← CRYPTO 101
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- [00:00]
Host
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- [01:24]
Interviewer
All right, everyone, welcome back to another crypto 101 podc. Today we have Sam Williams. He is the founder of Arweave and now the founder of ao. We're super stoked to be able to dive into both of these. We know that you probably heard about Arweave. You've seen a lot of the work that they've been doing over the years. And now Sam's been working on a new project that we're excited to kind of bring to the forefront and talk to you all about. So, Sam, welcome and it's great to have you.
- [01:51]
Sam Williams
Thanks for having me on.
- [01:53]
Interviewer
Absolutely. So bring us up to date. You know, a lot of people are familiar with your work on Arweave. You guys have been a household name in the crypto space for years now. But start us off from, from day one, from the square one. You know, what even got you into crypto in the first place?
- [02:11]
Sam Williams
Crypto in the first place? A friend of mine in 2010, when I was just, just the year before going to university, depends on, I guess High school they call it in the us but in the UK it's college, confusingly. Yeah, he told me about it and I think if I remember correctly, bitcoin was worth 3 cents. It was really, really tiny, certainly below a dollar, because I remember that same guy came back and told me that it was worth a dollar now. And I found this to be very confusing because how can the magic Internet money be worth more than a dollar? Yeah, yeah. But really, I would say that my fascination with P2P software or P2P protocols started actually with BitTorrent slightly before that thought. The idea of spreading information around the world in a. You could say, like, yes, it's technically peer to peer way, like the machines are swapping bits. But that wasn't quite as interesting as the sociologically peer to peer way. This was an information distribution system that allowed people to exchange the things they thought were interesting without any centralized provider in the way. And if you look at the history of information technologies like the printing press, for example, the person that owns the printing press gets to choose what is printed. The same was true of broadcast journalism and the Internet. To some extent. The early web was relatively decentralized just because so many of the administrators were running their own websites. But it was still, yeah, it was still not quite truly peer to peer, whereas BitTorrent was. You plugged in your machine, you swapped bits with someone else around the world. And yeah, I thought that was very interesting. And so that's kind of how I found out about it.
- [04:09]
Interviewer
Yeah, I always like asking that question to kick us off because there's so many people out there, whether they are looking to simply just learn about crypto or whether they're trying to become a developer themselves and maybe even start their own project. And people always kind of look from the outside in and they go, well, that seems like such a far away goal. Like, I don't know if I could achieve that. Where do I even begin? And we get these unique perspectives from founders like yourself. And it doesn't always, you know, you're not always starting out as this insanely educated person on the crypto space. A lot of the times people hear about it and there is doubt, there's doubt initially and people are like, ah, I don't know if it's going to do this, I don't know if it's ever going to be able to achieve that. I don't know about this stuff. And they're hesitant. And I think that that's the natural reaction. So to all the listeners out there, I Mean, you know, we're constantly bringing in leaders and founders and creators from this space and also from the tradify side. And that's usually how it starts. And it just goes to show you that, you know, this stuff can be built upon, it can be learned. You don't have to know everything, you don't have to have all the answers from day one. And I think that's one of the cool things that makes crypto so unique and so achievable. We've heard that quite a bit. So kind of backing us up to Arweave. What led you and I guess give us a high level of what Arweave is but like what led you to the idea behind that?
- [05:34]
Sam Williams
Yeah, so Arweave is a permanent information storage system. Basically the same idea that was present arguably before Bitcoin was used for value transfer. Even Satoshi embedded a record of history in the first block of Bitcoin Chancellor on brink of second bailout of banks. That's slightly paraphrased, but yeah, that was the headline. Yeah. Bitcoin could do this from the start. It was a very, very interesting use of the technology. It allowed us to create like a neutral shared ledger of history, but it was excessively small scale. Each of those bytes now actually cost you like a non trivial amount of money to store. And so. Well, in the intervening period I. Well first there was a period where I was mining bitcoin in about 2012. I guess that was when I really started to look into it. And at that time there was some interesting. That was the start of the innovation on the consensus mechanisms side there was a bitcoin talk forum like sub forum for altcoins where all these things were being discussed and they thought that was pretty interesting. But in my normal life outside of it, around that time I started a PhD in distributed operating system design. I was really interested in building machines that don't fall over basically when one part of the hardware goes offline. Yeah. And along the way I got to very near the end of that Ph.D. actually and I just had this idea for well look, the world is sort of destabilizing in some form or other. It's not clear how, but this is a great time in history to have a shared ledger of history which is neutral and outside of the control of any one individual or group. And blockchains gave us the kernel of part of that solution, but it didn't scale. And that was essentially how the idea for Arweave was born. We got started in 2017, launched on the 69th anniversary of the publication of 1984. Yeah. The next year in 2018. And ever since then we've really just been growing it and kind of applying that same permanent scalable storage solution that we have to many different verticals, I suppose, for lack of a better word. One of the most interesting, I think, is basically as a new substrate for the web, something that you can use to host not just data, but full web applications and services. And that was essentially what eventually, starting about a year ago. Yeah. Led us to building ao, which is a decentralized supercomputer on top of all of this and glues it together so that you have a full, for lack of a better word, cyberspace that is built on neutral, trustworthy substrates.
- [08:41]
Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, let's dive into that a little bit more. You know, walk us through AO and I guess kind of what, what made you. I don't know if make the switches is the right word, but you're now founding and building and working with ao. What kind of caused this in the first place? Like, what was the catalyst?
- [09:00]
Sam Williams
Yeah, so ever since, I mean, the interesting thing about protocols is that in order for them to provide value to people, they really have to solidify. They have to become hard to change, basically. And if they aren't hard to change, they're more or less just companies. So the whole idea is that they should be trustless. They provide you with guarantees that are above any one person to change them or any one group even in order for that to happen, you have to basically set the game and the game has to be rigid and not change under people's feet. And so we're very serious about building real protocols. Frankly, I wouldn't be in crypto if I wasn't. There's many easier, better ways to build just a company if you want to do that. But I think these technologies are exciting because they give people basically services on the Internet that guarantee end user rights. But in order for that to happen, they have to stabilize. And so, yeah, we were very focused at the start on getting the technology of arweave. Right. And the round 2020ish. I would say we reached the right design, more or less. And it's been many tweaks since then, but they're really, really minor at this point. And subsequently the focus is just on building the perma web on top, basically helping incubate the ecosystem that uses ARWI for many different things. So now we're, I think, 16 billion pieces of data stored on the network. There's absolutely no way that could have happened if our team had just led the. Yeah, basically led. Building end user services on top of the system, it wouldn't work. So we put a lot of focus on building the community and the ecosystem around it. Many, many, many different projects. And somewhere in, I think it was 21, 22, maybe late 21, we started tracking Odyssey, which is this web3 social media platform. We ended up acquiring it to decentralize it on the permaweb. It has a user base of about 7,8 million monthly active users who are all sort of crypto aware, but not like crypto native. And we thought that was a great sort of beachhead for building a decentralized social network on the perma web. And all of the data on the perma web is open and composable. So if you're part of that social network on one application, inherently you're part of it on another. So this seemed like a logical step for seeding the perma web and to serve their needs properly. We needed an extremely scalable smart contracting system which really didn't exist at the time. And well, have a background in distributed operating system design. And so I spent quite a lot of time thinking about this stuff and basically we saw what the architecture could look like to build such a thing on top of Arweave, and I guess we ended up on this side quest. I mean, we were really just trying to solve our own problem. And yeah, we ended up building what I think can be reasonably described as like a decentralized supercomputer, which when you plug it in with Arweave is like a full stack for decentralized web.
- [12:25]
Interviewer
Well, you mentioned something in what you said where people don't always fully realize that they're using blockchain tech or at least that, you know, sometimes. Do you think that that's kind of like the path forward is creating these awesome strong products that kind of revolutionize a variety of industries without people having to be crypto savvy and crypto native. That's, that's kind of the way that I look at it, is that in modern technology people don't always understand what's happening in the background or this and that. You know, they just hop on a website, they hop on a platform, they hop on whatever it is, they do what needs to be done and they don't need to know what's happening in the background. I guess my question here is do you think that that's one of the ways that crypto can kind of have a path to success? Is that People can come in and they don't have to realize or even know that they're using either cryptocurrency or blockchain technology and they can just operate as normal.
- [13:25]
Sam Williams
Yeah, I think, I mean it's, you know, wisdom as old as a startup industry. Just build something that people actually want. And yeah, I think that the consumer non financial use cases of blockchain have been sort of drowned out largely so far, partially because in order to get them right, you need a huge stack of applications, protocols before you can get to an end user experience that offers those benefits to people. But when you can get there, I think it's truly exciting. When you build an application on the perma web, for example, and you're a developer, you're building on 16 billion pieces of information inside your database on day one, it's open and composable. You can, sorry, yes, you can access all of that and basically you solve the cold start problem, which is a huge, huge issue. And so yeah, if you have like one social network on the perm web, you have a social network, if you will, in every application. And from the user's perspective, if you don't like one of the user interfaces that you could use for accessing that content, just go to another. And those user interfaces themselves are permanent, they don't go away, they can't be taken away from you. So there are huge gains to be made here. But in order to get to that point, it was necessary to build a massive amount of infrastructure, frankly.
- [15:06]
Host
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- [17:41]
Interviewer
You know, when it comes to this idea of supercomputers, even the idea of quantum, you know we just had a guest on the other day talking about how the whole world's trying to improve compute power. We have decentralized compute and like Render and Akash and even like traditional sources like Core Weave have been working on this. There's all this focus on hey, we need to improve our power sources and all of this is to create infrastructure and just a foundation for these next levels of computers. And I think I saw a quote from you somewhere that said AO turns the entire Internet into a hyperparallel computer without requiring blockchains or custom hardware. And I was reading through that, I kind of think I got an understanding of it. But could you bring that down to a 1001 level for the average person and what that means and how that works?
- [18:38]
Sam Williams
Yeah. So you could either think of it as not requiring blockchains, or it simply turns everything into a blockchain. Basically, AO is built on this new web standard called HTTP Signed Messages, which is confusing because it's not HTTPs, the thing that everyone knows as giving us privacy in web connections. Instead, it's the standard that basically allows us to. Well, the base version allows you to just send signatures that sign from a. You know, I mean, it's very normal for the blockchain space. We sign transactions. Right. So that people can know who attested to the data inside. Well, that wasn't normal for the web. HTTPs wouldn't actually let you do that. And so they fixed this. Funnily enough, just a week after we launched AO testnet, this became standardized. And then for AO mainnet, this became the basis of our transactions. And so the idea is that, well, you should just be able to send a web request and sign it, and then when you get back a response that is built on top of your request, and also all of the other requests down the line between all of the nodes in the system, creating something that looks like a blockchain. We call them hash paths, but they're basically micro blockchains. And then you get verifiability of the results. So one of the things we saw with Arweave when we wanted to adjust course on for AO was you create a mountain of work for your team if you don't use standardized technologies on integration, actually. So just to use Arweave, we've solved this problem now, but it took many years. You need a library in every programming language. Wow. It needs to be kept up to date. Yeah, that's a big task. Right. And you need good documentation. And the way this really emerges is like, you know, some developer that really loves like some niche programming language or Java or something that we don't use. We'll make the library first, but then it'll get abandoned. And so you have to make systems to maintain these things. And we thought, well, now there is a neutral form of transaction, if you will, or something that looks very close to a transaction inside the web itself. So why don't we use that as the basis? And if we do, then you can integrate with it basically from anywhere, without custom software. And it also means that your browser is going to be able to Access and verify the content that's coming back, which is really huge. I think it's basically trying to just layer. You could think of AO as like the Hyper Execution transfer protocol, something like that. It's like a computer built into HTTP.
- [21:34]
Interviewer
So I guess my question here is what does AO enable that maybe traditional smart contracts or blockchain platform platforms can.
- [21:42]
Sam Williams
Yeah, absolutely.
- [21:43]
Interviewer
Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
- [21:45]
Sam Williams
So coming from like a traditional distributed systems design perspective, I think the whole blockchain space looks, this is changing now, but at least when we started ao, it looks completely frankly insane. The question of how you scale things in computer science is not like, well, you know, you used a website this morning, I'm sure, and you found that it worked and it probably served hundreds of millions of other users too well. How did it scale? And the answer is parallel computation. You break up the task into many pieces that can be run on different computers and you don't duplicate the work. One way to think about it is that most traditional blockchains, actually virtually all traditional blockchains have a single thread of execution, right? So you throw more computers at it, they just execute that same thread over and over and over again. It doesn't give you additional compute power. So the ao, and yeah, AO originally stands for actor oriented is this programming model basically where we say, okay, consider the world as a set of parallel executing actors, just like the world actually is. You and I do parallel things and then break up your tasks such that it fits on top of that and execute each of those individually. And then with ao, we took that same programming model and we made it so that the substrate underneath, basically you need kind of at least three core things, which is computer passing messages between those different actors and scheduling, assigning and ordering to the transactions on a chain or chain like thing. We make it so that all of that infrastructure is neutral and there are peer to peer networks of nodes that can offer that service to you. And subsequently you can scale up the amount of parallel processes really without limit because you can just plug in more machines to one of those three sort of compute areas or work areas and it just gains in capacity. So in practice this means you can do things like run LLMs full, you know, big LLMs on chain inside smart contracts with smart contract like verifiability and pretty much everything else you want. Like that's why we call it a supercomputer.
- [24:19]
Interviewer
Is there a difference between parallel computing and decentralized computing?
- [24:26]
Sam Williams
Yes, very much. I mean Ethereum is a decentralized computer, but trying to work out how to describe this? So in computer science, what we would say is it's a single thread of execution, that is that there's one global state. Everyone's program is inside the same sort of machine, the Ethereum virtual machine. And when one person is computing on top of that, it has global locking. So one person, basically when you pay those exorbitant fees, you are paying for the right to lock the state for a period of time to do your computation and then unlock it, and then someone else can do something after you. And so you throw more machines at this network and you just have more verification. Verification is good, but you don't need like 12. What is the marginal utility of the 12,001 person verifying the compute? It's essentially nil. Whereas parallel computing, we say, okay, instead of having this global shared state, what if we had local state? So each program ran individually and then instead of locking that state, locking other program state in order to act, they pass a message just like you do when you. Well, this podcast recording is doing a bunch of message passing, really. It's just our machines are all running in parallel and they are sending packets between one another to orchestrate this experience. AO works like that, rather than having a single threaded computer essentially.
- [26:03]
Interviewer
Got it. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. And I know people are always talking about how blockchain can evolve, how can we get blockchain and crypto to the next stage in its evolution? And you have to think that this is a part of that process. But I guess even zooming out, like, let's zoom out to the really, really big picture of where crypto's at right now. I know people want to see it used on a macro scale and stuff like what needs to change and how can we realistically get there? And I guess even the third question, like, what role does all this play in doing that?
- [26:42]
Sam Williams
We see it as like, I mean, yeah, we were exactly on that mission. How do we take crypto to end users? And you know, we acquired a social network to bring to crypto, if you will, to make decentralized and well, we encountered this massive problem like it just wouldn't scale. And you know, with arweave, we made it so that the data storage scales, but without a compute system on top that matches it, the number of things it can be used for is really, really limited. And I think that's also why we've primarily seen blockchain applications focus on finance in these early years, because finance is where the cost of trust is highest. I actually think currency is where the cost of trust is truly highest. You know, if someone can print money, the central banks, it has an immense cost for the society. And then downstream of that, you know, the cost of trust and finance is huge. You, yeah, you pay to work with the people you believe won't scam you basically. And these protocols, they can't scam you. So that that works. And that will even mean that you maybe pay $15 to do what would be on a normal computer, like much less than a millisecond, probably closer to a couple of hundred microseconds of compute. You'll pay $15, which is really, really crazy. But if we can get it right, and I think we have now with the substrate of ao, then you can apply this same trustless computation model to essentially everything. And that I think will be a huge, huge unlock. Probably starts with financial utilities still, but I think eventually it will become a case of, well, do you want the version that can screw you over or there's a company sitting in the middle that can extract or that is incentivized, it's in the nature of companies to extract the maximum amount of profit that they can from a captive audience, or do you want something that guarantees your rights? And my hunch is in the long run we'll see it played out in the latter category.
- [28:57]
Interviewer
So it sounds like this is something that not only improves efficiency from like a time perspective. Right, let's make everything more efficient and how fast it works, but it can also be something that improves the bottom line cost as well. Because efficiency can have kind of a ripple effect on all of that. Is that correct?
- [29:18]
Sam Williams
Yeah, I think beneath the surface of the Internet there are these huge actors that are offering the physical infrastructure, typically aws, gcp, and a couple of others, digitalocean. But it's like really just a handful. And if you look at the cost that they impart upon their like user base, which is the applications and services that you make use of on the Internet, it's huge relative to the actual cost of the infrastructure. And we saw this interesting story in about two years ago now. Arweave is like a multi hundred petabyte storage cluster. It's huge. And we've been building that software for eight years, but we have only ever run it on like the 100 terabyte scale off by a factor of 1000. And so we thought, okay, it's probably time to set up a petabyte cluster just so that we can see what the problems are that the miners have when they mine with the Software we create just to make the development process more efficient. And in doing so we thought, well, okay, we've got to acquire a petabyte of storage somehow. Let's go to all the different providers and see. And in theory it should be like, you know, a break even expedition. Like it shouldn't cost us anything. But we found that just by having to like butt up against this problem ourselves, I mean, first place you would go is Amazon. Well, that's $23 per terabyte month. Arweave is paying its miners and the miners are profitable at $0.78 per terabyte month. Yeah. And so we kept looking around and we managed to find something that was in the range of $1 per terabyte month. But that was, they were giving us an exorbitant deal just because they wanted to work with Web3 projects and the likes. It was extremely, extremely difficult to get anywhere near that level of efficiency. And that begged the question why? The answer is trust. Yeah, because you know, if you want to store your data somewhere, you don't necessarily just want to store it with like a random person on the Internet, but with these protocols in the middle intermediating it for you, they can enforce a trustless environment. And so yeah, the efficiencies there can be truly, truly enormous.
- [31:56]
Interviewer
It's crazy what improving the foundation can do, right? Let's just look at like a very traditional example and say if we use the foundation for a house or for some structure and if it's like sand or dirt, that's not going to do that much, let's improve it a little bit more. Let's make it some wood. And it's like, okay, we're getting better, let's improve it more. Let's start using stone, let's improve it more. Let's start using concrete and steel. And like the more that you improve the foundation and the structure of anything you are able to do, vastly more complex and like, just like unimaginable feats. And the kind of scale for that can be very parabolic. And it's again when we start making these changes to the foundation and the structure, it allows for so many other things to be done. And that cost reduction that you were talking about, going from I think you said $23 per terabyte to going to under a dollar per terabyte is such a great example of that. And it makes me think, and I hope it makes all the listeners think as well. Like how many other verticals are out there, how many different industries can be disrupted and affected by different variations of blockchain technology, you know, beyond just what we're talking about here, because it's easy for us to get caught up in the conversation. And again, we're having a one on one here on the podcast, but. And we're zoomed in on this niche, but I want all the listeners to really kind of open up their brains and maybe think of a couple different verticals that could see blockchain really disrupted, which. And I guess this can be a question for you, I mean, are there any other verticals that you see that could be potentially disrupted by blockchain technology in a similar way?
- [33:46]
Sam Williams
Yes, and to your point, I wholeheartedly agree that it's like the foundations can be swapped out here and subsequently the things you can build on top, they have categorically different properties.
- [33:59]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [34:02]
Sam Williams
The, the interesting thing, I think about blockchains is that they are essentially a technology of trust under the hood. Like, why care about decentralization? Decentralization is really just a means to an end. What is that end? Well, it's that we don't have to, you know, trust centralized providers in order to give us services anymore. And another interesting thing about it is it's completely invisible. So I think a lot of people, when they first meet blockchain, they like, I could do this on this centralized service. Why should I use a decentralized one? We just don't have a frame of reference for what a world of trustless services on the Internet looks like. There is no existing parallel. But to that same point, when you do proc what it gives you and it is executed correctly, which is an interesting hard social problem, like how to get real trustlessness in these protocols. But when you do, yeah, it just radically improves. I think it can be applied to at least every service in cyberspace. And it's really just a case of going down the stack of where the cost of trust is already the highest. And I think, satoshi, it's kind of miracle. Yeah, it's amazing. They applied it to the thing where the cost of trust is probably the highest. Single highest cost of trust in society is money. Everybody needs it and uses it. And if it becomes devalued, which it definitely can, apparently, is they have targets for the devaluation of money. Yeah, it applies to everyone. But I think also just even down to the web applications we use, like social networks, I mean, you're a creator, right? Well, in the current world, you publish and you reach your audience at the bit, at the whim of a company that sits in the middle. And we all saw through various political events over the last few years that the range of things that you are allowed to say before you will lose access to your audience and subsequently livelihood. I don't know about you personally, but for many, many creators it changes at a whim. It's now also enforced without human interaction. We can solve that with blockchain technology.
- [36:23]
Interviewer
And I believe you have specific examples because that's been something that you're passionate about. Are there any big ones that come to the top of your mind there and that fight for.
- [36:35]
Sam Williams
There are many. There are very, very many. But they have a habit of rubbing people the wrong way politically. So I try not to. But what we can say is I think everyone can point to a time where something that they thought was reasonable to say on the Internet was censored. Whether sort of punishable by financial means by the company or by the, you know, political organization of the state that they live in. This is virtually universal now.
- [37:08]
Interviewer
Yeah, well, you know, it is a crazy world and we love to see just again how blockchain is improving so many different sectors. We love to see the technology advance. I know that you personally, you've worked with some of the biggest VC firms in the space, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square, a handful of others. What advice do you have to builders who are trying to stay innovative while staying on the right side of regulation? Because in recent years that's been a harder thing to do. It's getting a little bit easier nowadays. What advice do you have for people?
- [37:44]
Sam Williams
Well, I guess I've never had this instance before, but I feel compelled to say I am not your lawyer.
- [37:50]
Interviewer
Yeah, fair enough.
- [37:53]
Sam Williams
But I mean it's definitely difficult. It's held the space back a huge amount because constant. So a lot of our work is just helping founders get started building on the perma web. You get someone that's a passionate builder, they create a great, typically minimum viable product, they get it in the market and people are excited about it. They try and make it their full time job. Well, here is when you suddenly meet the lawyers and then you will end up in endless, truly, truly endless conversations which have no good answers like that's the truth of the situation. I mean, I think it's at least in the US quite a lot clearer now just by precedent set, but just by outside of precedent, they're really. Yeah, I mean the CFTC and the SEC have been arguing for years about who has jurisdiction. So if they can't work it out, you can pay the lawyers. However much you like. But the truth is going to be that you'll get an opinion on what they think the world might look like, but the fact of the matter is it's undecided. So, yeah, that's. Yeah, just be careful with the lawyers. I guess they will take. They will very happily eat all your capital. I see it regularly that the builders end up probably spending two thirds of their initial capital on lawyers not building. It's really obscene. But you got to kind of tame that and try and work with them to understand what the limits of their knowledge are. Not just their knowledge, but also the wider state. And yeah, to the bigger question of working with VCs or community, I would say there's a lot of hatred of VCs and there's also a lot of different times, anger about retail amongst the VCs. And the truth is there's all more or less the same. It's just people that are interested in technology and I would try and treat them the same. Something you'll find with VCs is that they, they will. Not the ones you mentioned, actually, but occasionally they would try and like nudge you for information that isn't yet public. Don't do that. Just try and keep the channels of communication. One nice thing about crypto is we can build everything in public, give everyone the same information at the same time and yeah, just treat everyone equally as best you can. This is what we try to do with the token model of AO. It's 100% fair launch. Anyone can deposit and take part on exactly the same terms from precisely the start. There is no pre sale or anything like this. And I think that's a movement back really towards what got crypto started in the first place, which was just open access to technology. And I would, yeah, I'm biased, but I would recommend founders take a similar route if they can.
- [40:57]
Interviewer
Yeah, no, I like that. And you know, that's unique advice too, because that's stuff that at least I haven't heard yet on the podcast. And it probably easy, it probably is easy to get caught up, especially in those legal fees. You know, people are saying, oh, I'm so worried about regulation, I'm so worried about staying compliant. I'm so worried about this and that. And then you're right. And I've never even thought about that, that projects get so caught up in that and maybe the fears of that or the complexities of it, that they spend way too much on lawyer fees and everything that goes alongside that and it can affect the bottom line of projects themselves. And I'm sure that there's been a handful out there that have. That have buried themselves in that, or at least, like, limited themselves by pouring too much time and resources and capital into that. So it's certainly a unique perspective and something to think about as the space goes forward. But I got one more question for you before we leave here. When you look five or 10 years out, what is the most ambitious prediction that you have for the future of the industry?
- [42:05]
Sam Williams
Ambitious prediction. That's interesting. Okay, so I guess the question is, like, what we could achieve in the best possible case.
- [42:12]
Interviewer
Yes. What you think is, like, realistically achievable in the next five to ten years?
- [42:18]
Sam Williams
Realistically achievable. Okay. I mean, I can tell you where I think we want to end up latest 15 years from now. Okay, let's say. And I don't know how fast we'll progress. Five years seems too fast. Ten years maybe. But we essentially want to replace all of the underpinnings of cyberspace with trustless alternatives.
- [42:41]
Interviewer
When you say cyberspace, what do you mean by that?
- [42:44]
Sam Williams
All of the experiences that people have on the Internet. But if you pay attention to the way that it works in your real life, like, I don't know about you, but I'm excessively unaware of everything outside of this little box we're in right now. And so. And you know, like, people talk to each other on Slack or in a gmeet. Right. There's this psychological effect that seems to happen with humans and computers that we just interface with them in a form that makes it, like, it's reasonable to say, a space. I think it would have maybe two, three years ago said web. But really, like, the web as a medium is kind of dying, and it's being replaced bit by bit with this other thing. Like, you see, the web was made to be a knowledge graph. Well, really, the web is currently constructed is like 5 to 10 giant databases accessed through web browsers, which have really just become, like, the operating system. They're where the applications live. It's like universal application environment. So that's what we mean by cyberspace. It's just everything you do online, if you will.
- [44:00]
Interviewer
Well, it's a fascinating space, and there's a lot to learn. So, Sam, we appreciate you coming on. For all the listeners out there who want to follow what you're doing, where can they get plugged in, where can they get involved, and where can they follow you?
- [44:14]
Sam Williams
Yeah, I'm afraid to say the best place to follow me is probably my Twitter personally, which is just Sam E.C. williams. But yeah, from there you can jump into the perm web. There's a bunch of links you can find.
- [44:28]
Interviewer
And what was your Twitter?
- [44:30]
Sam Williams
Sam E.C. williams. It's a terrible name. I picked it many, many, many years ago and then it was always a sunk cost fallacy like oh, can't change it now because you know, a bunch of people know it and that just only gets worse over time. But it is what it is.
- [44:45]
Interviewer
And what about AO and Arweave as well? Is the best place Twitter as well? Is it the website? Is it somewhere else?
- [44:51]
Sam Williams
Yeah, you can, I mean just if you search AO or Arweave, you'll find people talking about it and find that there's a really decentralized ecosystem around these protocols.
- [45:01]
Interviewer
Now.
- [45:02]
Sam Williams
So if I pointed you to like one particular website, that would be kind of slightly unfairly advantaging the ones that we run. But yeah, if you just like search on X for either protocol or just search the perma web even, you'll find a bunch of people to follow there. And then yeah, if you Google search, I mean there's obviously arweave.org was like the original website, but now it's mostly just an index pointing people to other better resources, frankly about learning about the protocols and how you can start using them. So if you just like Google, you'll find plenty of.
- [45:37]
Interviewer
Fair enough. Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your time. And man, as you continue to work on this, if anything comes up, let us know and we'd be happy to have you back.
- [45:48]
Sam Williams
Thanks for the conversation.
- [45:49]
Interviewer
Absolutely. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming in to yet another episode. We have a lot more coming your way. We have plenty of more guests and we're excited to see you at the same time, same place next week.
- [46:12]
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- [47:40]
Sam Williams
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- [47:48]
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- [48:24]
Sam Williams
Fantastic.
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