declaration of independence says people are tolerated tyranny and tolerate oppression rather than risk at all uh so my my theory of governance is is fundamentally that by nature it's the law of the jungle and all of our rights come from uh entering a peace treaty with other people uh and the only and a peace treaty


that's negotiated based on equal negotiation which means everything has to be reciprocal i can't uh give you the right to food uh if you can't give me the right to food and if we both and you can only give people the right to something that you have to give so if one of us has food and the other doesn't you can't enter a peace treaty that says we both have a right to food but you can enter a peace treaty that says i will respect your rights you can keep your property i'll keep my property i


won't hit you you don't hit me we use this dispute resolution process yada yada you can enter fully reciprocal things but when the playing field gets unlevel or unbalanced it goes back to law of the jungle and so if you don't want to go back to law of the jungle you need to create a playing field that can self-correct uh and and that's what i'm trying to do with the governance systems that i'm engineering as you put it earlier yeah i want to thank you for all that it's time to wrap this up do you have


any uh further thoughts uh and and uh you know you just said it again you're engineering freedom i just love that instead of fighting for it which requires conflict you're engineering something where people can participate in freedom yeah well it's interesting the i think doug casey said people are fighting a war for dependents right there they're going protesting demanding more free stuff free stuff is dependent on somebody else right what we need is people that want independence independence


means taking responsibility right what people want is freedom without responsibility uh which uh it's it's not really possible right uh and so that means sacrifice that means a lot of paying a high price in order to have your independence um but as a culture we just want free stuff and we want someone else to give it to us and we're going to protest until someone gives it to us and at the end of the day that's that's like um teenagers demanding free stuff from their parents and burning the house down


until their parents give it to them right it's it's it's just uh instead what people should be doing is creating systems that make them independent from the system and that's where bitcoin cryptocurrency gold and silver it makes you independent of the federal reserve independent of their inflation it means decoupling yourself from from the technology shopping local building and doing things local so what we really need is a movement toward independence and personal responsibility and creating


tools that allow people to be independent and that's what blockchain is a tool that people can use to gain some independence um and and so that's what i'm all about is engineering tools and systems that allow people to organize to increase their independence relative to the system and opting out rather than fighting the system and demanding the system give you stuff demanding that google not censor you and re-prioritizing demanding that they host your videos uh you know demanding that you can use


the bank account all those things are just creating a war for dependents instead of a warfare or opting out and becoming independent and then having your freedom that way uh so our viewers can find it and read it uh what is the name of the article that you wrote about the hierarchical representative government ah so you can view my profile on voice voice.com um count my account is dis dan um and the article's title was um can we end riots with a new form of government which now that i'm thinking about it's


probably not the the best uh seo optimizer you know i i want to be an ally in this this is a brilliant thing i want to i change only happens uh when a few people start a ball rolling and a lot of people need to know about this so i really hope that you take that article and rewrite it give it a bunch of titles give it different perspectives and just keep on republishing that same system and arguing for it uh i will help and some other time we don't have the time here but i want to discuss you know how is it how


can we get this implemented because uh you're up against a very entrenched system and this is so different uh but it could run in parallel to start you know uh you could come up with at least a candidate whether that candidate would survive the media like a third-party candidate running that was selected this way by 10 people at a time and uh without any media influence and have somebody that's actually qualified to to be telling us what to do i hate this thing where we have a popularity


contest every four years and we hire some [ __ ] to tell us what to do and typically they don't know anything about economics that's my main concern because of the consequences of dumb decisions where they're not considering the economic ramifications and because that always comes back to haunt us so i want to thank you so much and i hope we can do this again uh sometime soon i found this absolutely fascinating and i really want you to i'm hoping that you put a lot of energy and effort


behind this i will help you i'm sure there's a lot of viewers out there that would love to see something like this come true because we deserve more than the worst of the worst yes i agree yeah i built my my career on building consensus algorithms for for blockchains building consensus this is a new consensus algorithm i think it's the ultimate consensus algorithm i am very much actively pursuing this i'm i'm working on on incorporating it into a book uh so that the idea can be disseminated


and and thoroughly uh fleshed out for for people to understand uh so i i appreciate your support and uh thank you for giving me the opportunity to interview with you today okay thank you very much dan and to the audience uh uh i hope you really got something from this uh and make sure you visit voice and take a look at eos dan thank you thank you guys