A Short Story About Private Law | Peter Van Valkenburgh

The Director of Research at Coincenter, Peter Van Valkenburgh joins us for our final talk at the Bankless Summit with a story that hits close to home about privacy and surveillance. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/102?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Start 03:39 What Is This Talk About? 08:16 Lets Talk About Cars 12:46 The Stolen Bike 14:37 Surveillance 17:18 California 24:41 Supercharged Surveilance 27:48 What We Should Be Building ------ RESOURCES Peter - https://x.com/valkenburgh ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Welcome to the final talk of the Bankless Summit, which was a series of talks from speakers around the Ethereum ecosystem, all presented at a one-day event hosted the day after DevCon called the Bankless Summit. Peter Van Valkenburgh is perhaps one of the greatest speakers in the entire crypto industry. He works at Coin Center, defending our rights to hold crypto, have privacy, and retain all the cypherpunk values that spawned this industry. Peter's talk at DevCon, I also recommend watching just because Peter's talks are always so special. He gave a little short story allegory, a story about a town with houses and buildings made entirely of glass with nothing to stop anyone from seeing inside the houses. I'll let your imagination try and guess what that's a metaphor for.

• 0:44David Hoffman?

  This talk that he gave at the Bankless Summit poses a potential inversion of that same metaphor, which leads Peter to argue why we need more of this thing that he calls "private law." I hope you enjoy it. Let's go ahead and get right into this talk from Peter. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere, to trade crypto. Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your hundredth trade in just a few clicks. And there's an award-winning client support team available 24/7 to help you along the way,

• 1:29David Hoffman?

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• 3:11Speaker 01

  I'm a lawyer. I have notes and all this stuff here going on. Yeah, okay. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And water. This is lovely. Thank you, David. Thank you for having me. I hope this is interesting to you all.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  As I said, I am a lawyer, a very Washington DC lawyer. So of course, this talk has to open up with a disclaimer. But you're lucky. This is not my normal disclaimer. My normal disclaimer applies. I am a lawyer, but I'm not any of your lawyers. That's definitely true. Like, do not rely on anything I say. And if you get in trouble, you're on your own. Has nothing to do with me. That's my normal disclaimer.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  The special disclaimer for this one is this is also not part of my day job. My day job is Coin Center. Show of hands if you know Coin Center. Oh, that's really good. That makes me feel good. So Coin Center is a nonprofit based in Washington DC. And we've been advocating folks in DC and Congress and in the agencies and through the courts to understand these technologies better and to give them enough space, just a little opening, to actually grow and build and make the world a better place. That's increasingly difficult because of issues like investor protection and securities laws, and increasingly, increasingly difficult now because of issues like sanctions and North Korea usage of the chain or North Korean usage of things like tornado cash. So that's my day job.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  And we are suing the government, by the way. We're suing the Department of Treasury for its tornado cash sanctions. Thank you.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Our claim is pretty simple, is that the statutes for sanctions laws are important. They're part of our national security. And Congress said, "Here, you have this power, President, to identify foreign persons and property who are, you know, enemies of the state and block Americans from interacting with those things." But Congress said that really clearly, and they said "foreign persons" or "property." And an immutable smart contract, the Tornado Cash immutable pools, is neither a foreign person nor any foreign person's property. So if any of you, show up hands if you're American, or maybe you don't want to admit to it. If any of you donate to Coin Center, an American nonprofit, 501(c)(4), and use the immutable

• 5:24Speaker 01

  pools in order to make that donation private on-chain, there's no foreign person involved. There's no foreign transaction nexus. This is not about national security. That's just about civil liberties. The statute should not empower Treasury to block that transaction, and that's what we're fighting for. We have oral argument in that case this coming Tuesday, so look forward to some new news on our appeal. This is a very long disclosure, or disclaimer, rather. So let me get into the meat of my talk, because David, when he invited me, said, "You can talk about anything you want. This is the Bankless Summit. We want it to be like podcast-y and interesting." And I was like, "Oh, oh, okay, the guideline is interesting." Well, my idea of interesting is hopefully similar to your guys' idea of interesting,

• 6:09Speaker 01

  but it's a little weird, I gotta admit. And so I was like, "All right, well, interesting to me is something that someone's personally passionate about and maybe even angry about." And yeah, I could be passionate and angry about Tornado Cash for a whole half an hour, but I wanted to do something different. So this isn't a talk about privacy law. This is Peter, just as Peter, not Coin Center, talking about private law.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Like the civil court system, the Anglo-Saxon common law, and how we need to accelerate the private law. I actually want more lawsuits. I'm a lawsuit maxi. And that's gonna sound crazy, but hopefully this talk will explain why. I'm seeing some nodding. This is a great audience. I hope you enjoy this. So David told me I could do my talk about anything. So what I decided to do was talk about seed oils, actually. Because seed oils, especially these, the long-chain fatty acids here with a double carbon bond in the middle, it makes it kinky. They screw up our metabolism, right? And they're in everything. They're in hamburgers. They're in things that look like Whole Foods, but actually they've got like canola oil in them. It's because of all the money from the corporations. And this guy, R. F., he's gonna, he...

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Just kidding. This talk is not about seed oils. Seed oils are actually bad, by the way, but this talk's not about seed oils. No, this talks about something else that makes me passionate and sometimes angry. This talk is very personal. It's about my kids and where I live, in Washington, DC. So these two little adorable things are my two kids. And this is their bike, or my bike. And, you know, I kinda agonized about this because I was like, hmm. I see people being afraid to talk about their kids in front of public audiences on the internet. And I see even on Instagram, pretty normie people like put these emojis in front of their kids' faces

• 8:02Speaker 01

  because I guess like fake facial recognition, right? And personal privacy, and I get it, but... And we've got a lot of big problems there. But Jesus, like a couple of emojis is not gonna fix that problem. And so actually, these are my kids.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  They're so cute. And you've probably noticed that the background here is a city. It's a pretty dense area. I don't just live inside the Beltway. I live in the densest neighborhood in Washington, DC, population density-wise. And it's nothing compared to like Bangkok, you know? Or let alone Manhattan or Paris. But I'm determined to stay there in DC because I have to be in DC for my work, for lobbying and bringing lawsuits.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  And I just really don't want to be that person who in order to go get a beer and a burger and hang out with the neighbors who also have kids, where I have to hop in a car and drive through two neighborhoods where I just pretend not to care about those people. I want to like meet my friends at the bar on the corner and meet more friends along the way. Because I'm kind of an introvert, believe it or not. I get these presentations, but like I need to be like, I need to be next to somebody to finally like intimately get to know them. I can't, I won't. If I was living in the suburbs and had to drive everywhere, I'd never see anyone, you know? I'd be too afraid to call them up and be like, hey, let's get a beer. And so I'm really committed to being in this neighborhood in DC, but it's hard. You know, the schools aren't great.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  They're getting better, they're difficult. The school closest to us is probably not great, so that's why I have that cargo bike is to take them to school. And is the crime problem real? Yeah, it's, it's very real and it's kind of getting worse sometimes. Like I said, nothing like Bangkok, my neighborhood, but, but still dense. And this is like, this is the bar we go to. I, I'm gonna keep these smiley faces on the neighbors' kids because that's not my place to share them, but like, and we met because, you know, one of them works for the Federal Reserve, another is a contractor at Deloitte, and I'm a crazy crypto lobbyist. And, but we all have kids and it makes us come together and it makes us happy. And here she is drawing on the like, the, the, the bar gave her the chalk. They're like, go ahead, scribble on the specials, nobody cares, it's a fun bar.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So she's a mischievous like me. And because I live in the city, I hate cars. And I, I see cars as a symbol of something that went wrong technologically about 100 years ago. That is a lesson for how we might go wrong for the next 100 years. This is pretty close to me, I won't tell you exactly where I live. My OPSEC is bad in this presentation, isn't it? This car flipped. You know, and these are the sidewalks I walk on with a 17-month-old who's just kind of like starting to go like this. And so David said I could do this talk about anything. So actually, this talk is all about how cars are evil. We're just gonna watch a bunch of Not Just Bikes videos. Any fans?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  It's just a great YouTube channel. You should watch it. No, I'm kidding. This is the second bad bait-and-switch joke. This talk's not about cars. But in a way, it is. Because as I said, I really want to live in a city that's dense, interwoven, where I'm forced to be in touch with people all the time, learn about their weird things and their cool things, and even have conflict with them and bump into them so we can talk about it and find a way forward together. I don't want to go off and be a mountain man in the wilderness, to use Vitalik's term about people who are gonna fully validate the chain on their own. I want to be a part of a society. And this is what I want to be a part of. Does anyone recognize this?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  This was the engraving cover of Hobbes's Leviathan, the great European political theorist. And Leviathan's always talked about as this like monolith, this power, this evil, evil government that we have to just submit to or die, or be in the wilderness nasty, brutish, and short, struggling for survival and unhappy. There's a way to read Hobbes that isn't like that, though, and I think it's actually what Hobbes meant. This guy, this powerful king, he's not a dude. He's a dude of many dudes and dudettes. Right? Like, like this one here, this is a human. This could be me. And over here's Niraj at Coin Center. And like, over here's Amin Sulaimani.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  And I'm like, I'm happy to be in the same dude as you, because you're weird and I like the ideas and I want to work together. So like, this is what we need to enable to be able to prosper in a system of ordered liberty and move forward with our lives. And I'm worried that we're not preserving this. We're not living up to what Hobbes would have actually expected us as, as political theorists. We're going in two opposite directions away from this. Towards an actual tyrant that isn't made up of the people, or towards a world where we're all alone in the wilderness, nasty, brutish, and short. So let me, let me talk about cars just a little bit more, because I do think they're a good symbol.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  This is how most people take their kids to school, right? And you stick your kid in this car seat and like, "Look at him, this poor guy. He's got like this great view of the sky." And he's gonna sit there, maybe in traffic, for like 20, 30, 40 minutes. And those minutes are so precious when you have a little kid. Their brains are just developed, they're learning how to interact with the world. And what are you showing them? You're showing them the sky. And they just kinda get teleported to their safe destination. They don't walk through the neighborhood. They just suddenly end up in the Montessori school. And the Montessori school might be really good, but no wonder they grow up anxious. They're like, "I don't know how to get from A to B." It's just magic, it happens. I'm in a glass enclosed box, and then I'm in where I'm supposed to go. Like, they've gotta bump into each other.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  The problem with bumping into each other, though, is it's scary as a parent. Like, I really worry about my kid's safety when I take them out on a bike. They much prefer it. They love the fresh air, they love seeing the neighborhood. They love, they love the, the wind on their face. They, they love me behind them with them in the bucket, talking to them. Cause you can have a conversation. But I worry about cars. There's good bike paths, so it's reasonably safe. I worry so much that I bought this 360 camera. Remember you have like an Insta 360 or something, or the newer GoPros? Lenses on both sides, they're great for like skiing and snowboarding and stuff. And I wanna, I wanna mount it on my handlebars. Cause then I can just have a document, it's like a dashboard cam, but it's all around me. Have a record of people who mess with me as I drive.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And that's kind of maybe a silly solution, but it made me feel a little better. I was like, "Okay, well, at least, you know, if somebody messes with me, I could, I don't know, start a website of like shaming people in DC for driving into the bike lane and messing with this bike full of adorable kids. What are you doing?"

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Well, that was gonna be the next slide, was a video of me driving my kids to school. 360, it would've been really cool. It didn't happen. Because as I was writing this talk, this happened.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  This is like a weird, like cement wall in the back of my townhouse. It's like 10 feet tall. It's where I keep my bike in there, and the door's locked.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And that's my bike.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  And this guy is lifting it up out. How he got in there, I'm not sure. I don't have footage of that. And it's like a 150-pound bike, by the way. That's why it wasn't chained up in there, because I was like, who's gonna lift this bike up over a 10-foot wall? Stupid of me, in retrospect. I blame myself a lot for this, but... The bike's gone. He disconnected the camera at this point, because he probably saw it. And then I suspect he just threw it over the side of the wall, and that was the end of it. And you know, this is okay. The bike was insured. I'm lucky that I live in a civil society that's pretty good about this stuff. And the only hard part was explaining to Ada, my daughter, like, "Oh wait, we can't go to school on the bike today. We have to drive, because the bike needs to get fixed."

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I didn't want to have the conversation with her about scary people outside taking our things. Though I guess I'm gonna have to have that conversation someday. I just don't know when. And you know, the police didn't really help. This is my favorite scene in Big Lebowski, where he wants to get his rug back, you know, because it tied the room together. And the cops are like, "Oh yeah, we got a lot of leads. We're gonna have a team of, the crack team of people working on it," you know? And I don't blame the cops in my neighborhood. I like the cops in my neighborhood. They have bigger priorities than my cargo bike. Like, there's violent crime. So what was my response, as a parent, as a human being? I was like, "More cameras." Because I didn't have enough angles to like, ID the guy.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  This is just like, an impulsive response. And you might have noticed the little Nest watermark in the earlier surveillance footage. I was like, "Well, that's wrong." I know that's wrong, because I'm just actually making myself more vulnerable with those cameras, in a certain sense. Like, what if Nest gets hacked? People are gonna learn everything about me. So I built a whole system that I installed hurriedly before coming to Bangkok, because I wanted to like, get it working so I could spy on my house while I'm in Bangkok. And it's got, you know, power-over-Ethernet cameras, so they're all wired. They all go to a switch in my house that runs pfSense routing. And they go to an NVR, a network video recorder. And it's all local. I got like, 16 terabytes of storage, and it just rotates. It's about a month of capacity for two 4K video cameras,

• 17:41Speaker 01

  which is great. And I'm gonna get more cameras. I'm a little crazy, I admit it, but like, this is cool. But, as I found myself kind of impulsively doing this... How much time do I have? I tend to talk a lot. As I found myself impulsively doing this, I was like, "This is wrong." "This is not what a privacy and civil liberties advocate is supposed to be doing." "What am I doing?" "I'm becoming my own worst enemy." "Like, I am the ubiquitous surveillance." "I'm like Walter White, Breaking Bad." "I'm like, 'I am the danger now.'"

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And maybe that's true, maybe I'm screwing up, I don't know. I'm not so egocentric to not entertain the possibility that I've become unhinged. So please, after the talk, tell me I've become unhinged, if you think I've become unhinged. But the thing that's important to me about this is that it's mine. It's cameras I control. Because we have two paths forward in a world where there's ubiquitous surveillance. We can try and ban cameras, and ban the state from using cameras, and ban each other from using cameras, to reclaim the kind of 18th-century privacy that we maybe secretly want. And I do kind of want that. But good luck with that. Or we can admit that there are going to be cameras everywhere, and we should, as private individual citizens,

• 18:58Speaker 01

  race the state at having more surveillance that we control, to leverage and show what we think is important about our lives. Evidence of injustices, of good things, of bad things, of protest movements, of all this. Like, I should have a camera, just a 360 camera, on me all the time. As long as I'm the only one with access to that data, to just prove that if somebody messes me, be they the government, or be they a criminal, I have that evidence. Like, I think that's the way forward. And, to sort of wrap this into a philosophical framework, rather than it just being about this guy whose bike got stolen and then he gave a talk at Bankless in Bangkok. Which is true, this is what this talk is. But to put it in a philosophical framework, to elevate it a little bit,

• 19:42Speaker 01

  here's a way of thinking about it. I came across this article, I'm not endorsing this article per se. It's by a guy who's trying to explain why California liberalism is so weird.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  And why California, and this is like a topic de jour of podcasts, why California's having trouble, right? Why San Francisco has this bad ascendancy of crime and vagrancy, and also potential economic consequences that are very, very bad, like the rising housing prices, and how it's all linked. But he's coming at it from a cultural perspective. Instead of coming at it from like, uh, real politik or something, he wants to make philosophical points. And I found this valuable because he identifies two avatars in cultural history of California that are useful, and useful also in my talk, but useful to explain California liberalism, because he, he, he doesn't use this phrase, but I think this is the most succinct phrase to explain his point.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  What you have in California are NIMBY anarchists. Which is freaking weird. They're like, "Not in my backyard, I don't want the condo built next door." So, nothing like Bangkok where it's just like, "Oh, I had this nice house, and now there's a monolith with weird people giving talks like this next to it." So, it's NIMBY, it's like, "No, never change the neighborhood." But it's also anarchists, like if, if there's somebody doing drugs, right next to the school, you're not gonna call the cops on them. And that's a strange combination, it is. And, um, Leighton here says that it, it could be ascribed to the two founding populations of California, um, as in the, the founding of the American California, not older founding

• 21:23Speaker 01

  populations, or, or immigrating populations. And so, the two founding populations of American California predate the Gold Rush, and they're, they're New Englanders, who were Puritans. And, you know, Puritans are, uh, pretty NIMBY. Puritans are like the original NIMBY, they're like, "Oh, you want to dance? We're just gonna have no dance in England for a while." Like, that's what Oliver Cromwell did. Like, not only must your, your house be painted the right color and have the right pickets, no dancing. And then, the other founding population was the Scotch Irish from the Appalachians. And these, these fine, fine ladies and gentlemen are, are like the characters in Braveheart, you know, that when the English army's going by, they moon them.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  They're like the anarchist vigilante class that just want to be left alone. And these are, in some ways, the, the NIMBY anarchists of California. This is a great thesis, it's, it's a little too cute maybe, but I think it's very real. And what I found interesting about this dichotomy is it's not entirely like complete. And I don't think he would suggest it is. And maybe the answer from populations in history and cultures is that the thing in between the Puritans and the Scotch Irish is actually the thing they were both running away from. It's the Anglo Saxons. It's like, it's England, England.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  And that thing might be actually just really good as a middle way to have an ordered society that isn't totalitarian and top-down. Why do I think that? Because I'm a lawyer. And if you're an American lawyer, the thing that gets drilled into you is the Anglo-Saxon common law. Like, yeah, I do a lot of administrative law now, which is like filing comments with the SEC, but most of my law school times was spent learning about property, torts, contracts, the things that are actually like all of your economic activities. All of those things, all of those economic activities are mediated internationally because it got codified in the Uniform Commercial Code and other international documents.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  They're codified versions of holdings from the Anglo-Saxon common law that go back to the year 1000. Like, there's a thousand years of legal history here to develop the concept of what it is to have liquidated damages attached to your contract. You know, and like, that started with like, well, when we made this agreement for the sheep, you spit in your hand and then shook it. And everyone knows that when we spit in our hands and then shake, that means I get extra sheep, double sheep, if you break the agreement. Like, that probably was a thing, and it gradually grew into something we now soberly like call like liquidated damages. But like, originally, it was just organic practices bottom up, and it became the law.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  So you have this really rigorous system of norms and rules and laws that keep us together as a society, but it didn't come from some sovereign. It didn't come from some king who was just like, this shall be the way now. It's not the Puritans, nobody can dance. And it's not the anarchists, because it's not, we'll retreat and just live alone. No, we're gonna live together, and we need a lot of very rich, bottom-up emergent norms and law to actually mediate that.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Just to hit home on this point, because I'm gonna take this opportunity to nerd out on the law some more. This is one of the earliest cases defining what it is to have an assault. And this all ended up in the criminal law, but it used to be just a civil statute where you'd sue someone for assaulting you. And this is, I don't know enough about Old English to explain why the parties to this lawsuit are I.D.S. et ucs versus W.D.S., but those are the parties. You see the date? We're at 1348, and I can cite this case in court. It has authority still, which is wild. So defendant went to the home of plaintiff at night to purchase wine, so it's a tavern.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Upon finding the door to the tavern closed, defendant beat the door with a hatchet. Like, this person really wanted some freaking wine, right? The plaintiff stuck her head outside and told him to stop. At which point defendant swung the hatchet toward plaintiff, but did not strike her. Very nice. Plaintiff sued for assault. This is the case that is still identified for the premise that you should be able to sue someone for almost hitting you with an axe, but not making contact. Because that's what assault is in the law, is creating the imminent fear of harm. Because just as we'd want to arrest people for harming people, we also don't want people going around being like, "Ah, ah",

• 26:04Speaker 01

  you know, because that's also bad for civilization. And what's interesting about this case is it's so early that there's no discussion of what's actually the most important about the criminal law of assault, which is the mental state of the defendant. Like, maybe this guy just was, he was banging on the wall with his axe, right? And then she opened the door and her head was there, and he was like, "Oh, oh, I was just knocking on the door." Because if that's true, if that's what he was thinking, he didn't mean to scare her, and he's innocent of assault. But that rule about mental state would come about 200 years later. So it was a little before his time, maybe, you know? Poor W.D.S.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  And so what's amazing about the common law is it's this in-between. And what I want to talk about, just to close out, as a like project for future resource research from brilliant people in the Ethereum community, which I'm assuming you all are, because I think you probably are, all are, is we need to supercharge that middle way. Because we, God knows, we know that technology is supercharging the totalitarian nanny state. Technology is even supercharging, to some extent, the anarcho-vigilante hiding in their bunker. You know, over here, we've got ubiquitous surveillance, we've got all the armor of state control. Over here, we've got like, personal desalination technology and Starlink and stuff

• 27:28Speaker 01

  like that. We really need technology that will supercharge the middle. Because that's what actually binds us together, is a bunch of weirdo lawyers who are like, "Yeah, I'll represent your claim. Let's go fight it out in court. It'll be fun." And not only should we fight it out in court, it'll be fun, it'll leave a record. So that a thousand years from now, someone can be like, "Ah, when the DAO got hacked, this happened and this happened, and they decided this for that reason. That's why we still have this tradition of building DAOs this way." Like, it's a bad example. I hope people aren't still talking about the DAO hack in a thousand years, but maybe they will be. And so, how do we supercharge that? I think it's a really hard question. I think, one, is the ubiquitous surveillance point

• 28:08Speaker 01

  I was making earlier. We need more, we need more evidence-collecting tech that is controlled and exclusively in the hands of individuals, rather than the state. Ideally, it wouldn't be made by Meta, like the Ray-Bans here. We need trusted execution environments and zero-knowledge proofs and personal data architecture that allows me to leverage things like AI, to sift through masses of camera data, find the thing that's relevant to me, where I ran into someone and got hurt, or otherwise learned a lesson, and then selectively share that information with somebody else, either just to make a point about how we should be as a society, or to take them to court.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And say like, "Look, I have this one discreet piece of evidence. You can prove that it came from my device and the chain of evidence is good." But then, what does that court look like? Because God knows the current legal system is incredibly slow and costly. Just to file our amicus brief in Roman Storm's case, I had to apply pro hoc vice to appear in the Southern District of New York. It's just a document that says, "Yes, I'm barred in Washington DC. I'd like to practice here in New York just for this one case." $400. It's just a document. I had to set up, you know, you set up your Pacer account, everything you do. Even just reading a page of case law ends up costing you like $3 because they still charge like Xerox copies at Pacer. The public records of our law. So that system is too slow and too costly.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  We need to make it cheaper. And if there's something that hopefully technology can do and do well is take arbitrarily complex systems that are nonetheless fundamentally important and reduce the barriers to entry for using those systems. Make them more appealing, available, affordable to the average person. And so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. Like, private courts that happen with like arbitration, sometimes even binding arbitration. So they still happen in the shadow of the law. I'm not talking per se about like a network state here. The sovereigns are not going away. The big governments are not going away. But we can build a whole layer of peer-to-peer dispute resolution under them

• 30:21Speaker 01

  and only resort to the sovereign when that system fails. Kind of like an L2. That's fine. And if something goes wrong, you have your fraud proof and you go back to the L1. That's what we should be building. And there's some, you know, I have to shout out to Claros, which is one of the early projects in this space that's attempting to do this. I don't know a lot about them and I haven't seen progress from them that makes me think that they've already cracked it, right? So, and there should be like 50 things on this slide. And they're the main one that I've found. We need these systems of dispute resolution that are private, that are low cost, that are accessible, that are technology native. We should be building that.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Now, the other thing that private arbitration and private law doesn't really solve is this. This quote is either from Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle, depending on who you're listening to, and maybe it's from neither, because who knows? "Poverty is the mother of crime." And so you might say, "Peter, this is a ridiculous talk. Your bike got stolen. You're not gonna like, bring them into some distributed justice court to get your bike back." And there's a lot of truth to that, especially because the guy who's hard on his luck enough to pull a bike over a 10-foot concrete wall, he probably doesn't have, you know, many resources. He's probably poor. And that means society's already failed him, which led to this problem. And me trying to go to the court to get like vengeance,

• 31:51Speaker 01

  or to get paid the cost of the bike, or to get the bike back if he hasn't sold it yet, good luck with that. Like, he might not even have the money to pay me. He's what we call in the law "judgment-proof." So we have the big problem here that we also need better social safety nets, better welfare systems. And this, I wanna just, the short point I wanna make is, it's a bad idea for the tyrannical nanny-state to be the source of the welfare system too. Because the only way they're gonna means-test things and get an idea of who deserves a welfare payment is by learning all the intimate details of our lives. And that is just as dangerous as any other totalitarian state then, if it falls into the wrong hands. So we need a peer-to-peer welfare system. I think we need a welfare system, though.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  I'm not an anarchist. I'm not an anarcho-vigilante who's like, "I'll just live in my compound." Because that guy definitely shouldn't be in charge of welfare payments, because, well, he just wants to protect his stuff and would happily shoot someone who shows up in front of his walled compound in the apocalypse of the future, right? I don't want... I want the middle. Build me the middle, please. That's what this talk is about. And, you know, if we take down my metaphors, because they're just avatars. The, um, if we stop talking about the Puritans, the totalitarian nanny state on one side, and the Scotch-Irish, the anarcho-vilantes on the other side, they're actually the same person. It's a flat circle. And that flat circle is embodied by the car.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  So if you think about the little kid in the car, they're alienated, right? Why are they alienated? Two reasons. One, their parents made the kind of anarcho-loner choice to choose as their default mode of transportation this steel-and-glass cage that travels at 60 miles per hour through neighborhoods instead of being social.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  And they're strapped to a chair that's facing the wrong direction and can't even see where they're going because of the nanny state. It's a little bit of both.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  And so I want to leave you, because I think I've got one minute left. Man, I did not expect to time that that well. Just got lucky. I want to leave you with a quote that lives rent-free in my head,

• 34:10Speaker 01

  by Schopenhauer. It's called "The Porcupine's Dilemma", sometimes "The Hedgehog's Dilemma", because we can't tell these animals apart. "One cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order, through their mutual warmth, to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them, 'ouch', move apart. Now, when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated, 'ouch', so they were tossed between two evils, until they discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus, the need for society, which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men's lives, drives them together.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  But their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. And the mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners." Thank you.

• 35:21David Hoffman?

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