Ben Horowitz and Balaji Srinivasan on Netscape and Network States

Countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete, but it tends to be the countries that want to grow. A huge strength of the US has been rule of law and the amount of case law and like the predictability of the law. But that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law, who are judges and, you know, prosecutors and these kinds of things. People who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested in kind of pushing forward into the future. What the state cares about is power. And as tech kind of rose in power to the level of the state, then they got very, very interested.

0:00

Can you build a new kind of country from the Internet up? Not a metaphor, not a community, but something that actually replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed money, law, governance. A few decades ago, China experimented with this idea, physically carving out special economic zones to test new rules without rewriting the entire system. Shenzhen was once a fishing village. Today it's a global tech hub. Now the experiment has moved online. Crypto, digital identity, Internet native communities, and what some call network states are trying to turn code into coordination and coordination into legitimacy. But there's a real tension here. Code is deterministic. Societies aren't. So the question isn't whether these systems are clever, it's whether they can actually scale and what they replace if they do. In this episode, A16Z co founder Ben Horowitz joins Biology Srinivasan on the Network State podcast to examine how Internet first institutions form, where they break, and whether network states are a curiosity or the next phase of governance.

0:50

Ben, thank you for speaking at the Network State conference.

1:51

Good to see you. Balaji, ready to go.

1:53

Awesome. So, you know, Ben, you've been, you know, a mentor, and I think I'd say a friend, hopefully for.

1:56

For.

2:03

For many years now. And, you know, one thing is in the hard thing about hard things in that book you wrote about your time at Netscape, and Netscape in many ways was like the first Internet company, and because it had downloads and so on and so forth, and it went viral and you guys went public and you had an acquisition and all the monodrama, Right. And then we worked together on the rise of Bitcoin, which was first Internet currency. And obviously we've been very heavily involved in that with Async, crypto and everything, and Coinbase and all that stuff. And now we're building Internet communities. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. As you know, I think of them as the third Kind of thing. Startup societies, Internet communities, network states. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you think they're the next big thing or. Could be.

2:04

Yeah. So I think they're very kind of parallel in the development and that. You know, kind of before Netscape, which was the first thing that kind of brought all of the Internet pieces together, you know, there were many pieces, you know, there's FTP and TCPIP and Gopher and this and that. But you needed something to unify all the technology. So it, it was a little deceptive in that a lot of people deep in the tech kind of saw it as, well, what's new here? You know, like, it's just like you're just putting an interface on it. And I think that what the network state is in network school is very much like that, in that we have all the primitive building blocks of community. We've got Discord and WhatsApp groups, and we have Bitcoin now, and we have many kind of different currencies, stablecoins and so forth, but nobody's brought them all. We have VR, but nobody's put the whole package together. And that's really when it gets unleashed. I mean, in my experience, that's kind of where you hit the knee in the curve. When is that the integration? And it doesn't seem, in a way, it doesn't seem like a lot because all the pieces were already there, but the pieces, as pieces just aren't. You know, it's not actually the thing, it's not the product.

2:44

It's funny because you're right, the system integration. And the thing is that actually has to happen after all the other pieces are mature, because if any one piece of those is wiggly, the whole thing doesn't work. You have to wait for that to, to be there. So only when all those pieces are mature can you snap them together.

4:09

Right, exactly, exactly. And, and that's kind of the deceptive thing because in until that point, you know, people might have tried it and failed or, you know, it's kind of like this, oh, no, that doesn't work. Right. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, Same with, same with Bitcoin. Right. Like it put together like a lot of techniques, you know, peer to peer cryptography, et cetera, that had been around, but they weren't put together in a way where you could actually have money.

4:24

Right. Because ECDSA existed.

4:53

Yeah.

4:55

Hash functions existed, hashcast existed. And in a sense, I think somebody. Exactly. As you said remarked, is just, it was quote, it was a Clever integration of existing things. But they all existed before and they didn't innovate on cryptography, they integrated on the, on the system. Right, right. And you know, it's funny you say that because I myself actually had not thought of that before in quite that way as the analogy to the web browser. But once you do snap all the speech together, then that itself becomes a platform for other things.

4:55

Yes, exactly, exactly.

5:27

And then you had web apps and you had everything else because then you could. Right. And so what we're starting to see is these startup societies, I call them like the parallel physical, are each usually inspired by the parallel digital. For example, there's sort of society that is like cul de sac, which is based on all the microbial stuff and it wants to be a walkable community. Right. And then there's, you know, Prospera, which has mini circle and it's inspired by the biotech innovations. And then there's another one that's booting up which is inspired by all the educational innovations. Yeah, and so the digital is inspiring the physical.

5:29

Yes, yeah, no, exactly. And I, and I think that's gonna, I think the number of ideas around that is really gonna multiply because you know, one of the things that if you look at the primitive version, it's all kind of, you know, a community around an idea. But what about a community around the intersection of many ideas? You know, just for my own sake, it would be great if there was a tech hip hop community, but you know, you could imagine many, many dimensions. You know, just sort of, if you think of every policy that you might be interested, anything you might be interested in, or any policy you might vote on, if you took the intersection and found all the like minded people in the world and put them in a community, that would be a kind of very powerful thing.

6:07

Yes. And you know, one thing is some of the other folks were having speak, the conference, for example, the CEO of AngelList read the network state book and they've just opened this Angellist founders cafe in San Francisco. And he said he was kicking himself for not doing it three years ago because on the one hand it seems an obvious thing, but it's also like a non obvious thing because people drop in, they give customer feedback so you can materialize the cloud into land. So many, many digital things that we have that we think is purely digital have some physical manifestation that might actually be non obvious.

6:58

Yeah, no, that for sure. And then when you add the physical, it, it does add a whole another dimension of possibility. For sure. Yes, that's very interesting.

7:30

So, you know, one way that we've, we started to establish a few templates in the space. For example, the pop up, which is somewhere in between, let's say a conference, which is like a one day thing and what we're doing in network school is a permanent. Where it's like a permanent setup. Yeah, exactly, that's right. So a pop up, like, like a one month thing. Ish.

7:44

Right.

8:05

And so it's longer than a conference because people, you know, they have to bring, you know, change of clothes, laundry to, you know, it's more than that. So do you have any kinds of things that you've been thinking? So you mentioned a tech hip hop thing and obviously we're used to thinking about, okay, we could solve this with a new tech company, we could solve this with a new currency. Have you thought about communities that you'd like to see?

8:06

Well, there are so many, you know, like there's the kind of, I'm part of like many primitive communities in, you know, the form of WhatsApp groups and so forth. And it would be really like this nice to see those be much more highly dimensional, maybe have a physical incarnation. You know, it's everything from like, you know, the LLM community to, you know, various different kinds of things. But they're all so primitive because there's no money in them there. You know, there's no, there's no crypto in these communities. There's no physical dimension, there's no virtual reality dimension. There's, you know, all you can really do is chat, which is, you know, one of the things you'll do in a community. But there's many, many, many more ideas that you could have.

8:30

Yeah. You know, it's funny you said because the, the WhatsApp and Signal groups, what I like about them is you have a lot of busy CEOs and investors and so on and we can remain in kind of lightweight contact with a lot of people. And then you have the physical, like, you know, maybe there's a coffee and you put in an invite there, a luma invite, and 20 of the people or 10 of the people from the group show up there and you can just pick up right where you left off with this long running group chat conversations. There's definitely this amazing thing there. Yeah, but you know what, what, what's interesting is when you, when you, when you say what you just said, you kind of want to be able to, boom, hold a meetup within the chat or like hit a button and create a meetup or boom, hold a meetup and do maybe like a quick VR talk or something like that. I don't know, maybe the chat, chat interface will get there. Or maybe we'll need something completely new.

9:20

Yeah, yeah. Because right now, again, you know, you can do that, but it's a little bit of a heavy cognitive and like social lift. Right. Like it's a little more risky to say, hey, let's all get together. You don't want people to go, nah.

10:14

Yeah, yeah, right. Well, you know, there's something, you know, one thing that's interesting about that is, you know, with WhatsApp, you know, a very modern question is where are you? Because, you know, if probably if you analyze text in the 1800s, for example, it's very rare for someone to ask, where are you?

10:32

Where are you?

10:54

I'm on, I'm on the other side of the table from you. Or happy, you know, because there's not that many times, you know, maybe you send a telegram, but the telegram, you know, or you know, you sound send a postal message. But it's rare that you wouldn't know the other person's physical location.

10:55

Yeah, you, you would certainly know where they are if you're sending a postal message.

11:09

Yes, that's right. So, but one thing that's interesting, you know, WhatsApp itself is location aware. But an interesting thing that happens is people cycle around the globe and they're kind of, you know, they're in the Spain airport or they're here and they're just kind of sending messages. And, and we sort of take for granted the level of mobility there. Even though they're in one place in the chat world, they're moving around the physical world. So maybe there's something that would suggest, you know, to reduce the social overhead, as you mentioned, that, oh, these three people are nearby, you guys should meet up, but you need to allow it to do that location tracking. That's like one concept, for example.

11:14

Yeah, that would be that, that would be super convenient because then you, you'd also not have to worry, oh, hey, let's meet up. Oh, I'm in France.

11:48

Right, right.

11:55

That's going to be hard. Okay, well, that was a waste of a message for me.

11:57

Yes. The thing is that the people would have to also want to be location tracked. It has to be done in exactly the right way that they feel, they feel good about it.

12:01

Yeah.

12:09

So, okay, so Internet communities, I mean, there's another angle on this which is for example, things like self driving things, like many of the biotech things that we're interested in. We can potentially have those within special economic zones. And you know, did you see my post from a few months ago on the special Elon zone?

12:11

Oh, I didn't see that. I gotta look at that. That sounds good post. Yeah, yeah, just all Elon's tech gets to work for free. Or the app restriction.

12:34

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. So my thought was what is the sort of westernized version of the Asian cause of the Special Economic Zone? The Special Elon zone, or more generally the Special Founder zone would be find some swath of territory. Maybe it's in the U.S. maybe it's Elon Salvador. Okay, so Elon gets, you know, because Tesla's a global business and so on, so some country gives or some state carves out a piece of territory and says, okay, Elon, you can move the speed of physics rather than permits. You can crank out all the humanoids you want. You can mine stuff out of the ground. And what they would do is they'd import existing regulations on, I don't know, graffiti and stuff. Like, you don't have to rewrite every single law, you just allow, however, quick changes to existing laws. And the crucial thing being that it's like an essentially an uninhabited territory as close to Burning man as possible.

12:43

Yeah.

13:38

What are your thoughts on something like that?

13:38

Yeah, no, I think that's a. I. By the way, I think it's very doable. There's so many states in the US that would want to do that. I know Nevada would want to do that. And I mean, they have Burning Man. They would certainly rather have something that was productive. So I think that's super viable. You know, there are certain sites, of course you could never do it, but for sure. And then I think it could be, it could not only be really productive, but it would also kind of create a very special community almost of, of kind of both like minded people and then people who knew how to build things.

13:40

That's right. And actually the thing about this is if it worked for Elon, then it could work for Palmer. Lucky to have the drone zone and. Right. And you could have, you know, different.

14:22

Kinds of, you know, like a more mundane thing. Manufacturing.

14:34

Exactly. So on that point, rare and light mining. Exactly. That's right. So like if you know about how Deng Xiaoping reformed China when he took over the country was like all brainwashed, total communists and he couldn't like reform it all at once. So he just set up a few special Economic zones, especially Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. And actually he didn't allow everybody in. They actually there was like a membership process or an admissions process where only the most capitalist sympathetic people were allowed in and they weren't going to make trouble. They weren't still die hard Maoists. Right. And, and of course that became this gigantic, you know, Chinese city there. And this way they could gradually reform communism rather than try to change it for the whole country at once. They could experiment with new laws and so on and so forth. So for manufacturing, all of the osha, you know, EPA type stuff, right. You could suspend that in this one zone and everybody who came in signed a new social smart contract that would basically say, guess what, I'm coming into this totally desolate piece of territory and I'm coming because of new rules.

14:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I think that would, I think that's a great idea. That would be very good for the, it would be amazing for the US if we could do it here.

15:45

Yes.

15:55

So here, not there where you are.

15:56

Well, well we could do it there too.

15:59

We could do it in Singapore.

16:01

Yes, so, so I want to. Of course it'd be amazing if we do it in the US and in a sense if you can do it in the rest of the world, then that gives you a template to bring into the U.S. potentially. Right, so, so we can, we can parallel path, potentially. So. Okay. On, on that topic, actually, relatedly, there are a bunch of countries that are pursuing interesting kinds of pro tech legislation like digital nomad laws, crypto laws, dao laws. I'd love to know your thoughts on the progressive. For example, in Wyoming they had, they did the first dao law. Tennessee had followed up with the dao law. I'd love to know your thoughts on the jurisdictions, politicians, et cetera, that are kind of pursuing the most progress technologically progressive interactions with not just tech companies, tech currencies, protocols, startup communities. You must have some thoughts on this.

16:03

Yeah, so, so I mean, you know, in the US it does tend to be the, like the states that want to do that do tend to be the red states or the purple states at least. So you know, Wyoming, Nevada, Florida, Texas, to some degree a lot of the southern states are very kind of open to manufacturing and these kinds of things, you know, around the world it's been interesting. So like worldcoin, I think their most kind of active country per capita is Argentina. And I think half the citizens of Buenos Aires are active users on worldcoin. And then they also made a lot of progress, surprisingly with Malaysia, which is pretty good. You know, of course in the uae, Dubai has been very, very aggressive and so they've been good. So I think countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete. But it tends to be the, you know, it tends to be countries that want to grow as opposed to, you know, what's going on in Europe or, you know, some, some other places or in, you know, California even, where they kind of are like, well, we're rich enough and now we need to divide up the pie and protect our children. The people.

16:56

That's right. They, they're basically unfortunately taking prosperity for granted.

18:29

Yeah.

18:32

And then they're the. You, you mentioned this thing about places that want to grow. One of the things I've been most pleasantly surprised by over the last five years or so is small states putting themselves on the map. Like El Salvador.

18:32

Yeah.

18:49

But also like, like small cities like Palau, Marshall Islands, you know, they've taken very pro crypto kinds of, you know, approaches. And my general pattern on this is actually that, you know, there's 190 to 193 UN members and it's there, it's a little bit like a reverse merger or digital asset treasury company where you've got kind of a listed company and it's got a symbol and you've got a coin and then this guy has a symbol and a sense of political legitimacy but not capital. And it says capital but not legitimacy. And then they merged together. That's a digitalized treasury company or reverse merger. And that, that can now be done at the level of the state or whether a sovereign state or like a US State.

18:49

Yeah, yeah. No, that is, it's a very, very smart move, I think, by, by those states. I mean, I think it's, it's really interesting that you can differentiate just by thinking about how to grow and how to maintain prosperity that their whole societies that have given up on that idea. Yeah, we, Mark and I just had dinner with one of the kind of potential candidates for Prime Minister of the uk and she was going through like, you know, like, what's your differentiation? She's like, growth, like we can grow the economy. And I was like, wow, that's a very interesting differentiator.

19:32

It's interesting also because, you know, historically people have said natural resources is a differentiator, but I actually think it is, you know, human resources, so to speak, or capital, like basically.

20:16

Right. Letting the human resources do their thing. Yeah.

20:29

Yes. And we should come up with a term for that. But I'd like to at some point organize a conference of small Countries and pro growth jurisdictions and that's kind of like one side of a two sided market. And we have all the tech founders and venture capitalists is the other side of the two sided market and put them together. I mean Network State Conference is like the V. One of that. Right. And we've got a bunch of, you know, folks here who are, who are, who are doing that.

20:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I think that goes together. You know, people who want the Network State in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested in kind of pushing forward into the future.

20:59

Yeah. Because we can bring talent and capital there just like crypto, just like, you know, just like tech itself. So now are there. What has, you know, what has surprised you about the last five, 10, 15 years in terms of tech and policy? Or, or did nothing or maybe, maybe there's so many things. But what have you found to be, to be interesting or something that we should look at, pursue, pay attention to?

21:11

Well, so I think the big wake up call for me was first kind of how interested you know, nation states got in technology policy, which is very like all of a sudden because we ran my whole career, nobody cared. I mean, you know, like what were the issues? Stock option accounting, H1B visas, like real like relative fringe stuff compared to, you know, the like we're going to ban crypto or we are going to call Google and Meta and tell them what they can publish. You know, that, that was a real change. And I think that, you know, my big conclusion is what the state cares about is power. And as tech kind of rose in power to the level of the state, then they got very, very interested. So like, you know, it's always under the guise of, of safety, but it's really power. Right. And you know, it's been, it's been quite interesting. I mean like it took us a long time to unravel like why the Biden administration was so keen on banning crypto and like taking the US out of a whole technological space. Probably, you know, one of the two most important kind of technology platforms for the next 25 years.

21:44

They're also anti AI.

23:22

Yeah, yeah. Why would, yeah. And AI well, both of them. Right.

23:24

Yeah.

23:28

Why would you withdraw from that? And it really has to do with, well, you know, control. If we can, if we can't control the money then we can't control the speech and if we can't control the speech then we can't control the people. And you know, both AI and crypto are like, well we better shut them. We Better have control of those things. Like they better not be in control of somebody else. And that's, you know, it's just a really interesting learning that that's. I, I guess I had to grow up and learn how the world works. But, but that is how it works.

23:29

Yeah, it, it is interesting because you know, for, you know, you're, you're a little bit older than I am, actually maybe 15 older. And you know, during the period where for, for many years we had to convince people that tech was important.

24:02

Yeah.

24:19

And then suddenly they're like, it's too important. And that happened right. In the mid 2010s or thereabouts. After about 30, 40 years of building the intranet.

24:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No crazy. It is. It's just so, so weird. Well, you know, it's the same with all the, I mean the first thing, the first sign I got of it was, you know, the big push for like women in tech. And like, which was always surprising to me. Cause it was like, well, you guys are discriminating against women. There's not enough women in tech. But like nobody wanted to go into tech. Like going into tech was like a weird ass thing. When I went into it, like I, I got like ridiculed and my friends like, what are you doing that for? Like, you know, like really computers, this and that, you know, it's so hard and like, you know, there's not that much money in it and this and that and the other. And like all you do is work and, and so like going in, in that world and then all of a sudden, you know, Google and Metahit and people are getting so rich and, and then people, all of a sudden it's like, well, you guys are discriminating. You're not letting people in. And it's like, oh, okay, you want in? Okay.

24:27

No one cares about the demographics of plumbing, for example.

25:37

Right.

25:40

Like they haven't. Yes. So now. But the other part about that is tech is actually in a real sense very globally meritocratic because we've got people from just about every country that are participating in tech in some sense.

25:40

Well, that's how we always thought of it, right? Like it's like, oh, there's all these Jews, Chinese, Indians, like all these people are coming from all over the world, they're doing tech. You know, like it's not the, you know, kind of canonical white man or whatever who's doing it, but, but it was all self selected, you know, it wasn't like there was no, no, nobody ever cared. Like there was Never a conversation in any of the companies that I worked at, like, that would get you to think anybody cared what race or gender you were. Like, like it just was never a thing. But nobody wanted, but, but nobody applied. You know, this was one of those things. And look, if you were kind of not Jews, Chinese or Indians, you would definitely feel low on the outside because that's what most people were. I mean, it's just, it worked like that.

25:54

Yeah, well, yeah, the thing about the.

26:45

Midwest too, I guess.

26:47

Yes, that's right. So we, I mean, basically we have many different demographics. But you know, the thing about this is, one thing I've been formulating is the thesis of the Internet is to America as America was to Britain. Like the version 3.0, it's like 10x bigger. And in particular, lots of traditional American values like freedom of speech or protection against search and seizure. You can protect them on the Internet with encryption in a way that is, is stronger than the protections of a law, for example. Right. And so like a smart contract is rule of law. You know, for example, Delaware is melting down, but smart contracts are booting up.

26:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We just actually moved the, we reincorporated the firm into Nevada.

27:28

And that's an opportunity, right, for many countries. I mean, I know you guys are like, are in Nevada now, but the fact that, you know, Delaware was, was a stable jurisdiction for, for decades, maybe centuries, depending on, you know, how long you think the Chancery Court was, was the main event. And so now I think there's sort of a jump ball where if, you know, there's some jurisdiction that could say, hey, guess what, we've got a better DAO law and we're better than Delaware because we allow you to port your company from place to place. We've got the crypto stuff. It feels there's a real opportunity in rule of law integrated with rule of code. Maybe you'd agree with that.

27:33

Well, I definitely think so, because the thing that we've seen in the US over the last, probably mainly over the last five years is we've always kind of a huge strength of the US has been rule of law and the amount of case law law and like the predictability of the law, but that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law, who were judges and, you know, prosecutors and these kinds of things. And so then what's happened in the last five years is, you know, particularly in the Delaware Chancery Court, is the chair of the Delaware Chancery Court just chose to completely Ignore the law and make up her own law. Which, you know, it was quite stunning. You know, like the board of directors didn't have a say and then even the shareholders didn't have a say in.

28:08

How the company, this is the Tesla case.

29:03

Whatever she imagined would be the right thing. And you know, like, it took a lot of us by surprise. It's like, okay, wow, so Delaware doesn't have rule of law anymore, which it doesn't like. It absolutely doesn't. And it's hard to even get to a point where you think it does. But yeah, there was also, if you look at, there was the prosecution of Trump over the real estate deal, which was also like, forget about the law. I, the prosecutor and I, the judge will just go like the law about, you know, what it means to have an agreement with a bank to get a loan is no longer the law. It's what I believe. And because I believe that they shouldn't have given you a loan because I don't like you then therefore you were cheating other people. But it's like, well, if I go to borrow money, I disclose the thing, you kind of evaluate my collateral and I lend you the money. That's not legal in New York or it wasn't legal for that case. So, you know, you get into this, we're in a different world where the law has been very politicized, I would just say. And you know, as a result of that, you're kind of, we're in like unchartered territory a bit. So I do think that creates an opening.

29:05

Absolutely. I mean, yes. My view on that is if you imagine like a house and there's two factions and they're fighting over the territory, that house is now a battleground. And it can have a window blown up here or some guys can take it and shoot down from here. And so all of these formerly neutral institutions are now political battlegrounds. Yeah, one side and then maybe another will, will weaponize, you know, and I.

30:31

Think it's on now. Right. Like, I think we've got, we've, we've gone through a bit of a one way door on this because I think that once one side does it, like, I don't think the other side is like morally higher on higher ground. I think it's going to be the same kind of thing, but in reverse. For sure.

30:57

Exactly. So that is why my view is with crypto, with the blockchain, with the Internet, with these special economic zones, we can potentially rebuild a new Internet first version of those things, which now Puts more of the. Or as much as possible of the rule of law into rule of code so that, for example, the property can't be seized since the private keys, you have to break encryption in order to seize the property. For example, to break the contract, you have to break the smart contract.

31:17

Yeah. If the.

31:50

So what's your thought?

31:50

Smart contract, then a little bit. By definition, there's no room for a judge to say the contract was invalid, which. Which is kind of the case in both the Delaware courts and in the kind of Trump New York real estate case where there was a contract. And that's all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that contract, the state decided the contract was invalid. And. Okay, that's interesting. But if it was a smart contract, then there's no, you know, there's no third party.

31:51

That's right. And, you know, one of the things I think about a lot is when I'm at a tech conference in, for example, Dubai or in Singapore, the vast majority of people there are not American, often not white. They're from Africa, they're from the Middle east, they're from, you know, Asia. But they all trust Bitcoin. They all trust smart contracts. And so that is something which actually addresses the concerns of both the left and the right because clearly people of every race, religion, ethnicity, and so on trust Bitcoin and smart contracts and so on. But it's also fair, certainly to the right, because it's now like it is. It is sort of provably fair, which is new. And that's like a new standard that can, you know, outweigh what, you know, what is, what is no longer thought to be fair by both sides.

32:26

Yeah, this is actually one of my kind of favorite ideas of yours is, you know, they are called consensus protocols, and they are a way of getting kind of mathematically strong consensus to the point where everybody in the world agrees to the penny who owns every bit of the. Whatever it is, $3 trillion Bitcoin market cap, like, that's a hell of a magic trick if you think about it. I mean, get everybody in the world to agree to a thing like that is quite spectacular. And I think that the. I think it's probably the only future that works given, you know, what's. What we're seeing now with the US in terms of the law.

33:17

I think that's so. And the reason. Part of the reason also is everybody from every culture can read code, can diligence code, can do the math, can determine for themselves it's correct whether they're, you Know, Pakistani or Indian, Japanese or Chinese. Right. Democrat or Republican. And so that is, I think part of the goal of Network State is to come up with a series of templates that can sort of restore order from the cloud. You actually, you know, you guys pioneered this in some ways. Like reboot from the cloud. Yeah, yes, right. Like in a data center, you know. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for sure. So restore from cloud backup is kind of how I think about a big chunk of what we're doing, but not simply the state of a server, but the state of a society. You know, we could, we can do that. And you know, an interesting question is how far we can take that. Because you can, you can have like minus 1 and plus 1 bitcoin and you can have a smart contract that governs identity. But actually many other kinds of contracts. For example, you could have a marriage and a birth registry on chain. People have started to do things like that. You can even have a jury of peers where people all turn their keys like Claros and you know, or things are done, things like that. So I think a really interesting question to see how creative we can get, how much of the old world we can replace or at least partially replace with Internet first variants. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

34:06

Yeah, I mean, I think that I think we have to get the infrastructure deployed more broadly first. Like, so I do think step one, you know, the, the, the biggest challenge right now, you know, a big challenge for the world is like we crypto is not pervasive. Like, not everybody has a wallet, not everybody has keys, but it's really important that they do. You know, first of all, just from a security standpoint, like having all of your PII in the cloud and 400 different websites is the most dangerous thing. People are gonna look back on that and go like, that was crazy. That was much worse than driving without seatbelts and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Like that. Like me insane. Like, what are you guys doing? But we have to get that underpinning in order, you know, And I think that needs to be the way that money gets distributed to citizens and the way people vote and the way. And then, you know, when you have that basis, then there's a basis to move the law on chain. But I think it's the trickiness of it now is it's just not pervasive and we really need it to be, we need it to be like the Internet and it's not quite there yet. And then, you know, a lot of that has to do with you know, the kind of assault on it over the last four years from the Biden administration. And so it's fragmented around the world and so forth and so on. But I think like it's definitely the future. The question is just how fast.

35:30

So yeah, I think we have years of years by some measures we have hundreds of millions of crypto of holders at least.

37:13

Right? Yeah, I know.

37:20

And it's funny because it is whatever trillion dollars and it's a big enough deal that it was like a camp major campaign issue and you know, blah, blah. But it's a weird thing where like on a, like I use it actually quite a lot for wire transfers and other stuff. But my view on that is where we have Solana and Base which basically means you could just blast transactions on chain as well as well as other L1s. And we have USDC and stablecoins legal. We have Apple removing its issues where it's blocking a lot of apps in the App Store.

37:21

Hey, Apple is a huge problem, a huge problem.

37:57

Right. And we also have the regulatory assault has been pulled back. So there should be like you know, a spring of a. Of a bunch of stuff that was pent up that should come out there. And then two other things.

38:00

I do think we need more developers back in the field. So one of the is it, you know, the combination of the assault from you know, the administration and the powers that be and then the rise of AI kind of shifted a lot of the software development energy over to AI from crypto and we need to get a lot of that back to rebuild.

38:12

Well, so I actually think AI is going to subsidize crypto in the sense that AI makes everything fake and crypto makes it real again.

38:38

Yeah, right, right, right, right.

38:44

So because how do you know AI is probabilistic, A is probabilistic, crypto is deterministic and that that wallet allows you to digitally sign something to show it came from you and then you can have an, you know, essentially a content ID on everything. And I actually think exactly we're going to have proof of human social networks. I think worldcoin could help boot something like that up, for example. So I think that that is another subsidy here. And then your point on privacy, I've talked with some of the folks in, you know, the Ethereum community, Zcash community on HTTPZ like you know, HTTP HBS HTPZ which is conceptual, whether it's literally HPZ, but it's basically zero knowledge.

38:47

Yeah, zero knowledge. 0ah very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

39:29

It's clever. Right. And so we could. A lot of the privacy that's another major potential subsidy for crypto is the all the zero knowledge techniques that have been built up for not just privacy, but also scaling could be applied. For example, homorphic encryption and secure multiparty. All that kind of stuff is now starting to be something that you might be able to use in traditional web apps with the right packaging of it. And that packaging has to be done. Maybe we can put out some prizes or something to.

39:33

Yeah, yeah. There's definitely work that's going on on the packaging that's getting better. I mean, I write it. The usability of. Of being on chain, you know, that was one of the big two things that, you know, when the assault started that we needed to get better at were performance and usability. And they kind of are related. We made a lot of progress on performance, not as much on usability.

40:03

Yeah. And I think with. Hopefully we can get a lot of that over the next year or so. I think starting to see a farcaster with base and so. And ns.com earned. He was back.

40:29

Yes.

40:40

Let's go.

40:41

It's a good idea then. It's a good idea now.

40:42

Yes. You know what's funny is my view on this is you know how Evan Williams, he did blogger, they did Twitter. Medium.

40:45

Right.

40:53

Has iterations on a theme. And So I think earn 2025, 2026 is kind of like that. It'll be iterations on a theme from everything we learned from six, seven years. Because lots of stuff works now that was only just barely starting to work back in 2017, 2018. Yeah, so we'll see. Okay, cool. All right, so anything. So anything else that people who are building stripe societies. So actually, if you're building stripe society into a community network state, should you come to Anderson Horowitz and pitch Anderson Harwoods?

40:53

Yeah, I mean, I think that for sure we're very interested in it. We're, you know, we're, we're investors in networkstate.com ns.com exactly.

41:26

Yes, that's right. So. Yes, exactly. That's right. So.

41:41

No, we believe in it. We believe in it. We believe in the whole thing from the sovereign individual on up. So we want to be part of it for sure.

41:44

Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Ben.

41:54

All right, thank you.

41:57

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