Original title: Anatoly Reflects on Solana In 2023 2024
Original compilation: Sharon, Joyce, BlockBeats
Editors note: The last Bankless interview with Solana founder Anatoly took place after the Solana Breakpoint 2023 on October 30. In the past two months, Solana ecological airdrop projects, Saga mobile phones, NFT, memes and other hot topics have demonstrated the development potential of Solana to the community. SOL also climbed above $100 from $36 at that time.
On December 26, Bankless host David conducted an interview with Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana and Solana Labs, to talk about Solana’s gains in 2023 and future development in 2024, including the story of the Saga mobile phone and the BONK belt. Regarding the surprise coming and the development direction of Solanas economic ecology in Anatolys eyes, BlockBeats compiled part of the video as follows:
David: It was great talking to Anatoly Yakavenko. Recently, Solana seemed to turn a new leaf, with Jito airdropping $200 million into over 10,000 different addresses. With new addresses and new TVLs continuing to make breakthroughs, the Solana ecosystem seems to be really recovering. This has caused concern to many in the crypto industry, myself included. So today we will have an unscripted conversation with Anatoly.
David: The progress of Solana seems to be very smooth recently.
Anatoly: Yeah, that was surprising to me and everyone else. After the collapse of FTX at the end of last year, I was mentally prepared at the beginning of this year that Solana would not succeed. I was like: Oh my God, this is what our failure looks like. My mood has also become very negative and there are many risks to the ecosystem.
For us internally at Solana, all the core engineers are saying, no matter what code Im writing, the problem is still there and I still need to get this done. I think thats great, for the vast majority of companies in the Solana ecosystem, they got the fight or flight signal, and most chose to fight, just to build a better product. But it takes a while for people to go from shocked to Alright, people are actually building. I dont know how that happens.
David: We have been 13 months since the FTX incident. And what does dealing with the collapse of FTX mean for the cryptocurrency industry and Solana, specifically Solana? Now what is the impact of all this on the Solana ecosystem?
Anatoly: Double down. The collapse of FTX will cause people with lower beliefs in the Solana ecosystem to leave, and those with higher beliefs to double down. If you survive, its the best thing that can happen to the ecosystem.
We have a very core, hyper-connected, strong team that has a very deep belief and has been building this all year, and they just see it as an opportunity. Now I have more space, less noise and fewer competitors in my product category. This is actually a huge win.
Some people see, oh, this biggest competitor is now spread across five different ecosystems, and they get hardened and they cant stay focused. For those with this energy, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. To see them being rewarded for the hard work they put in, I think thats the best thing that can happen in the ecosystem.
Because the hard work people put in really pays off. This is just like the beauty of Bitcoins PoW, through game theory, it does this anonymously, which is magical. This approach doesnt always work.
Solana’s technical design
David: Compared to other ecosystems with higher throughput, builders had better options at the time. What do you think made people stay?
Anatoly: I think it may be because the technology Solana relies on is very special. The technology it uses is very different from the others and has some unique properties. This is obviously more risky. Just like if you do a bunch of weird optimizations, people will think you are crazy at the time; but after many years, people will find that the technology has matured.
Like those who understand technology deeply, they understand why we make the choices we do and appreciate the technology. In fact, many people feel that it is better to be part of the ecosystem than to operate their own L1. So a lot of people made the choice, I think for technical reasons.
When you have a good team, you have a lot of people around you who want to build. I think one of the best things about Ethereum is that you enjoy talking to Dankrad (a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation) and you feel like, this guy is really smart. This is like the best selling point of Ethereum.
Then we started seeing this happen with Solana. I don’t think of researchers as the cornerstone of Ethereum, but rather as a group of average developers who can hone out really cool stuff.
David: What do you think is the most important element driving the entire Solana ecosystem? Why is it?
Anatoly: That’s a really good question, but also hard to answer because I don’t know. I dont know if we have a super smart thing, I think maybe parallelism, were able to solve problems through failure and experimentation, which I think is a really cool innovation.
We are now seeing basically all these ecosystems with inscriptions on them, and some of them have very high gas fees. People who use blockchain see not just inscriptions, but the entire blockchain being saturated to the point where transactions cannot be completed. This is actually a liveness failure, isnt it?
Lets say, you work for a large Internet company and you have a database. Its true you get all this buzz when everyone wants to order some weird stuff at the same time; but all your other payments wont go through because theres a huge backlog waiting to be processed for some random viral thing .
This happens in every database system, but it took me a long time to see it, to take it apart and realize that this was something that had similar computer science problems in the real world. I relate this to economics to deal with relevant economic issues.
In fact, were lucky that Solana has the idea of an access list thats required for every transaction. We do this for performance reasons and its also the fastest way to build a runtime. But having this information now allows us to do that in every part of the stack and in the economics of it itself.
Like I was thinking, what is the fastest virtual machine? I copied designs that I knew would work in DSPs and GPUs, and the developers would go through a very painful process of telling the system that this was exactly the memory I wanted to touch. I mean, I had the experience, working for a full decade, to know that this was the fastest thing to do, but I had no idea that this was the most critical part of cryptocurrency.
When we see these failures, we have to fix them, or I think the idea of a single global public chain where many shared applications all use the same state is a little bit outdated. If we could, if global gas charges skyrocketed, parallelism wouldnt matter, right?
So luckily we took the right steps, failed in the right way, and the solution was obvious. I think thats probably whats unique about Solana - we went through a long search and I think we found the right answer on how to build a shared permissionless system into the system.
David: What’s the term for this technology?
Anatoly: I think the technical term in the database world is isolation, which means you have transaction isolation. So one transaction is isolated from another. When you implement isolation, you can execute these transactions in parallel and get the exact same results regardless of the order in which they are executed.
The cool thing is that once you do this, once you specify in the transaction that this information is available in the mempool, then your block producer will fill the block with the highest priority fee; and at runtime, the virtual Chances are that all the USDC, UNI, etc. transactions you may be able to enter into a specific market are already saturated.
You cant add anything more to the block, but you still have block space for other things, then the block producer can skip all high priority fees and defer them to the next block, but Then take all low priority charges, but then take all low priority charges that dont touch the saturated pool.
Thats why theres this expense of isolation and localization, because you have this heat and everybodys going to take it and everybodys still greedy. So they fill the hottest market, but they think: I have room, so I dont accept all the other noise and stuff like that. So, thats what we found we had to do so that we could support multiple payment methods, NFTs and DeFi, those are the three big use cases.
I think everyone is probably looking for a way to fit Solana, and I think the gap is closing, but sometimes things that you think can be done in six weeks sometimes take six months for a variety of reasons. Regardless, I think Solana has entered a new phase of its own.
David: After the Jito airdrop, Solana also has more projects that have attracted attention, and governance matters are also in progress at the same time.
Anatoly: Yeah, thats cool. How do we ensure that updates made by Jito will not affect the mainnet, impacts made by the lab will not affect Jito, and will not delay Firedancer, which is why I want to write more documentation. Alignment is now an issue.
How do I get all these engineers, like experts deep in the stack that theyre in, to go deeper than me and make sure that were working toward the roadmap. This is definitely a new problem, which means there are a lot of people trying to move the ship.
David: Just like Ethereum, with all this infrastructure built around Ethereum governance, Solana now hosts all core developer calls every two weeks. What does this coordination infrastructure look like?
Anatoly: The conference call that Jacob Creech ran, there was a validator call, more like an operating model system thing, there was a specific core developer call between all the teams, all the different channels across the different teams were inconsistent, and now theres one SIMD processes, Solana improvement documents, you publish them on GitHub and everyone reviews them.
David: Solana’s archetype is very powerful. There are database designers like you. And now with the whole phase change of Solana, the evolution of Solana into something greater, now requires a new archetype, just like the governance archetype. But I dont know if engineers have a lot of governance skills.
Anatoly: I think when necessary, you start constructing something like a constitution or a motto. For Ethereum, its like the cheapest hardware. How do we make this verifiability as accessible as possible? Everyone who is building is thinking about this.
For me, I try to get to the bottom of each one, how do I make it faster? When you have 50 different options and you have to choose one or the other, which one is more scalable, faster to scale, and has more cores, it forces all the discussion to pick out the permutations of each configuration . I think in a real way, its like a religious slogan that everyone repeats.
David: Along the North Star, this is a long alignment. What is the North Star of Bitcoin in your eyes?
Anatoly: Yes, that’s right. This is not meant to be an attack on Ethereum in any way. I think once your ecosystem reaches a certain scale, you have to choose our outstanding core PTO efficiency points and align everyone in that direction.
I think Bitcoin chose its place and it was the supply cap that limited it. Its like you get a piece of stuff that no one can change, and you can hide in your bunker, like calculating properties in your ledger. Right? Despite everyones criticisms of Bitcoin Core and the community, its still been a success for them. If Solana was in that state, I wouldnt believe it. In my opinion, that would be crazy.
David: What are the more important processes in the Solana ecosystem?
Anatoly: I think the trade-off between fixing bugs and improvements versus faster transfers with Firedancer is a very difficult question because I feel like we have some glaring flaws that havent led to catastrophic failures yet, but things like storage charges Stuff is hardcoded.
As the price itself increases, it becomes more expensive, which affects developers. At some point, the simple solution would be to have a governance, efficient hard fork process to reduce the hard code count until the actual solution is released after Firedancer. Like engineers dont like that because we know its a bug we want to fix.
So like that, bugs need to be fixed and stuff, but you also have to coordinate. So I think a lot of discussions like this are basically around, I know what the problem is, like how do we solve it? But how do we ensure Firedancer ships? In my opinion, reducing single points of failure of the code base is the most important thing right now.
David: How does this become a single point of failure? Is it because of storage costs?
Anatoly: No, there is no single Solana codebase that is a single point of failure, Firedancer is the highest priority, but fixing a problem at runtime requires two teams and us to fix it, even if we know what the problem is. If we want to have a solution, it only takes six weeks to achieve it, but the real answer will come six weeks later. We will act quickly.
Just like we have alignment conversations now, we have a design, we have our own North Star and thats how everything should work. I think for everything that cryptocurrencies have needed this year, I believe Solana has been tuned for my needs.
So my point is we can postpone improvements until Firedancer comes out. But its great to have design discussions now and figure out all the holes, and it would be great if we had done everything we should have done three years ago, but we can do it now and have one that everyone agrees on Very nice design.
The developers at Firedancer are great and they developed some of their own optimizations because they saw something that we were only doing halfway through and they thought, why dont you do this? So you can see, these are cool things that they do.
Cooperation with Jump Crypto
David: When Jump Crypto became a Solana customer, the general response from the Solana community was that Jump Crypto was famous for extraction and did not want these “extraction masters” to build extraction clients. What do you think of this?
Anatoly: First. In the world of finance, exchanges are the extractors. People like Jump Crypto pay a huge price to operate on exchanges, they put their own capital at risk, use their brain power, try to minimize all the information delays and all the noise in the world, find all Correct signals and get them to the exchange as quickly as possible.
I think what these systems that were building, permissionless open markets do is give them equal access. So now as a retail investor, I can compete with Jump Crypto without paying exchange fees and without requiring permission. I think this is cool.
Secondly, I think this will actually compress fees across the financial industry because there will be more competition. I think the other side of it is, its all open source, like a bunch of Apache 2.0 code. Then everyone can access it across the entire ecosystem and cryptocurrency, and all the optimizations they make can actually be applied to Ethereum if theyre interested.
So from my perspective, its just code, it doesnt matter who wrote the code. What I think is more interesting is that Jump Crypto can influence the direction of Solana, creating an environment that can be better.
David: Like governance?
Anatoly: Yes. I dont think governance will be equity weighted, but I think core engineers have a lot of influence, just like Linus has a lot of influence on Linux, even though he is just one person, he can make a lot of big designs decision making. Jump Crypto could push Solana to a place where it provides an advantage in some way to existing businesses like Jump and Citadel.
As another example, what will the technology choices look like? I think this is something the community should take seriously. When I graduated college, I loved trading and all these small exchanges, but the connectivity was poor, their data was inaccessible, everything was terrible. I dont want this to happen again. Innovation comes from people who dont know theyre competing against the best.
David: The silos of exchanges are being broken down and becoming more decentralized and open. Do you think that now the walls around the market have come down and players are now the new leaders?
Anatoly: If exchanges are doing real work, picking the highest priority things and pricing them right, why shouldnt they get some rewards? As an amateur like me, I can do that job too.
The world is so big, and I always believe that if I work hard enough, I can always find my own advantage, that I can compete with them in a specific area of the market, and then beat them, and then grow my business correctly, Finally getting to their level, I think its just like normal competition, as long as access is free and open to everyone around the world. I think thats great, at least I dont see a fundamental problem, or like a problem that defeats the purpose of an open permissionless network.
David: I guess the question is like increasing the size of capital, but how quickly can you get capital? Do the best traders on Solana earn more returns faster than the average trader on Solana? If the gap is large, then we would be concerned. But if thats not a huge gap, then based on what youre saying, like at some point theyre doing real work on changing Solana to map the state of the real world, theres value in that.
Anatoly: Well see. I think like people who are trying to think about how to capture, my view is, its like the question, how do we capture MEV in a protocol? People are trying to find solutions and I think its unsolvable.
So you have approaches like Ethereum, which runs on a slow chain through cryptoeconomics and auctions; I think youll see Solana take an approach thats like physics, how do we make a chain so fast, So that it is physically impossible for similar information to travel around the world?
And then you have localization, like some kind of fairness enforced over physical distance. For example, I can submit my transaction to the block producer closest to me, which means that the amount of information they can evaluate is only local to me, and no matter what happens, it does not fully control the global state, so we can reduce latency.
If we can do that, it would be cool to see which one is better, maybe Solana is worse, and well see what happens.
David: I think this is a very solid way to differentiate strategies between Ethereum and Solana. Ethereum tries to maximize protocol value capture, while Solana tries to surpass MEV. But I think the Solana theory or Solanas strategy is that these latency games are going to happen in one part of the world. These games wont be global games, but local games. And right now I think everyone thinks were taking Solanas ecological buzz to new heights. Does the influx of new users in the future scare you?
Anatoly: At STEPNs peak, we had 2 million active accounts. What Ive learned from this is that users like these who are super financially incentivized, if theyre not doing activities like creating daily value or anything like that, they have a steep entry peak and then decline very quickly.
These are like economic explosions. Whats interesting is that I think these users are basically like crypto users already. Once someone figures out what to do with any wallet, they can switch relatively easily, their mental model is already built for it.
Thats what I think is a key part of the growth of the crypto industry, is how many people figure out the mnemonic phrase, just like the total number of addressable users. And then after that, the switching cost of installing the extension is very low. So you can see all the pieces are there.
If the only ones we find are speculative, financial incentive-like games, I dont think its going to last. But if we find some real-world use cases that create value for these users, they will be stickier and will stick around. I think the latter remains unproven. My hope is that this bull cycle will gain some traction as it does with real world applications, like payments and things like that.
Just like Helium, I dont think the users who use it will like the crypto users, they are users of the Helium Network. You can get the idea of tokens used to create map quality, at least enough to add them to a wallet and get a mnemonic phrase.
But, I want something like Venmo. Why cant we have a global crypto Venmo? Everybody sends each other real currency, euros, dollars, and it works something like this.
So thats my biggest story, like I see the numbers and Im glad its happening and Im glad the network isnt crashing and the charges arent skyrocketing. This is already a tribute to good engineering. But we need to see real-world use cases, which I think are sticky and users wont leave.
David: Do you have a different perspective on how far the crypto industry can go in terms of its utility? How would you define Solana’s place in the discussion of optimism and pessimism about cryptocurrencies?
Anatoly: I definitely think its super optimistic. I feel like if the western world doesn’t accept the value of the cryptocurrency industry, then it’s like useless and no one will care. The only reason to have a high-throughput, low-cost chain is that it is adapted at the consumer level for everyday use by the average voter.
So I think Im very optimistic, I would say I think legally its going to be basically established that were going to have some way of operating and launching decentralized systems and all of these things are going to happen and every bank is going to have one Stable coins.
But if I also think in that world, a narrative like Bitcoin is very important because its kind of a forced issue. And if the cost of shutting down Bitcoin in the Western world is Orwellian, requiring mass surveillance and disruption of ordinary peoples lives, then thats politically too difficult.
I think they could shut it down, but if it requires so much political capital, such a huge invasion of privacy and personal freedoms that its not politically feasible, that means it wont be shut down. Because I believe we still live in a pretty representative world.
David: Solana is one cycle behind Ethereum, and Ethereum is one cycle behind Bitcoin, so if the trajectory continues, there will generally be enough stablecoins on Solana and enough applications that it is possible to write There are vulnerabilities with high TVL. Do you think this is a sign of the end of the bull market?
Anatoly: A year ago, many people left Solana, but some people stayed to continue building. People had nothing else to do during this period, for whatever reason, I think probably because it was launched at the worst possible time.
I think everyone is going through a shared trauma at the same time, and everyone is looking online for the next scary news, like no one has anything else to do, like all you have is this dogecoin. I actually have no idea how this stuff goes viral, Im an engineer.
Saga mobile and BONK
David: Why do so many people in the Solana community have BONK?
Anatoly: They do like to conduct large-scale airdrops in all NFT communities. Solana users attach great importance to NFTs, and I also bought NFTs and the like. So they did a really good job of screening who they were and the whole distribution process was not zeroed in on. We survived that moment long enough for developers to start building more products, just like they continued to build integrations into every DeFi market, every NFT project, and continued to talk about it so that the community wouldnt die. Although I dont know the real reason, the only thing that makes sense to me is that the developers released a bunch of products that attracted users.
David: But the BONK and Solana ecosystems overlap very much.
Anatoly: I think this is because Solana developers and NFT developers are two different groups. But theyre all like building web tools and a bunch of fun stuff for people to use. There is some overlap between them, but there are clearly two different types of developers. I think BONK connects the two.
We figured everyone got this phone and getting apps onto the big app stores was a pain. But if our mobile phones have things like NFT airdrops, then people who get the mobile phones will spontaneously become people who care about these things.
This means developers can publish their application into a target-rich environment, even if it is small. So we like to talk to every NFT project, and we talk to the developers of BONK. In addition, the price of BONK will exceed the price of Saga phone.
During a bear market, no one cared about cell phones and BONK was worthless. We were selling 20 to 30 phones a day and it seemed like we were losing them. Because most DeFi protocols dont acquire 20 to 30 users per day, you need to sell 20,000, which takes years to acquire.
David: Was the Saga phone failing at that time?
Anatoly: No, we had a team and we didn’t let it fail. The team was there, we figured out how to handle it, get people excited about it, and we spent the minimum amount of money to extend the runway for the team. After Breakpoint, our sales increased by 2-3 times. We were selling 50 to 75 Saga phones a day, which was good, but still slow.
Then BONK started to take off and then people realized that the BONK airdrop was now worth half the price of the phone and I think people looked at it like, the phone was actually half price or if you had some BONK you could sell it by phone and Makes the phone even, so you still have to spend money to get the phone.
So, even if its worth $10 or $20, its going to take 10 days to deliver. Rationally, I dont think anyone would say, Im going to get 10% more BONK in 10 days.
It never caught on to where it made sense to have a phone that cost twice or 10 times the price. Its probably 10 to 20% more. So enough people got it, or were excited about it, that it sold out. In one day, we sold about 15,000 units, which was weird. My previous assumption was that I might sell 50 or 70 mobile phones in a day. Like I think we sold in the beginning, we sold a couple hundred units on the first day. Interestingly, I said on Laura Shins podcast before that we only sold 2,500 units. Three days later, we sold 15,000 units. People treat it as a kind of NFT, a club, and now there are developers publishing applications on it.
David: How does airdrop work for each Saga phone?
Anatoly: If we ship another phone, itll be a different device, but youll have a different Genesis token, like a different product, there are 20,000 Sagas that have been built, the production line has Closed, we cant even ship anymore. We have to build another product and figure out how that thing works. The Saga phone is sold out, and thats not a failure. But now I think we have to figure out what to do next.
But the thing is, if you have an app store, enough developers will ship to Lightning where the probability is 100%. Its really cool to have an app store thats crypto-first, where we own our own destiny, were not beholden to Apple and Google, and you can do anything. This is the biggest unlock I think were likely to have. So if possible, it would be really cool if you could get users to actually enjoy buying the phone and use it for things like cryptocurrency.
David: What do you think the odds are that the crypto industry will launch a breakthrough consumer application in the next two years, Solana or not?
Anatoly: Im an optimist, so Id say 90% -95% probability. I think the next two years are going to be critical and you should see a legitimate consumer application emerge.
If it persists, I have a theory. Like, if Im paying my coach $50 an hour, Id rather run using the incentives I get from dopamine hits, kickers, trades, etc. if those incentives are essentially equivalent to what I get from the coach. At the same time, certain groups of people continue to use STEPN.
But I don’t know, it feels like maybe that didn’t quite come to fruition. But one theory is true, just like the value I get from it is exercise, the motivation I get from it is I can play crypto games like NFTs and tokens. Because its very attractive to the brain. Like if I wake up and look at the prices and competitiveness, I spent countless hours on this and not random resources like Ultima online deals, no one cares.
Putting that same stimulus on someone and forcing them to exercise is a value-add to the world. But I dont know if that doesnt seem to be working. So I dont know if its like a money-making game, learning to make money or something like that.
Economic Ecosystem on Solana
David: Lets turn to Solana economics because weve seen some things like Solana fee increases, and actually you want it to be pretty sustainable. For example, when I got into Ethereum, the monetary policy was that we would issue 5 ether coins per block, then it was changed to 3, and then it was changed to 2. Then EIP 1, 5, 5, 9 were introduced, and then the previous 8, just like the last update. If you had to draw the Solana arc in terms of economic sustainability, where are we on that arc?
Anatoly: I think the difference is that a group of validators compete on commissions. So for at-risk users, they choose the lowest commission validator, they basically experience no dilution, right? Like it, but there is some dilution since many tokens are staked. So these people are effectively paying something like a fee to transfer wealth from everyone to unstaking, and the validators take a little bit off of it, and its hard to determine how much the users are affected, so basically its like a two-day epoch.
Inflation is a problem and it is diluting some funds. But how much exactly? I think theres a lot of nuance, and certainly part of the obvious cost is hardware. So like every validator, every RPC, all of that has to be paid with real money, just like you pay for electricity to mine blocks, I think for the sustainability of the network, the fees that you get from running it have to cover The total cost of the hardware, I think the cost right now is probably 50 million a year, the cost of the hardware depends on the provider, all of these things are probably between 10 and 20, so I think the cost has exceeded the cost of the hardware, so you could say It is sustainable.
David: What is the global cost of maintaining the network?
Anatoly: It depends on how you calculate it. But if you choose the cheapest, if you choose the cheapest, say 350 per month, and then you multiply that by 3,000 nodes, the actual result is running 10. But people arent going to accept that there are a lot of different infrastructure costs, and no one wants to pay the more expensive ones, right? So it could also be twice as much, but there are a lot of nuances.
So how you calculate all this stuff is complicated. All costs are negative. I think the positives outweigh the negatives right now, but theres a lot of nuance here, but I think ultimately these networks have to capture more value to compete with tech companies, like market capitalization profits. If we have to really like compare these two things, unless you think theres some other reason to think these things are more valuable, I dont think so. I think ultimately you have to create value for the world.
David: Regarding the burning of tokens. It seems like the whole point of Ethereum is that you burn it because it is money. From a Solana perspective, you want to minimize it because Solana is like an application platform.
Anatoly: I don’t care about token burning. My concern is that fees like this dont skyrocket for no reason. So the problem with Solana is, because its not one, we dont have a second layer, like the second layer is not on the roadmap. You can build a second layer in Solana, the whole point of a single unified state machine is that you dont need them. If you have a single, if you have defi arbs, it increases the cost of accessing the network, which has to be bid higher than the cost of defi arbs, which means the payment has to have a separate application chain.
If you cant solve the problem of isolation on an economic level, then Solanas premise doesnt work. But I dont think you need burning to prevent weird spam attacks on validators like spam itself, and pricing a bunch of stuff for free to users, 1, 5, 5, 9 is actually very good at preventing that Smart approach. But I dont think you need to burn money to get value.
Anatoly: Youre going to have a completely different environment in the future, if something goes wrong with Rashit and everything goes down and instead of $1 you dont actually have a hedge and cant issue more, youre like in a death spiral if you issue More and you die, if Ethereum shouldnt be asked whether we burn Ethereum or give it to some validator or a public good, we should convert it to USD and be completely tied to Ethereum like others Keep it as a separate asset in case something goes wrong.
David: But you cant do that because these are trustless economic systems, and like the Terra Foundation and the Luna Foundation, I think well have Bitcoin and well deploy it whenever we need to defend the peg.
Anatoly: Youre not targeting code to defend the hook, the goal is to pay engineers to make it better later, but thats a completely different thing. We built cryptography, a tool that 10 billion people in other parts of the world use to coordinate decision-making. Much more difficult than burning where to go. The whole point of cryptography, which is what were building, is to connect 10 billion people, right? So they can all immediately coordinate decisions on a global scale and do more powerful things than fund open source software.
David: I think there might be an opportunity to find governance. So do our best to find a system that resonates completely with everyone. However, there is a saying that democracy is the worst form of governance, except for all others. Like one of the best forms of governance is no governance at all. Thats Ethereums point, you dont interfere with block rewards.
Anatoly: Im not against or recommending anyone try this on Solana because its too complex.
David: Okay, so I think thats like a big difference between the Ethereum view and the Solana view, I actually think that on this part of the spectrum, like what Bitcoin represents, currency is an application that continues, which As part of the bankless theory we’ve been working on, we and cryptocurrencies are here to “make new money.” Does Solana feel the same way?
Anatoly: Disagree. When people start talking about things like FTX, its like everyone has an instant immune response that property rights are sacred and will never change no matter what happens. And I think it comes from the ecosystem. So I dont think Solana can do that either.
David: Believe in property rights because thats like the core tenant of cryptocurrencies. If you have no property rights in your block space, what is the use of your blockchain? But I dont think the Solana community is interested in money, the concept of money, and its role in the world.
Anatoly: I think thats probably a very nuanced way of looking at it. But I dont think I think I like the idea. Charging a fee and then spending it, at least to me, goes against my idea of property rights and feels like Im being taxed and then everyone else benefits as well.
David: So I agree with that, like Ethereum takes a fee and then burns it, rather than just deciding that this public institution is better than that public institution, it feels good because no ones rights are being violated because everyone All are treated equally.
Anatoly: Correct. I think most of the Solana community would agree with this sentiment, as we all love Lark libertarians, right? But I think the reality is that there are more complex things in the world and you want to solve them, and I think cryptography offers a way to really change governance and achieve all of our dreams in a post-crypto world. If we are too afraid to do it ourselves, then the world will not be able to do it.
David: Do you like to think of this as a thought experiment worth thinking about, or do you really think we can build a monetary system that has governance as a component? One thing I see in the broader discussion is that Solana members will not emphasize the role and importance of currency in the same way that Bitcoin does, while a large part of Ethereum certainly does. Like we asked you, what is soul currency? You will say that soul is not money. For us, Im like, this is the problem. We start there and expand outward. But if your basic chain doesn’t turn into money, then you can’t expand outward.
Anatoly: Like human intelligence, Im very optimistic, human intelligence, human kindness, their ability to, like, make good decisions as long as theres enough communication. I think this is a very difficult problem to solve and I hope someone can solve it.
