Episode link:
https://www.citizencosmos.space/jaekwon

Episode name:
Jae Kwon, Cosmos, Censorship & Humanity.

In this episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast, the host interviews Jae Kwon, the founder of Cosmos and author of the Tendermint white paper. Kwon discusses various topics, including censorship, resistance systems, truth, misleading narratives, and division in society. They also delve into the importance of discourse, fiction, semantics, the power of history and languages, and smart contract systems.

Citizen Cosmos
Good Space time yall. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I talk with Jae Kwon, founder of Cosmos and the author of the Tendermint Whitepaper. Along with Jae, we talk about censorship resistant systems, truth in instincts, misleading narratives and division in the society. We also discuss humanity, the importance of discourse, fiction, semantics, the power of history and languages and smart contract systems

Jae Kwon
We have to create alternative financial systems because the system we're living under seems captured. It feels more like the wormhole between our physical world and the completely different kind of world. What makes a smart contract system good is going to be the language itself. It's really an ongoing battle of getting the truth out so that the things that were hidden become known and compellingly known in a way that is digestible to people so that they can say, Oh, that's crazy. That's actually a real.

Citizen Cosmos
Before we rocket off into today's podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress Dao has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub. This work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification, tools for online governance and polishing the Bostrom Dex adding MEV protection. New web front and bring in indexing of chain swaps.

Citizen Cosmos
To try Bostrom head now to over Cyb.ai. Hi everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. And today I have the founder of Cosmos Jae with me on the show. Jae Hi. Welcome. Hello.

Jae Kwon
Nice to be here, Serj

Citizen Cosmos
It's a pleasure to have you. I mean, it's a bit weird that our podcast with the name Citizen Cosmos only has you three years after the existence, but I guess that's a problem that we sort of solved earlier.

Jae Kwon
It's entirely my fault.

Citizen Cosmos
Jae Could I ask you to introduce yourself in the way that you would like to be introduced for the audience, For the public? Anything you want to say about yourself?

Jae Kwon
Well, I'm first and foremost programmer who wanted to create a platform to better our humanity, and I got interested in Bitcoin in 2013 and decided to commit my life to it 2014 because of financial crises that happened twice in my life. So, you know, through my parents, I've experienced that both in the IMF incident in Asia and when I was living in Korea, but also during the 2008 housing crisis and I realized we have to do something.

Jae Kwon
We have to create alternative financial systems because the system we're living under seems captured. And then along the way, I discovered a lot more about how the world works and the and said world is what it is and decided to go even further. Let's create beyond financial platform to create a censorship proof social systems on the blockchain and so on.

Citizen Cosmos
This is something that straight away points me to A couple of questions I've prepared though. I mean, I'm kind of the person who prefers to go with the flow, but I'm not going to lie. I have some prepared and one of Those questions is going to be completely probably out of the blue right now. But since you said financial crisis and you mentioned a couple of things, I mean, I probably should go into the intro, but before we even go into your intro on technology and how you became a programmer, I remember a few years ago something that made me I mean, I don't have icons.

Citizen Cosmos
I don't have people who I think I should pray to or religious. But that is something you did a couple of years ago, which I must say personally really impressed me. And that was your speech about the world is on fire. Right. And I really connected with you then, like a lot of the values that I live for and a lot of the values that I have been building and I have been also in blockchain since 2011 that I've been doing.

Citizen Cosmos
You have said there and I want to ask you, what was it what was it for you? Why did you decide to do that speech? I don't know if the listeners out there have heard it, but if you haven't, there will be no links to this podcast episode. But regardless, right now, why did you decide to say those words?

Citizen Cosmos
What was it for you?

Jae Kwon
So that was in relation to the Virgo Project, the code name was Virgo. And the point is that it goes beyond Cosmos. It's part of Cosmos, but it's also beyond it because it's not about financial systems per se. It's more about censorship Prof communication, social systems that we need. What happened was it seemed like Cosmos was going on a good path.

Jae Kwon
Everyone knew what they had to do and everyone was on board of the cosmos. So I figured, okay, this is a good time to consider. What else should I focus on? Because I'm much better at starting something based on needs than necessarily than everything else. Just best at starting something. So within the company, AIB, I decided to create a new project or department called Virgo.

Jae Kwon
The idea is to enable social applications, in particular. There was a project called Dither, which we abandoned for reasons, but we're coming back to now with gno land and Dither was intended to be an alternative to Twitter and but okay, I'll talk about why I decided to kind of sit for like a whole month and just meditate on what's wrong with the world, because there was a lot and I didn't understand what was going on fully, but I could see where we were headed.

Jae Kwon
It was pretty clear just browsing the news and what the narrative wasn't public, that we were being driven to division or being fed a lot of lies. Whoever it is, whatever it is, various forces were causing us to be divided. And meanwhile we have we're not addressing the issues in a way that is constructive to humanity. So at the time, I was particularly concerned about the climate issue and environmental issues.

Jae Kwon
There were fires raging around us, and now I have a slightly different theory on what exactly happened there. But it was clear that we as a species don't have our shit together and that we're at a precipice. We're at a fork in the road, so to speak. If we can figure out our our junk, if we can figure out how to move forward together peacefully and constructively, then we would be able to expand beyond even our planet.

Jae Kwon
Then we will be able to touch the cosmos, expand out there. But if we were to try to go and the path that we currently are led by capitalism and led by all these forces that are more selfish and less concerned about the long term, then we would end up destroying ourselves, that we would end up wasting an opportunity to escape the solar system and go beyond because our infrastructure is largely based on fossil fuels and we've spent a lot of it extract a lot of that, and our infrastructure is crumbling now.

Jae Kwon
And if we then enter into a war which we have and this war continues on, then then we would destroy our infrastructure and we will not be able to get back to the point where we can explore space and so on. That was a big concern and realized this is the fork in the road for humanity. We have to get our stuff together and in order to do so, first we have to figure out the truth.

Jae Kwon
We have to have constructive conversations among different, diverse factions of society. And instead of just butting heads and being led by those who want to sow divisions, we have to create a system that enables constructive discourse despite our differences. That insight I learned just working on Cosmos when I realized that even within our own ecosystem and even within the company all in bits at the time, there were factions and people were not talking to each other.

Jae Kwon
It's so easy to say, Oh, like that group or that person is evil, you know? And then to construct a narrative that's, you know, half true or false and or to be misled by rulers and then to stop communication. And it became clear that this was a big factor enabling division. And that but once we start communication and trying, then, you know, it's really easy to resolve things.

Citizen Cosmos
It's astonishing, in my opinion at least, how people underestimate the power of censorship because we are social creatures, we have to communicate. And when people censor, it's astonishing how people underestimate how many people it actually leads to be killed at the end. And there are so many examples. I think, in history, but not to go into my own views before I ask you questions, to open up a little bit about what you just said, I guess I'm going to do one boring question, which I apologize for, because I did jump ahead like with with the whole like, boom, let's go straight into it just to understand you a little bit better.

Citizen Cosmos
And I'm going to make some assumptions here. Correct me if I'm wrong. Now, you mentioned that through your life because you had some financial crisis that you went through with your family. And as far as instead, not only with the family did that essentially lead you to the programing of the question is sorry is how did you get to blockchain?

Citizen Cosmos
Not to programing, but to blockchain. I know the 2014, I remember that paper, I remember it very well. But still, what Path led you there? Was it the financial crisis? Or was it seen the world being fucked up or what led you there?

Jae Kwon
Those interested in programing and emergent systems, decentralized systems. And I remember university when I was still going to Cornell, my professor was Emin Gün Sirer and he started an avalanche and one of the projects he had us do was to create, recreate a portion of a free net and other decentralized systems. And that's when I really got interested in decentralized systems and programing.

Jae Kwon
And for a while, you know, I always wondered what would it be like to create a metaverse? I was just kind of interested in creating metaverse because as a concept, it's really fascinating to have something that is real, as real as an object, you know, something that takes force to destroy, difficult to destroy that’s how real it is.

Jae Kwon
And it affects how our world intersects with our world. And yet it's not physical. So I had these interests and then 2008 happened, and then I started looking for alternative financial systems. I went to conferences and looked at other projects that were related to finance, alternative finance. I looked into time banks, alternative local currencies and studied a bit about them.

Jae Kwon
But it was pretty clear that they weren't catching on as much, right? I mean, of course, local currencies, some local currencies have been around for a long time with ... and so on. But there wasn't something that was really going to change things until I discovered Bitcoin. You know, when I first saw Bitcoin, I was like, Oh, this is cool, this might work.

Jae Kwon
But it wasn't clear that it was going to work until 2014, during the bubble, yet another bubble. And then I realized, well, this is a system that is going to work. It's going to change the world. So that's when I decided to commit to the crypto space at first all in bits. The software company. The first thing I was working on this was like way back when it was just me I was going to create.

Jae Kwon
I was working on a Bitcoin crypto exchange called Fort Knox FTNLX and the source code is still up. It's kind of cool. It's a pretty simple exchange, and I think the cool thing about it was that it also had proof of assets. So there's there's actually a Merkle root to the assets of all the Bitcoin UTXO’s in this exchange I think more exchanges should use published things like that.

Jae Kwon
And then I was learning regulations, I was learning about how money transfer laws work and how you need to place a need to post a bond in order to participate in this financial system. That's where the bonding idea came from for me as I was learning the regulations around how to launch a crypto exchange, I started to learn concepts that eventually led to proof of stake.

Jae Kwon
Anyways, one day, as I was just about to launch this exchange, I was just browsing on the internet and found some white papers from decades ago that described how to create byzantine fault tolerant algorithms without proof of work. And and everything kind of clicked and I said, okay, forget this exchange. This is way more important because we need a world with many chains, not just one Bitcoin.

Jae Kwon
So I decided to commit to tendermint the rest as I think more familiar.

Citizen Cosmos
It's a good thing you didn't decide to call the exchange FTX because the name was taken. And the thing is that I don't go that.

Jae Kwon
Yeah, no, no, no, not it wasn't FTX, it was FTNLX.

Citizen Cosmos
But listen, I have a kind of a personal question for you that well, it's a personal non-personal. It's not personal about you. Personal for me. I mean, you mentioned the metaverse. And there is one thing I hate about that word, and the only thing I hate about the word metaverse is what the marketing companies try to sell. That is, to me, the metaverse and the Internet are more or less a synonym.

Citizen Cosmos
There is some variations, but I would like to know your opinion. Could you agree that the words metaverse and the internet are more or less a synonym of would you say those are two separate entities?

Jae Kwon
Understand what you're saying? It makes a lot of sense to call the Internet the metaverse, and there's aspects about it that is its own universe. I guess it's a little different when you have BFT systems that are securing this alternative digital universe because it's more real in that sense, in the sense that it's not subject to the laws or physical universe as much, even though it is because albeit these systems are still vulnerable to a degree, but it feels more like the wormhole between our physical world and a completely different kind of world.

Jae Kwon
So I see both sides. I guess a lot of people think of the metaverse as being 3D Meta. Facebook changed their name to Meta and then they tried to commit to the metaverse. But I see it in different kind of way. I think that the more plausible and real, more real metaverse is one that's based on symbols like a digital world.

Jae Kwon
It's all about symbols. If you imagine Ethereum or the smart contract system, we're creating like gno land, but it starts to feel really more like its own universe, full of symbols and logic and code. I think on top of that as a platform, we can build 3D systems, an interactive systems. But to me the fundamental basis of a metaverse will always be language itself.

Citizen Cosmos
Semantics is a super powerful thing, right? It's crazy how our brain applies so much things to just the simple words, right? Which is just simple connection of lines. And then, I mean, try calling somebody an asshole on the street, right? And then for straight away, you know, it's not going to be passed. So you see how semantics works, right?

Citizen Cosmos
And second, it's amazing Jae I have a question to you. I was going to ask it later on, but I'm going to ask it now. I know that religion plays a big part in your life, and it's fair enough, in my opinion, in a world that you're speaking about the decentralized world, the decentralized metaverse, there is no place for such sentences as let's destroy the bank, so let's kill all the religious people, or let's burn all disease, because it's not a decentralized world.

Citizen Cosmos
A decentralized world is what people have choice. So I know that religion plays a big part in your life. I even know that you tweeted about like the chosen, the Christian series. I did actually go and check it out for it was I was curious. I have a weird question for you. If today you could change the world, politics and religion, what would be the first things you would change in the world in terms of the political situation, which is also important to you and the religious situation in the world today?

Jae Kwon
Oh.

Jae Kwon
Yeah. I mean, a big part of the motivation for Virgo as a project was not just environmental issues, but also seeing that, oh, there are these factions of religions, not just within the Abrahamic religions, you know, Christianity, Judaism and, you know, Islam, but also others too, and came clear that this may be and this is a large force or a large obstacle to uniting humanity towards constructive action.

Jae Kwon
So in short, what I realized was we need to come to a conclusion or some progress in the narrative of religion to bring factions together so that we stop fighting each other. And I realized that all that is needed in order to accomplish that. It's not all but the major thing that we can do that we're not doing is just to help elucidate the truth of the matter, because in reality, these religions are not especially the Abrahamic religions, they're not working against each other.

Jae Kwon
They are actually creating a joint narrative together with a plan to come to a resolution. And if enough people see what that plan is and how it's supposed to come to a resolution, then perhaps we can get over the stumbling block of factions or religion. That's really the motivation for me as to why I talk about religion, because I start to see what could be and I start to understand how religion was being distorted systematically in order to create and so divisions and to confuse people.

Jae Kwon
Like most of all, we think about and know about Christianity. It's not even what I would call true Christianity. And a lot of people would disagree with me. But I would say from my research, it seems like the institution of Christianity had maybe always been subverted, even since the year like around 180 or so. But the problem is it's hard to talk about any of this stuff without appearing like a kook, a crazy person, and without attracting negative attention.

Jae Kwon
It's so easy to just say, Oh, he's just talking about religion he is conspiracy nut, he's insane or whatever. So, you know, it's pretty clear we all need a different approach to this, right? So maybe what I need to do is disassociate myself from, you know, this idea of what could be. But in either case, I think it's going to happen.

Jae Kwon
It has to have.

Citizen Cosmos
I think the words conspiracy and a definitely were not in my head when I was asking that because, I mean, today it's enough to I mean, even if you talk about, you know, two years ago about COVID or anything, you would be like, oh, you talk about aliens, you’d be a conspiracy nut right? But come on. It's like I think the label conspiracy nut is being labeled on anything by anybody who feels offended by something because of their semantics.

Citizen Cosmos
And then there is a question there in the chat about the religion and what is the Abrahamic religion called that unites all the religion? It's called ..... This is just for the listeners out there. I don't know if you heard about that, actually. It's a religion that recognizes all the nine monotheistic religions.

Jae Kwon
I know a little bit about it. I don't know enough about it and say I haven't seen from Bahaism enough about the points that I have seen about Christianity and the conflict and the controversy there. I can't say that Bahaism has the answers. I haven't looked at it enough. It's possible. I would say, though, that probably nothing that ends with ism has all the answers, right?

Jae Kwon
Like no isms is kind of what I go for. There's various denominations of Christianity that have like portions of their truth, and some are more true than others. But like, as far as I can tell, nobody has all the truth. It's just difficult to arrive at.

Citizen Cosmos
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the truth is very much about the perspective, right? I mean, look at Socrates and what happened to him, Right. For asking questions. So, Jae, if we were to play that game a little bit more, I mean, I know this is going to be a bit more controversial, but what if you could they could single handedly change anything in Cosmos and I'm talking about the Cosmos Hub today.

Citizen Cosmos
You know, you wake up and I don't know why, but for some reason you have all the voting power personally or whatever. I don't know. Let's just say theoretical situation, whatever. What's your first things that you do? Would you change?

Jae Kwon
Okay. I mean, if I had all that voting power, I would make sure it's decentralized. That's that.

Citizen Cosmos
Makes.

Jae Kwon
Sense. Yeah. But, you know, I said, See what you're asking? Of course. I think the biggest thing that I saw from Prop 82 the Atom 2.0 push was that the narrative for the original plan of Cosmos Hub was not well preserved. And what I mean is it was always the plan to create interchange security, to solve scaling, and thereby to make the story of the Cosmos Hub, the Atom story in terms of the business model is to enable as many transactions as possible to solve a scaling problem.

Jae Kwon
But politics happened various infighting and factions happened, and somewhere that message got lost and people were led to believe that there is no story for Atom, but it's entirely not true. So that's one aspect. So if I were to change that, what would I have done differently? I would say probably it would have been better to start with the Constitution to make clear what the hub is about and what business model is.

Jae Kwon
And another thing I would do differently is have an explicit plan to make all the operations of the ICF, the entertainment Foundation, public, transparent and accountable to the Cosmos Hub. So just to be clear, for example, the Interchange Foundation, which I did most of the legwork to found, right. And so the purpose of the Interchange Foundation was originally to make sure that the atoms are spent in order to create a well-functioning, diverse, decentralized ecosystem for the cosmos Hub.

Jae Kwon
You know, regardless of the mandate of the ICF itself, the if you read the fundraising terms, it's pretty clear that the reason why the ICF got the atoms is in order to develop software for the Cosmos Hub. There are some issues with what the ISO is doing. I feel like there's not enough transparency and I feel like it can do better in terms of technical leadership and what I mean, there is specifically things like ensuring that the development of software around cosmos and specifically the Cosmos Hub is aligned with the long term vision that makes sense, that is coherent and, and it's not just about popping the atom price and so on.

Jae Kwon
So the problem, though, is that we didn't have the right infrastructure for creating accountable Dao systems. The Cosmos Hub is pretty good. It's good for what it does and allowing different Dapp chains to be built. So if we've proven that many blockchains are using the cosmos have developed, but it still isn't quite as easy as what is theoretically possible.

Jae Kwon
And what I mean is it would be better, in my opinion, if we had on top of tendermint a smart contract platform. And the reason why a smart contract system is better programing and go into cosmos SDK is because the logic can be in order or two magnitudes less. So there's a lot less boilerplate. You don't have to program it in a way that ensures determinism.

Jae Kwon
And those are the main things. You know, the fact that there's so much boilerplate when you try to create something outside of a smart contract system and the fact that you have to program in such a way that you have to ensure determinism, you know, and the fact that you have to read, decode and manipulate an object and then encoded and then write it to disk and it creates all these layers that are not necessary if you have a specific kind of virtual machine.

Jae Kwon
Now, Ethereum, as far as I know, still the only other smart contract system that actually tried to solve this problem and did it well with solidity. But I think we can go beyond solidity and do even better. And that's what we're trying to do with gNoland. The GNO virtual Machine is very unique in the world, I suppose. I haven't seen anything quite like it, and it enables really the theoretical optimum of succinct type checked smart contracts in a language that is it's well established, let go.

Jae Kwon
And I think it's going to change the landscape and we'll see that the demand for applications is going to be more and more on top of the smart contract system, whether it's gno land, gno lang or some other language, you know, it's going to be about languages and how well that language is integrated. This smart contract system.

Citizen Cosmos
Will have a couple of other formats. One of them is like a debate format. We call it the Knights of the IBC round Table. And we had the Cosmwasm one recently. It's lovely, right? It was Ethan, Sunny, me and Dean from Agoric And at one point the discussion even for me. What for me, even for Sunny.

Citizen Cosmos
It was a little bit technical with one point Sunny and me were like, What the hell is Dean and Ethan talking about? We don't know. They're just like shooting each other. But long story short, why not cosmwasm Of course we will get to gno VM in a second. But why not cosmwasm?

Jae Kwon
It is a virtual machine. Wasm is a virtual machine? But it wasn't designed for blockchains. It was more designed for like the environment in the browser. So that's one. And that's why even if you were to support languages like go on Wasm which there is, there is an experimental version of a go compiler for Wasm but it's not well maintained.

Jae Kwon
So let me start over. What makes a smart contract system good is going to be the language itself. First and foremost, you have to choose the right language and you have to provide, integration between the language and what you want to do with blockchains. Okay. And Wasm doesn't let you do that. Whereas if you look at the gno VM it has features that are not really available in other virtual machines.

Jae Kwon
even Wasm for example, after every transaction, everything in memory in the gno virtual machine gets automatically persisted and it's also automatically Merklized So anything you create, any object that you instantiate, any structure, primitive value, even a closure that you create in the gno VM at the end of the transaction, you can prove the state of your application by through the Merkle root the local tree, and nothing provides anything like that.

Jae Kwon
So why not Coswasm? Because, you know, you can't do the same thing. You have to program your practically you have to program your thing in rust at the moment, and it doesn't provide the language, features and integration between language and smart contract platform. That's possible. And so you'll find that for any application it's going to be much more succinct to express it in gno than in anything else that's said.

Jae Kwon
You know, I'm not saying there's no place for Cosmwasm I do envision a world where, you know, it's not just the gno vm it's not just one language, but we need multiple systems in different languages and different even non VM systems that interact with each other. So there is a place and a need to bring smart contract platforms together to make them interoperate.

Citizen Cosmos
By the way, a strange question, not not in terms of verifiability here and the semantics that gno can offer. But in terms of the name. gno, I was was curious, considering the location of the first office of Tendermint and Berlin, together with Gnosis and the name gnoland, is this me going crazy or there is something that is I don't know why, but gnosis always like somewhere appears when we're talking about tendermint like with gnoland?

Citizen Cosmos
Not, of course it's not. Like, is it? Where is that? I mean, coming from. Sorry. Simple question. Where does the name come from.

Jae Kwon
From a it's a modification play on the language from what's inspired from go right. And it's like the opposite. No it's do you go or or no but also maybe more so even more so than that. The reason why gno stuck is because what we're trying to do is create a system that enables everyone to know the truth, to understand more about reality, to debate the facts and permissionless, to create application.

Jae Kwon
You know, systems, different algorithms that enable the truth to emerge from conversations because there's so much fake news out there, so much misunderstanding and half truths and intentional misdirection. We need to create a way and find a way to sift through that. The best way is probably going to involve combination of various things, including reputation systems, right? And then scoring.

Jae Kwon
But but we don't know how best to do this yet. And gno as a platform will enable that experimentation so that we can know how to move forward together.

Citizen Cosmos
That's a very big challenge, in my opinion. Like challenge in terms that you put for the team and for yourself and well, I mean, if you can solve that, I guess we're going to have like some Lego blocks leading us to a vision of a world where people, you know, actually can make it together, get their shit and make it together and not fight over who said what, when, and at which point.

Citizen Cosmos
But a little bit like a question that I had related to that was, you know, we're talking about big things. Well, specifically now you're saying, in my opinion, things maybe for some people I'm really apologizing to anyone who's listening to this. I'm not underestimating the listening capabilities. But sometimes when people talk about the truth and trying to find, you know, things like that, it's underestimated, in my opinion, the value that those things have.

Citizen Cosmos
I'm going to ask again a strange question. So when I look today in the crypto world again, let's bear in mind, you know, like in mathematics, let's remember as we're talking about the truth and solving debt and building for a world where we can get our shit together. Now, when I look at the world today and I look at especially I look into the crypto world, into the crypto world that I'm involved in, that I'm part of, I see a lot of things like multisig wallets, enforcement of rules, like people say, Hey, let's make all the validators.

Citizen Cosmos
Well, I was going to say a rude thing, but you know, do this, let's make them do this. You know, nobody wants to look for a solution. That open market will make people do that. That will create a situation. You know, people create multisig like, and they say, oh, a multisig is way more efficient, you know, And you don't need on chain governance because there are too many people or you need it, but they need multisig.

Citizen Cosmos
And it's like, but isn't that reverting backwards? Isn't it reverting backwards from the truth? I mean, didn't we get to this point? Didn't we come to blockchain and get all these tools out there in order to stop doing things behind closed walls in order to stop multisig or to stop writting rules that are cemented in the universe, You know, isn't the goal is to evolve to go explore a space like you say.

Citizen Cosmos
And to me it seems that those things that we're doing sometimes in crypto kind of take away from that rather than actually build, get us towards closer to that.

Jae Kwon
A big problem is that our tooling is not there and it hasn't been so far. And so gnoland wants to change that and show an example of how things could be. Here's an example. Like if you've been listening to the Twitter files, that scandal, you know, there are various things that were exposed with the Twitter files, but even before then there were and all throughout, you know, just four years, it was very clear that Reddit and Facebook and most of these social services were censoring in very sophisticated various ways.

Jae Kwon
The big thing that comes to mind when I think of Reddit is it's not just like Subreddits randomly being closed for like reasons that don't seem to make sense, but just seem to align with censorship. But also the fact that it seemed like Gislaine Maxwell was also perhaps the moderator of the World News subreddit, which the most popular subreddit did you know.

Citizen Cosmos
That I was not aware of that. That is crazy, bro. Are you serious?

Jae Kwon
Oh, yeah. Are you serious? I'm serious. And if you look. Yeah, the countless called GMAC's work. And if you look at the things and she went to, like, Reddit parties, you know, she was well connected with the Reddit crew. And if you look at the kind of news stories that were being censored by this account, it makes sense.

Jae Kwon
It all aligns. Okay.

Citizen Cosmos
That's crazy. That is really fucking crazy.

Jae Kwon
We're being attacked from just from the very basis of our ability to communicate and share information with each other. And yet we don't have a killer blockchain application. That solstice steam, it was pretty good at Steam. It was an approach to provide a blogging platform. But we don't have alternatives that are serious. When are we going to have social media really on chain?

Jae Kwon
And you know, the answer is it's hard to program. It's hard to make those things right just as is. Now, imagine trying to put that on the blockchain that's even more difficult. And imagine trying to create like a subreddit system on Ethereum. You know how difficult that would be, right? But if you go to gnoland, you'll see source code, pretty simple.

Jae Kwon
Smart contract, just a few files, very bare bones that demonstrates a Reddit like communication system and you can see the code for yourself. It's very simple. And by having better tools that enable succinct expression of social communication protocols, we can create more experimentation and start to solve these problems that are all necessary in order to get to the point where we have DAO governance systems that actually work.

Jae Kwon
Because if we can't even have a communication system, we're not going to have useful DAO system, right? Right. You need communication the very least among so many other features.

Citizen Cosmos
It's really interesting that you mentioned Steemit because, well, I was a lot heavily involved with Beecher's and in fact, along with some other people, we launched the first official fork of Steemit, the Golus Steemit was back then. Their Genesis block wasn't public. We were the only project that actually paid them for it. And then they made it public.

Citizen Cosmos
Well, they changed the license, so to speak, right? And it was like a Russian based social network back in 2016. Well, not Russian, but Russian speaking primarily. And yeah, the project is actually still alive. It doesn't have a team today or anything like that. But yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned that. So I have a lot a lot of history with it and I will stop right there on Steemit for about three months or something like that.

Citizen Cosmos
It's crazy, crazy, crazy history.

Jae Kwon
I'm curious, I wanted to ask you a question, if you don't mind going. All right, are you still active there? You were a top contributor. Are you still active? And if not, why not?

Citizen Cosmos
You can still see my account, of course, because it's blockchain. Of course you can go and you can scroll down. Why not? I guess when we launched well, this is changing the clocks. Okay. I was very much into steemit. But then when we launched golus and after some time after I quit, like first my attention focused Golus and I stopped writing completely.

Citizen Cosmos
And the biggest obstacle that I saw there and that I still see today in that is on chain proof of stake reward. The economics are just not there. The tools to build people don't understand free on chain rewards. I don't think they should be free. I think people should understand why they're getting that reward. And those economists were milked very easily.

Citizen Cosmos
Like you could have a two or three not even smart people. And I apologize to say that, but I really do mean it. Not somebody like a genius, not somebody who's, you know, like was that movie called Big Short Right? You don't need somebody like that. You just needed somebody with a loud enough voice and a great example, you know, back in Golus, back then, before you implemented the proof of stake, which had slashing back there, the witness nodes, they didn't have that.

Citizen Cosmos
And, you know, one of the things you had to update price feeds and on purpose, me and the other guy who was the founder of the project stopped updating a price. It's just to see what happens. And people didn't care. People would still delegate to us all the time. And that was for us, like the quickest proof that this shit doesn't work.

Citizen Cosmos
You know, people were milking the economy. All you had to do was just be a little bit more. Loud the tools like you say, the tools were not there. Today. The situation is changing and I would love to see a place like I mean, I was following D3. I mean for a while a few years ago when I forgot the name of the...Yes Pung, sorry, when we spoke with him a couple of years ago and he was telling me about that and it was very cool.

Citizen Cosmos
But again, when the tools are there, it seems that people are not. For example, there is this other crazy project, Cosmos based project, you know, and they had a version of Twitter where you had to use your ledger to tweet anything out at one point. And people were like, I ain't going to do that. You know, I'm not going to.

Jae Kwon
Yeah, yeah, we need better tools and we can we're actually working on on solving that. So you'll see a solution to that problem. But you're absolutely right that UX has to be there. You shouldn't have to use a hardware signer just to be able to post a comment.

Citizen Cosmos
It's crazy. Crazy. Jay You mentioned your vision a couple of times, and I know it's coming up to an hour already, which is crazy, but you mentioned the vision, the truth, the reality. I mean, those three things are super biased, super subjective. How does one person, does it matter if it's you? But in your opinion, how does one person how is one person able to deliver what's supposed to bring truth to people objectively without subjectively sticking his own opinions and subjectively putting his fingers everywhere in there?

Citizen Cosmos
You know, how can that be objective ever? Or it shouldn't be at all.

Jae Kwon
I don't think one person can do it. I don't think one person can fully know. Everybody has biases and perfect information. So whatever the system is, it's not going to be something that gets everyone to follow this one person, because one person has like a better idea and grasp of reality, but rather, I don't know the full answer.

Jae Kwon
But of course, you know, if you combine the perspectives of multiple people and you and I mean, here's an answer, a partial answer. Back in the days before Google, we didn't know what websites were reputable. It was hard to know because people were gaming the system and they were trying to create SEO kind of in order to get promotion on search engines and all that.

Jae Kwon
But there was an algorithm based on what is it? It's page rank and it's based on matrix, you know, algorithms that was able to distill eigenvectors or the views, mathematical views of what might be most real or truthful. And we need those kinds of algorithms to help us select among, I would say, not just perspectives, but also people using reputation of correctness, of people who are able to distill truth, get to the point where we can distill truth from ... you know from the whole collective to see something more true than what any individual can understand.

Citizen Cosmos
If you were to try and I know it's hard to summarize something which is dear to you because, well, I don't know about you. It is for me definitely when somebody says I love music or What's your favorite song? I don't have one favorite song. What's your favorite writter? I don't have one. I love a lot of books, but if you want to try to summarize that vision that you're talking about into that reality that you are keeping, you talking about the truth, we need that.

Citizen Cosmos
And I understand what you mean by that. But if that vision was summarized in a paragraph or two paragraphs, what would it be? And one small sort of comment in there, could you say it in a way that anybody that's listening to that would be able to understand those right now, even if they didn't have any financial or technological background?

Jae Kwon
There's something maybe a little more concrete than what we've been talking about. You know, we've been talking about truth in the abstract. But really, I think the question is more about there are certainly groups of people in organizations and ideologies that are working to confuse and divide everyone. Who is it? What is it? How do they work? What have they been doing?

Jae Kwon
And what is the thing they are trying to bury? And if we can get better insight into that, I believe the entire charade that's put forth before us will dissolve and we'll see what is today very upside down right itself quickly. So it's not just this abstract notion of finding something true. It's really ongoing battle of getting the truth out so that the things that were hidden become known and compellingly known in a way that is digestible to people so that they can say, Oh, that's crazy, that's actually real.

Jae Kwon
That's actually what's happening.

Citizen Cosmos
It's astonishing how quickly people forget when those things happen and when things like charades, you know, start to be more of a circus like show. It's amazing how quickly people forget who's the master of the circus, so to speak. You know, so it's crazy. It is really crazy. And sometimes people forget that to invent something and to put something together are very different things and take very different mind skills and mindsets to do.

Citizen Cosmos
And, you know, there are not that many people, in my opinion, in the world that can invent something and invent something that is used by other people, regardless of whether it's used in the way they were thinking about it. And yeah, spliting an Atom and Einstien I'm not a great example here, of course, but still, more realistically, there are technologies that are being invented and used by a lot of people and people kind of forgot.

Citizen Cosmos
It doesn't matter who invented it, you know? I mean, this guy, he's out there, he's doing the charades and we should listen to him. It's crazy. Jay, considering you're huge, in my opinion, experience in building products, could you give, like, a couple of words of advice to anyone today building on Cosmos or looking to build on gnolan, for example, trying to look in the gnolan VM code?

Citizen Cosmos
What would you say to them? What would you advise them to do or not to do?

Jae Kwon
One is to step out if you can, if you're in a position to to step a little bit outside of the box of Defi, because while there's money in Defi and it's exciting and it will potentially be rewarding, very rewarding, it's not necessarily the thing that we need. We can get by with very far with very simple defi tools that we already know how to build.

Jae Kwon
What we really need are solutions to the problem that go beyond the surface level of finance, but help tackle the problem that at the source. It's impossible to do that if you don't understand history because once you get to the point where you are making a difference, you will encounter people who will manipulate and steer course for you.

Jae Kwon
Because this is how the world works. This is actually how the world works. You will find and meet people even inside of your organization in the very least that just have a different idea of what they want because they want something different. Perhaps they want money and fame. So it's really important to understand history and to make sure that you align in vision with the people that you work with from the very beginning.

Jae Kwon
And it's really important to try to be very methodical and slow in how you give up control. As much as it is important to give up control, ultimately how you get there, the devil is all in the details and if you're not careful, then you will end up losing control to people and forces that you don't agree with.

Jae Kwon
And so listen to your gut. air more on the side of breaking the relationship off than trying to save something just because it's too convenient to too at the time because you'll pay later.

Citizen Cosmos
It reminds me of I mean, I think I've said it before. Ready on the podcast. But Isaac Asimov writes, The biggest weapon in history invention is history, because whoever controls history controls everything else, including, well, everything technically. So definitely Jae I mean, seriously, I want to keep on asking you questions forever, and I haven't asked you nothing about Atom 2.0 and anything but I don't know how much power of course, you have in you.

Citizen Cosmos
Or would you rather carry on talking or would you rather do a second go sometimes else and finish this round here? Or would you carry on? Or do you want to carry on talking

Jae Kwon
Okay, let's have another one. So another one. I think we're going to have a lot more to talk about soon with ICS and gnoland. And I think we can go to a technical dive for the next one, and I love to do that.

Citizen Cosmos
So then if it's okay with you, I'm going to ask you like the blitz question. It's three questions, so you can answer them quickly. You can answer them slow. If you're going to surprise you. A little surprise. Everybody says they're surprising. The first one is shit, the other two are better, I promise. So the first one, it's going to go down 3 to 1.

Citizen Cosmos
So the first one is Shit question give me three projects, not Cosmos, not Bitcoin, not Ethereum, not Gnoland. You cannot say that that technologically impressed you in the past two years.

Jae Kwon
One thing that I really like to do in solving problems is like to get to the root of it and to try to transcend the problem. Amino was like an attempt to do that, to transcend and get beyond protobuff and beyond the need for even in coding systems. And I see that kind of spirit from a project called the telescope, and they're also working on a wallet at the telescope project.

Jae Kwon
It's pretty impressive a lot. What else to more.

Citizen Cosmos
It doesn't have to be three, really. It could be one. Really.

Jae Kwon
Okay. All right.

Citizen Cosmos
But no, go on. If you want to say one mark on.

Jae Kwon
Yeah, I don't. I can't take anything at all.

Citizen Cosmos
Let's go get cool. Cool, cool. Don't push it out of yourself. And it's true. That is something that if it impressed you, would have stuck in my opinion. Okay, second question. And now it's two things. You are obviously, in my opinion at least, and I'm sorry, this is not an offensive thing. It's is a very like compliment. You're you're a sensitive person.

Citizen Cosmos
You're a person with a lot of knowledge, a person with a lot of. Anyways, long story Short And this is the question that I think you would have a good answer to. Can you share with me and the listeners two things that motivate you in your daily life to keep on searching for the truth?

Jae Kwon
That's really good question. What keeps me going? I won't lie. There is an aspect of what I experienced discovering the message underneath, like the New Testament and especially the last book and the Book of Revelation that was really fascinating. So many things come together in those messages and the book that it makes me wonder, like how it could be to the point where it almost does almost seem supernatural, like it cannot be explained, and the divisions and the prophecies are disturbing and difficult to comprehend and difficult to accept.

Jae Kwon
And yet, in many respects, we see it unfolding behind and before our eyes, you know, according to the millenniest interpretation. And I think it's really fascinating, especially in the context of global organizations that I've mentioned in the past and Twitter and understanding the power dynamics of the world, even including more secretive organizations, understanding of why the world is in how it works and why these things are happening.

Jae Kwon
Curiosity is a big motivator, but also the desire to transcend the gridlock, right? The problems of today, and the hope that we can actually get to a better state where we can feel more at ease knowing that, you know, certain things are have been resolved, the hope for that kind of world and what kind of world we could be living in like 50 years from now, you know, and our dying.

Jae Kwon
beds sure. Right. But like for our children, the desire to make a better world for them, that's not as crazy as the one we have right now is probably the biggest motivating factor.

Citizen Cosmos
Hat off for saying Curiosity, by the way, because you're not going to believe it. The amount of people and very smart people who have been on this show, no one has ever mentioned curiosity. I was always surprised. Why? Because to me it's also my driving force. It's curiosity. I mean, I like Why? Why? Why not? Why? Yes, why?

Jae Kwon
Why is this beautiful? How does it work?

Citizen Cosmos
What is beautiful? Right. Well, what is beautiful? What is why does B E A U T I F U L make beautiful? Like why does it make images in my head like it's. Last question, Jae. I promise. Go on, go on. Going on. You were going to say you were going to comment. Sorry.

Jae Kwon
I was just going to ask one more, which is what is our role in the universe? What is our role? What can we do? Why are we here?

Citizen Cosmos
The million dollar question to explore, To be curious, I think there is the actual answer in my opinion. You know, to build to make sure that we can expand. And it's last question. I promise dead or alive. Doesn't matter. One person that inspires you could be a coder, an author, it could be a politician. Well, I'm going to say that, but I hope it's not a politician like anyone in the world.

Citizen Cosmos
It could be a cartoon character. So dead or alive, real on the single person, somebody who inspires you is not the only person but inspires you. It doesn't have to be a person it could be a ghost.

Jae Kwon
Say, in tech between like Tim Berners-Lee and all the way to Steve Jobs. You know, regards to just this Giants, that affects our lives every single second today. And if it weren't for them, it would be a completely different world. A lot of the heroes, though, seem to have fallen in some sense. So in some sense, you know, we're always disappointed by them.

Jae Kwon
But Steve Jobs still, you know, feels like there's something missing with the world because since he was gone. So this is the last thing I would say it is. Yeah. Let's let's leave it up there. Okay. Cool.

Citizen Cosmos
Cool. Jae Thank you very much. First of all, just going to thank everybody who has been listening and thank you for listening to this podcast. Citizen Cosmos, and join us next time.

Jae Kwon
Bye bye bye.

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