Assembly 2022 | Balaji Srinivasan: Urbit and The Network State

All right, so I've got a little bit of a double header talk today. I'm going to talk about this concept. I just put out this book called The Network State, from new currencies and new companies to maybe new countries. And then the second part is: is Urbit part of this exit? Okay, so the first part is... is this clicker working? So, there's a full book, it's up at the networkstate.com. You can read it. You can just read the first sentence for the ad, you can read the first image, etc. Ada optimized. And I'm updating it constantly, and it'll be a big V2 hopefully next year with lots of new stuff. So I'm going to give the talk version, that's the book version. Okay, so first part is going to be about starting new countries, to show that it's possible, preferable, and profitable. And then the question on the second part is: is Urbit part of this exit? So let's start with the first. Okay, it's possible, preferable, and profitable. Possible is the big one, right? You know, we've started new companies like Google from a dorm room, from a garage rather. We start new communities like Facebook from a dorm room. We start new currencies like Bitcoin from a white paper. But is that it? Is that where the internet stops? We just stop there? We just flatline out? It's just new coins for all the world can see, as I can see. Or do we get something more? And I think we can actually potentially start new countries. And how would you actually do that? And so this is the concept in really one visual. This is what I call a network state. Okay, and it is a social network that crowdfunds territory. Okay, and that actually has a census, a real-time census at the top, that bar across the top, that shows its population, income, and real estate footprint. And it basically eventually achieves the scale to be comparable to a legacy nation state. We might call a fiat state. This is a crypto state, a crypto country, and those are fiat countries. And this builds out around the world. Here's how it actually can happen. I've given an example of it being 1,729,314, so 1729 and Pi. Okay, it's at a million person scale. But how did you actually get there from one person? So you start with somebody, for example in Japan maybe it's Satoshi, and they start building and they build it to 10 people, and 100 something people, and a thousand something people, 10,000, 100,000, a million. And each step there, the annual income and real estate footprint increases by roughly another 10x. And this is a true community. It's not like Facebook or Twitter where there's many different communities on Twitter. It's just a bunch of... it's like Fight Club, right? You just go there to fight every day. It's like a combination of Liberia and a library. But with something like this, it's a true community, a true social network where the people actually want to live with each other, which is a very high bar for what a social network is. You can call it a digital community, you could call it something which is more powerful. And as you can see, the buildings on the left-hand side get more and more sophisticated, because if you've got a thousand people, you can crowdfund a thousand person building. That kind of collective action we just haven't done frequently on the internet, but there's nothing preventing it in terms of laws of physics. Okay, so this is the concept in just a visual of how one would build up a network state. Every single piece of this is available today. We have social networks, we have crowdfunding, we have cryptocurrencies, we have remote work, we have dashboards, whatever, mobile phones to show the dashboard, all that type of stuff, right? Okay, so it's not like... I'm a big fan of space, you don't need to build rockets, you don't need to build seasteads. This is a way of building a digital country, as sympathetic as I am to space travel and sea setting and other things, right? Okay, to just put some more meat on the bones, to make this more plausible: most countries are actually small countries. If you go to the UN, more than half of the UN is less than 10 million people. There's 38 countries that are less than a million. And while not shown on the graph, there's 12 countries that are less than 100,000 people. We've built social networks that are far bigger than that. Even if most people live in big countries, most countries are actually small countries. And UN membership has actually grown over time. Most people don't think this is their mental model. They think countries have been flat for a long time, but as the British Empire broke up, the French Empire, all kinds of countries got independence. And most recently, the Soviet Empire broke up in 1991. So as empires decay, you get new countries. Okay, now the thing about this is, of course, this has been roughly flat for the last 30 years. There's been South Sudan and East Timor, but for the most part, new countries are not thought of as something that are cropping up on a daily basis. But then again, new currencies weren't either. New currencies kind of look like this, and then suddenly they took a dogleg up. At least you'd add Bitcoin and Ethereum to that class, but all the other coins that are perhaps above the market cap of an existing fiat currency, there's at least two, there's probably dozens if you have that threshold, right? So if the number of new fiat currencies has grown over time, maybe the number of new cryptocurrencies have grown over time, perhaps the number of crypto countries could as well. And the key concept here is: cryptocurrency is already ranked with fiat currency. So this is a funny site called fiatmarketcap.com. It's like CoinMarketCap, and it's comparing to fiat currencies. And you see Bitcoin is right there, just a few days ago between the Turkish lira and the Chilean peso. And at various other times it's been higher up, like at the peak I think it broke the top ten. Okay, and the thing about this is: cryptocurrency, this pure cloud phenomenon, is ranking with the land phenomenon, right? The new thing is starting to rank with the old thing. And so by analogy to that, here is the table of all the UN recognized countries in the world, okay, and their populations, just from Wikipedia. And exactly by analogy, here is a network state somewhere in between Latvia and Bahrain, with 1,729,314 people. Okay, and then on the right hand side you can see the change in that right hand column, you see it's like 15% population growth, because network states will want to rank on these dashboards. They'll actually want to have a pronatal policy. This is actually the way I think to get Type A personalities, tech people, etc. You can grow by immigration, you can also grow by reproduction, right? The new way and the old way. And so this is something where skilled immigration plus pronatal policy, your network state would rank on that leaderboard. Okay, and it's the opposite of the Singapore style IQ shredder. This is the opposite of that. So as much as I like Singapore, this actually solves several different problems at the same time. And the census that I talked about, the 1,729,314 people, that's how that pops in over here. And you just start every day you're showing your rank there relative to the fiat countries in the moment. The moment that you have a crypto country that is bigger than Kiribati with like 100,000 people, you're ranking. That's a huge, huge moment, okay. You could also put cities there as well. You could have a 10,000 person city, a small city, and you start ranking. So you extend this from just UN countries to other things, you start figuring out the scale of your thing. Okay, all right. Now, sufficient traction actually means diplomatic recognition. This is the other piece here to establish plausibility. GoDaddy has done a deal with the .tv domain. Nevada's done a deal with Tesla for the Gigafactory. El Salvador is using Bitcoin. So we can see sovereign cities like Miami, sovereign states like Nevada, sovereign countries like El Salvador and Tuvalu doing deals with companies and currencies. Okay, and so the question is: can a network state that is comparable to a company like Tesla, or a currency like Bitcoin, or a company like GoDaddy, can that similarly achieve some sort of win-win deal with a legacy state? I think it can. Okay, the land is already negotiating with the cloud. Okay, so that's the possible part, right? Now let's talk about preferable. I probably don't need to convince you too much of this, but there's basically both a push and a pull. Outside of the US, the energy scarcity and other things are leading to riots in many countries. That's Sri Lanka, that's Venezuela, that's Panama, okay, at the top. So there's these failed states and powerless people now have an alternative to failed states. Conversely, at the bottom, since expanding out of Africa, we've gone to... we've got the Statue of Liberty, we've landed on the moon. There's also the pioneering aspect, that's a pull, right? Are we just stuck in the states that we already have? Is a 200-something year old code base the best we can do? If we think we can land on Mars and even end death, can we not start new states? I think we can. Okay, so ambitious people now have an alternative in these frontier societies. So it's both a push and a pull, very similar to crypto itself, where it's for both those people who are powerless and for the power user. Okay, it's both at the same time. Finally, starting new countries is profitable, right? It's perhaps an obvious point, but just to give a comp. Okay, this is just stretching the point a little bit, but the ARPU of nation states, social networks, and network states. So social networks across the bottom, that's the number of people, and then on the y-axis is ARPU. And so the traditional ARPU is like annual revenue per user. And for a social network, it comes from ads. For a country, for a nation state, it would come from taxes. And so you can see that things like Facebook and LinkedIn and whatnot are pretty large in scale, but their monetization per user is only about $50 something. Conversely, there's many small countries like Israel, Estonia, etc. They're small in the number of people, but their monetization per person in terms of tax is actually quite high. Then in the upper right corner is both scale and the number of people, and that's the US and China. That's why they're the two big superpowers, right? So network states would kind of occupy this little bit over here, where you have relatively smaller scale but much higher affinity per person. And this is where the internet is going. In the 90s, it was eyeballs, people just looking loosely at websites. By the 2000s, we had DAUs, daily active users, you're logging in every day. Okay, by the 2010s, we have the concept of the crypto holder. You're not just logging in every day, you're holding a significant percentage of your net worth in this cloud currency. And by the 2020s, what comes after the digital currency in my view is the digital passport. You actually think of yourselves primarily as a netizen of this cloud country. And that's the next step. So from eyeballs to DAUs to holders to netizens of network states. And so this shows that it's profitable. And now economics, I think of as a tool, not the master per se, but this shows economic feasibility, not simply technological and political feasibility. You can make money doing this, and therefore we can align capital behind it. So I talked about this more at the networkstate.com. You can go and read that, or browse it, skim it, whatever. Give me feedback, and we'll make revisions for V2. Okay, so that's the first part of the double header. Okay, part two is: is Urbit part of this exit? Okay, can it be useful? So Justin Murphy, you might be here today. He tweets at me at times and trolls the internet, fine. So on August 8th, Justin predicted the first network state to have a GDP greater than one trillion will be built on Urbit. Okay, now the thing is, as other folks, perhaps somebody in this audience has observed, biology exists in superposition of first investor in Urbit and cognitive black hole. Okay, so why have I not talked that much about Urbit as the possible exit? So the reason is because Urbit is very unusual for something started 10 plus years ago. It is not a failure. Fail fast, CNN+ took our lessons of tech to heart. Okay, they fail fast. Okay, Bitcoin has just dramatically succeeded and was started roughly the same timeframe. Urbit is definitely not a failure, and it keeps improving every year, with this conference perhaps being a breakout moment. But it's not yet an obvious success. And why is that? And what are the limitations there? This is the kind of stuff that I poke Galen and Josh about, and so on. And let me poke all of you, okay. So basically, accessing the Urbit arena is a bit like taking the Chinese imperial exams. Okay, you learn many new words, it filters out many people: Arvo, Ames, Behn, Clay, Dill, Iergal, Iris, etc., etc. Okay, and the thing about this is there's a lot of good to this, because if you go from the hub and spoke model of the cloud to the Urbit vision of self-hosted ships securely and personally computing each other, it seems very compatible at first. Wouldn't it exceed? You have the sovereign individuals with their sovereign computers that group into sovereign collectives. Ta-da, seems like it should all work, right? But the issue is that the Web 2 and Web 3 alternatives to Urbit are more polished in most areas. Okay, Urbit wants to actually be a cathedral. It's a bit bizarre, but it's currently a bit of a bizarre cathedral, okay, or a bicycle MVP. And let me explain what I mean by that, right? So let's talk about the Web 2, Web 3, and Urbit alternatives in various areas. Okay, so namespace: for Web 2, it's URL; for Web 3, it's something like ENS; for Urbit, it's Azimuth. Like Dalvin, Robsten, you know, kind of stuff, right? As you guys know. Okay, language: obviously there's many languages for Web 2, just give an example is Python or Solidity. Okay, Hoon is fairly obscure. File store: AWS or IPFS. Clay, you've got a global path, you can address any object. Really cool thing about this global immutable namespace, this revision control namespace. The app store: you have the Apple App Store, you have web browsers, main things you could put there. For Web 3, kind of CoinMarketCap, where it's got a kind of a list of everything that's over there. You've got the urbit.org ecosystem. Okay, for tutorials, we've got all the O'Reilly books, zillions of programming books. For Web 3, we do have Mastering Bitcoin, Mastering Ethereum. That was actually a very important moment for crypto, was Andreas's book. We're going to need a Mastering Urbit if somebody here wants to step up and do that. I think that's an important moment for the ecosystem, where there's not a single word that is not explained in terms of something else. Like ideally, in my view, it should be like Google established a brand name, and then it was Google Maps, and it was Google Images, and Google this and Google that, right? You knew Google was search, and then there's these things. So rather than Arvo, it should be like Urbit OS. Rather than Hoon, it should be like Urbit language, or whatever, right? Everything should be kind of branded in this legible way. And if you want, you can preserve the old nickname in parentheses after that. Okay, but this way you only need to learn one word, and then you just make the surface area more understandable, minimum necessary overhead for people grasping it, right? Compiler: again, there's an infinite number of compilers, interpreters set on Web 2. Web 3, the canonical arguably is the EVM, even new chains or whatever, you see VM. Urbit has Nock. Okay, interop: lots of APIs in Web 2. And Web 3, there's atomic swaps, Chainlink, lots of interchange stuff being worked on. Urbit has Jets and HTTP in a sense. Jets for the C interface, HTTP for the web. Monetization: Web 2, again, SaaS is not the only thing, it's resilience of things here, but Web 3 coins. Urbit currently is ships, but you could imagine projects that issue tokens or stock or whatever, and build SaaS. And actually was not just pure ship-based monetization, or not just improving the namespace, but also had something that was specific to them. The blog: Web 2, again, there's tons of stuff, there's Substack. Web 3, Mirror. Urbit is Urbit Notes. The community: we've got Twitter, we've got Crypto Twitter, we've got the Urbit groups. And the killer app: again, there's an infinite number on Web 2, I could just go and list them. For Web 3, I think there's quite a few. Bitcoin: digital gold and DeFi are very large. And the big question is: what is that killer app for Urbit? Okay, so the thing is that when you look at this, Urbit wants to be this full stack thing, it wants to be this cathedral. But any individual road there is somewhat less polished than either the Web 2 or Web 3 alternatives. You have ENS alone is a giant project, they're just focusing on namespace. And so the alternative to Urbit is you take a bunch of things that are billion dollar market cap things and then you system integrate them, versus using Urbit which is living in this Galapagos Islands kind of thing. Okay, so just to understand from a developer who's outside the community, that's how they would think, right? So how do you fix that? Can you fix that? Okay, so one way of thinking about it is: this is a good post. When I talk about one of the individual elements of systems, someone will tell me another company is already building that, and they're usually right. What sets Urbit apart is we're building all these elements that want to work together seamlessly. That last bit is the key bit. It's not yet there, and in fact it's really, really, really hard to get there if you're doing something that is everything, because it's hard to polish the surface of the Earth. Okay, for it's another planet, you're like you can't buff Mars. Okay, so you need to actually find some piece that you actually get to being better than the Web 2 or Web 3 alternative that pulls people in. And so what is that? So I've thought about this a lot actually, and I actually do have an answer, which is that the killer app of Urbit is actually not related to its technology directly. Just as that Chinese imperial exam, the thing about it wasn't so much that you need to know about the past dynasties and what have you to become a Chinese bureaucrat, it is that that selected for those people who are competent enough to be Chinese bureaucrats. Okay, and so in the same way that the imperial exam filtered down a community, the Urbit exam has filtered and built all of you guys. Okay, Urbit's killer app is actually its community, not its technology per se yet. That bizarre test pulled all of these people in who wanted something like this, and now you might be able to LARP it into existence. And what I think the next step is is identifying the Urbit community is actually the killer app. But that's the thing: if you think about it, that's what keeps you coming back every day to bash through the various idiosyncrasies of Port or Urbit Notes or Urbit Groups. Like a lot of this stuff is not polished, but it's a community that's actually keeping people coming back if they are DAUs, which is non-obvious because that's not what the project started with, right? It started as a technology. It has become really a community first and foremost, related to the concept of the network state, where the community is actually the primary thing. It's not like the franc of France has some amazing tech, it is the currency of that community, and it is the community that's keeping people there. Okay, so when you have that lens on things, that Urbit's killer app is actually its community, then that's what we want to polish. Okay, this should get to the level of a Slack or a Discord. Urbit should be decentralized Discord. It could be a lot more. We should absolutely nail this. And the way you've nailed it is you go to somebody who's in Slack or in Discord and you go feature for feature. You don't say, "Oh, Urbit can do everything but it's not on this thing," but yet you buff this area of Mars. Okay, this is the thing in my view to focus on, because anybody who's doing a Web 3 Discord has private keys to manage, understand sovereignty. They'll want to run many programs within their chat environment that use local computing. You might want to do a digital signature or something like that. You'll need to build the equivalent of slash commands in Discord and make it as backwards compatible as possible. If you notice, for example, new projects in crypto, backwards compatibility is a huge thing. The EVM is something where people market new projects as being EVM compatible. Windows, or rather Microsoft, for years made Word files backwards compatible. So what you should do is really go and look at Slack, look at Discord, and make Urbit a better decentralized Discord. Your community is already there every single day poking each other. This is a thing that will make it better. Once you've got a better decentralized Discord and you've proven extreme strength in one thing where you can win against Slack and Discord on the merits, not on the potential but on the realized potential, then I think you'll actually have something. So this is what I would encourage everybody here to focus on. Okay, so that's how I think Urbit can be part of the exit. Because if so, you don't just have a network of little personal servers, you don't just have a bunch of sovereign individuals, you have a bunch of sovereign collectives within the larger Urbit community. And that's the kind of thing which can potentially give rise to network states. So thank you very much.

Should I take any questions or go next? Eye, Josh. Good, go take questions. All right, go ahead.

Yeah, so Zooko's triangle is like the trade-off between memorability and something like that, right? Yeah, I forget the three points on it. And so your question was: could Urbit namespace solve that problem? Is that... do you think that there is ever going to be a need to have a more traditional namespace kind of on top of Pat P, where it's like I can get at Sam that maps to my Pat P? Kind of. Yeah, so for example, I think a huge thing for the Ethereum community will be eventually to do a deal with Ethiopia to administer the .eth thing, right? Jack Dorsey had this somewhat amusing troll of ETH where he posted the Ethiopian flag or something like that, right? Because he's a Bitcoin maximalist. I found it funny, but it's also something where in the same way, Urbit should find either some country or TLD that it can get and make it reverse compatible with normal URLs and also make it reverse compatible with ENS. And I think that's the answer, is to do something like that. For example, the other day there was an Urbit app and there was a path, and I asked Galen, I poked, I was like, "Share that path with me." He's like, "Well, you need Urbit or whatever to launch." I'm like, "Yeah, share the path and I want to see what happens when I click it." And it just didn't give a good landing page. It should say, "You need to install Urbit to do this," and it'll like onboard you there, right? These are all the small usability things where I think you can make Urbit's namespace valuable, but it requires building the Galapagos bridges. She had a question over there, yep.

With Handshake? I mean, HNS, yeah, I like Handshake. I think it's probably feasible, but I can sort of an implementation detail. I'm a small investor in Handshake and so on and so forth, but so yeah, HNS, SNS, ENS. I'm just mentioning ENS because it's the market leader right now. Yeah.

Ah, good question. So really primarily social. And the reason I say that is once you have a community... I mean, there's a guy, by the way, I'll do the back, Josh, to me, you can give them the mic for the next guy. Once you have a community, I mean, just think about the rotting infrastructure of San Francisco, yet everybody hasn't left yet. Okay, the network effects keep people there even when the technology is terrible, right? Decaying, etc. And so that's both a good and a bad thing. The good part about it is it means people don't necessarily immediately leave. It's a loyalty aspect of voice, exit, and loyalty. But the bad thing is it allows people to make tons and tons of mistakes for good or ill in managing that community. Right? With that said, at the beginning, something like a network state or its antecedent, so we talk about network unions and network archipelagos, is so fragile that you do want those community bonds. And so I think it's fundamentally a community first thing, technology second.

Yeah, sure. So it's like, you think about the quote "venture contrarian" typically, right? They are right when everybody else is wrong. They do something that's different and whatnot, right? But a lot of you know, Teal's vets aren't totally anti-memetic necessarily. It's something where he's establishing a new axis, and then everybody is memetic towards him, meaning he makes an investment and then he's proven right ten years later because the world catches up to him. So it is not simply enough to be contrarian and divergent and cryptic and whatnot. That has to become the lingua franca of the world, right? You're establishing Mars, then you want lots of people to migrate there. Okay, that's fundamentally the combination of the two. You are contrarian, and to be proven right, you need to actually have your idea sweep over the rest of the world. Otherwise, you're just like it'll die out like the Shakers or those various communities that didn't reproduce.

Yeah, so the fundamental thing is, obviously Bitcoin and Ethereum have managed to secure hundreds of billions of dollars without any soldiers. Right? Why? Because they decentralized the state itself, or they sort of decentralized the servers to decentralize the back end, and there's nobody, no one person you can punch to take their money. Okay, that's not to say that we're not going to see the limits of state force versus the network. I think we will. However, something like this actually is clearly inspired by cryptocurrency, where we're decentralizing the state itself. We're using the fact that the internet allows us to network enclaves. If you take the country of Indonesia, down over here, basically all of these little islands were separated by ocean. Now you have lots of little islands around the world separated by internet that nevertheless think of themselves as the same country. Something like that is very difficult to nuke, very difficult to invade. If you tried to nuke this, you'd nuke lots of Germans. You tried to nuke this, you're nuking lots of other people, right? So the weapons of the traditional state are less effective against these distributed states. That's not to say that I'm totally naive about force and what have you. Nevertheless, I do think that you can get to a scale where you're basically dual netizens all the time. For example, with cryptocurrency, people didn't just go, "Okay, I have $100, now I have 100 Bitcoin instead." They're dual booting the entire way, right? They've got like 0.1% Bitcoin. That's actually a pretty big investment for many people. 1% Bitcoin is a huge investment, okay? And then that gradually takes up, and it becomes a gradual percentage more and more. By 2030, perhaps probably 10% of your net worth will be in some kind of crypto asset, if you include traditional assets that gain crypto asset back ends, and so on. Just like your time spent on the internet was maybe a few minutes in 1999, then a few hours, and now it's like half your day. That ticks up. And so just like your time on the internet ticked up, just like your holdings in cryptocurrency tick up, your time as a dual netizen of the American state or the Indian state or the Brazilian state and your corresponding network state just keeps ticking up. Okay, and then during that process, you're negotiating various deals. The fiat to crypto country exchange of digital passports and fiat passports is similar in its complexity and importance to the fiat to cryptocurrency exchange between digital currencies and fiat currencies. That's like diplomatic relations. So the answer to your question is: you can work out deals with local sovereigns to protect you. You can be decentralized around the world. You can be pseudonymous. You can build up large communities. And you cannot be taken seriously for a very long time. And all those are different overlapping levels of defense. Okay, but I'll talk about this more in the book, because everybody wants to hear about it, and fine. You'll get more on that. Go ahead.

Great question. So I think the network state straddles the boundary of internationalism, nationalism, and in a sense capitalism and collectivism, because you are building a nation, that is to say a community, from the people of the world, and you're building something where individuals are opting into a collective. And so to your point, nations themselves, we think of them as kind of immutable, and there's certainly things that have gone back hundreds or thousands of years. But for example, the territory of France at the time of the French Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm said less than 10% of the territory of France spoke what we now think of as French. There were a lot of other dialects and stuff. In the French Revolution, they imperialized everything and they homogenized it. And there was a bad to that, obviously, the guillotine and so on. There was also a good in the sense of a common language, common laws, and so on. A similar kind of thing happened in Italy with Garibaldi, and what we now know as Germany with Bismarck. These nations are in a sense partially social constructs and partially they have long historical antecedents. So there's a balance between those two things. And I think that if you think about a religion like Islam, it was founded in the 600s, and that spread and that's become this giant community. You can found nations, found communities based on propositions, and the internet has actually made that easier to do than ever before. And I kind of think that's a rebundling that's going to put the civilization together. Will some of these network states be like traditional nations? Potentially. For example, the stateless nations like the Catalonians love the network state. There's a Catalonian nationalist newspaper that had a whole thing on this. If you're the Catalonians, if you're the Basques, if you're maybe the Kurds, other kinds of groups like this, because there's hundreds of different nations around the world that don't have their own states. And now they might give up on the specific territory, rather than either seceding from the Spanish state or fighting an Irish-style ethnic insurgency against the Spanish government. The Catalonians could have a decentralized network state, give up on the territory but have a community, much like there's more Irish people living outside of Ireland than within Ireland, right? So at the same time, it allows totally new... for those people, many people who have an aversion to ancient nationalism, now you can get together purely on ideas of the mind. And if you just want a math community, you can do that, right? There's a lot of people who like that. So this is something which I think straddles a boundary in an interesting way, where hopefully it gives things for both groups. Okay, okay, predict two more, two more. Yeah, great.

Well, sure. I mean, just the fact that you have a censorship resistant... so what he asked is: how I talk about how a community is really based on a moral innovation, whereas a company is based on a technical innovation. Why is that? With a company, a tech company, you're saying my product is better than this product out in the market, right? Whereas in the community, when you're actually marketing the community, it's not because usually you have spaceships or something like that. There's some aspect of your community that is morally superior to the culture at large, even if it's not usually phrased that way. You're saying we are better than these other folks. We are vegan and they're not, or we're carnivore and they're not. We are X and they're not. You have like a one commandment something that differentiates you from society at large, much like that tech company has one aspect of their product that differentiates them. Who are better? Expert a better why? That one line pitch is super important. So his question was: can Urbit help with that kind of moral one commandment that differentiates them? If the community is primary rather than technology, let's say certainly, because Urbit says sovereignty, decentralization, peer-to-peer are crucially important. And that means if you take that as a constraint, a moral constraint on what you're building, it leads to a very different stack and very different infra than Web 2 and certain parts of Web 3, right? So that's just kind of already got that right. And there's more, there's the writings, etc. But I think you kind of already have that implicitly, but it might be useful to make it explicit and have something that's like a Ten Commandments thing. It might be an interesting experiment to write that up. Last one.

Yeah, no, I disagree. So okay, basically I think it's sort of... so there should be a few different, maybe several different centralized tech startups that raise money either via equity or via coins or both. And coins are not equity, coins are... okay, all right. So you've got... they're more like API keys, disclaimers, etc., all right. So you have a centralized thing that raises money, okay, and then it just has some vision of what decentralized Discord should be on Urbit. If it's monetizing via coins, okay, that's actually better because in some ways, because those coins could... there's more of a route for exit community or exit world perhaps. If you've got Coinbase monetization and stock based monetization, however either way might be fine. And once you've got a few of these, the level of polish in the community just creeps up. Like Slack led to Mattermost and Discord and so on. So chat apps have just kind of crept up. One centralized guy getting out there and proving that you can have a highly polished thing that can... and the crucial thing is: can you take sales away from Slack and Discord? Can somebody who just doesn't care about Urbit at all put this in a feature matrix and say, "Okay, this is better"? Crypto got to that level at least on investments. People who didn't care about Bitcoin or Ethereum could make money in it. So it was able to win on that base for people who didn't care about it, right? That's actually important, where you've got that neutral person who you can move them over. So my answer is multiple different companies that get you to that polish level, and to not say, "Oh, we're not ready yet." You gotta... this group is ready. This group is ready to do it. The talent is here to do it. All right, that's it. Thanks.