# Network States and the Rise of Rule of Code

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-01-28

## Transcript

Countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete, but it tends to be the countries that want to grow.
A huge strength of the US has been rule of law and the amount of case law and like the predictability of the law.
But that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law who are judges and you know prosecutors and these kinds of things.
People who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested in kind of pushing forward into the future.
What the state cares about is power.
And as tech kind of rose in power to the level of the state, then they got very, very interested.
Can you build a new kind of country from the internet up?
Not a metaphor, not a community, but something that actually replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed.
Money, law, governance.
A few decades ago, China experimented with this idea physically, carving out special economic zones to test new rules without rewriting the entire system.
Xinjiang was once a fishing village.
Today it's a global tech hub.
Now the experiment has moved online.
Crypto, digital identity, internet native communities, and what some call network states are trying to turn code into coordination and coordination into legitimacy.
But there's a real tension here.
Code is deterministic.
Societies aren't.
So the question isn't whether these systems are clever, it's whether they can actually scale and what they replace if they do.
In this episode, A6DZ co-founder Ben Horwitz joins Bology Shrinavawsin on the Network State podcast to examine how internet first institutions form, where they break, and whether network states are a curiosity or the next phase of governance.
Ben, thank you for speaking at the Network State Conference.
Good to see you, Biology.
Ready to go.
Awesome.
So, you know, Ben, you've been uh, you know, a mentor and uh I think uh I'd say a friend, hopefully, um for for many years now.
And um, you know, one thing is in the hard thing about hard things in that book you wrote about your time at Netscape.
And Netscape in many ways was like the first internet company, and because it had downloads and so on and so forth, and it went viral, and you guys went public and you had an acquisition and all the monodrama, right?
And then we worked together on the rise of Bitcoin, which is first internet currency, and obviously we've been very heavily involved in that with AC crypto and everything, and Boinbase and all that stuff.
And now we're building internet communities.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
As you know, I I think of them as the third kind of thing, startup societies, internet communities, network states.
So love to hear your thoughts.
Do you think they're the next big thing or could be?
Yeah, so I think they're very kind of parallel in the development in that, you know, kind of before Netscape, which was the first thing that kind of uh brought all of the internet pieces together.
Um, you know, there were there were many pieces, you know, there's FTP and TCPIP and Gopher and this and that.
Um, but you needed something to unify all the technology.
So it it it was a little deceptive in that a lot of people deep in the tech kind of saw it as well, what's new here?
You know, like it's just like you're just putting an interface on it.
Um, and I think that what the network state is is a network school is is very much like that, and that we have all the primitive building blocks of community.
We've got you know, Discord and WhatsApp groups, and you know, we've got uh we have Bitcoin now, and we have many kind of uh different currencies, stable coins and so forth.
But I mean, you know, nobody's brought them all to be a VR, um, but nobody's put the whole package together.
And that's really when it gets unleashed.
I mean, my in my experience, that's kind of where you hit the knee in the curve when is that the integration.
And it doesn't seem in a way it doesn't seem like a lot because all the pieces were already there, but the pieces as pieces just aren't, you know, it's not it's not actually the thing.
It's not the product.
It's funny because you're right, the system integration and the thing is that actually has to happen after all the other pieces are mature, because if any one piece of those is wiggly, then the whole thing doesn't work.
You have to wait for that to be there.
So only when all those pieces are mature can you snap them together.
Right, exactly, exactly.
And and that's kind of the deceptive thing because in until that point, you know, people might have tried it and failed, or yet, you know, it's kind of like this.
Oh no, that doesn't work.
Right.
You know, that kind of thing.
Um, yeah, same with same with Bitcoin, right?
Like it put together like a lot of techniques, um, you know, peer-to-peer, cryptography, et cetera, that had been around.
But they weren't put together in a way where you could actually have money.
Right.
Because ECDSA existed, yeah, hash functions existed, hashcast existed, and in a sense, I think somebody exactly as you said, yeah, remarked is just an it was quote, it was a clever integration of existing things, but they all existed before.
And they didn't innovate on cryptography, they interfered on the on the system, right?
Right.
Um, you know, it it's funny you say that because um I myself actually had not thought of that before in quite that way as the analogy to the web browser.
But once you do snap all the species together, then that itself becomes a platform for other things.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
And then you have web apps and you had everything else, because then you could, right?
And so what we're starting to see is um these startup societies, I call them like the parallel physical, are each usually inspired by the parallel digital.
For example, um, there's startups society that is uh like uh cul de sac, which is based on all the micro mobility stuff and it wants to be a walkable community, right?
And then uh there's you know, Prospera, which has mini circle and it's inspired by the biotech innovations.
And uh then there's another one that's booting up, which is inspired by all the educational innovations.
Yeah.
And so so the digital is inspiring the physical.
Yes, yeah, no, exactly.
And I and I think that's gonna um I I think the number of ideas around that is really gonna multiply because you know, one of the things that if you look at the primitive version, it's all kind of uh, you know, a community around an idea.
Um, but what about a community around the intersection of many ideas?
Uh you know, and just for for for my own sake, um, it would be great if there was a tech hip-hop community.
Um, but you, you know, you you you could imagine many, many dimensions.
You know, just sort of if you think of every policy that you might um be interested, anything you might be interested in or any policy you might vote on, if you took the intersection and found all the like-minded people in the world and put them in a community, that would be a kind of very powerful thing.
Yes.
And you know, one thing is some of the other folks were having speak the conference, for example, the CEO of Angelist read the Netherburgh State Book, and they've just opened this Angelus Founders Cafe in San Francisco, and he said he was kicking himself for not doing it three years ago.
Yeah, because it it on the one hand it seems an obvious thing, but it's also like a non-obvious thing because people drop in, they give customer feedback, so you can materialize the cloud into land.
So many many digital things that we have that we think is purely digital have some physical manifestation that might actually be non-obvious.
Yeah, no, that for sure.
And then when you add the physical, it it does add a whole nother dimension of possibility for sure.
Um that's very interesting.
So uh, you know, what one way that we've uh we we start to establish a few templates in the space.
For example, the pop-up, which is somewhere in between, let's say a conference, which is like a one-day thing, and what we're doing in network school is a permanent where it's like a permanent setup.
Yeah, exactly.
That's right.
So a pop-up, like uh like a one-month thing ish, right?
Um and so it's longer than a conference because people, you know, they have to bring, you know, change of clothes, laundry to, you know, it's more than that.
Um so do you have any kinds of things that you've been thinking?
So you mentioned a tech hip hop uh thing.
And obviously we're used to thinking about okay, we could solve this with a new tech company, we could solve this with a new currency.
Have you thought about communities that you'd like to see?
Well, there's so many, you know, like the there's the kind of I I'm part of like a many primitive communities in, you know, the form of WhatsApp groups and so forth.
And it would be really like this nice to see those be much more highly dimensional, maybe have a physical incarnation.
Um, you know, it's everything from like, you know, the LLM community to, you know, the various different kinds of things.
But they're all so primitive because there's no money in them.
Um there, you know, there's no there's no crypto in these communities, there's no physical uh dimension, there's no virtual reality dimension.
There's uh, you know, all you can really do is chat, uh, which is you know, one of the things you'll do in a community, but that there's many, many, many more uh uh ideas that you could have.
Yeah, you know, it's funny you say it because the the WhatsApp and signal groups, what I like about them is you have a lot of busy COs and investors and so on, and we can remain in kind of lightweight contact with a lot of people.
And then you have the physical, like, you know, maybe there's a coffee and you put in an invite there, a Luma invite, and 20 of the people or 10 of the people from the group show up there.
And you can just pick up right where you left off with this long-running group chat conversation.
There's definitely this amazing thing there.
Yeah.
But you know, what what uh what's interesting is when you when you when you say what you just said, uh you kind of want to be able to boom hold a meetup within the chat or like hit a button and create a meetup, or boom, hold a meetup and do maybe like a quick VR talk or something like that.
I don't know, maybe the chat chat interface will get there, or maybe we'll need something completely new.
Yeah, yeah.
Cause right now, again, you know, you can do that, but it's a little bit of a heavy uh cognitive and like social lift, right?
Like now it's a little more risky to say, hey, let's all get together.
You don't want people to go, nah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
Well, you know, there's something, you know, one thing that's interesting about that is um, you know, with WhatsApp, uh, you know, a very modern question is where are you?
Because it, you know, if it probably if you analyze text in the 1800s, for example, it's very rare for someone to ask, where are you?
Where are you?
I'm on I'm on the other side of the table from you or happy.
You know, because there's not that many times, you know, maybe you send a telegram, but the telegram, you know, or or or you're, you know, um you send send a postal message, but it's rare that you wouldn't know the other person's physical.
Yeah, you you would certainly know where they are if you're sending a puzzle message.
Yes, that's right.
So, but one of the things that's interesting, uh, you know, WhatsApp itself is location aware.
But an interesting thing that happens is people cycle around the globe, and they're kind of, you know, they're in the Spain airport or they're here and they're just kind of sending messages.
And uh and we sort of take for granted the level of mobility there, even though they're in one place in the chat world, they're moving around the physical world.
So maybe there's something that would suggest, you know, to reduce the social overhead, as you mentioned, that oh, these three people are nearby, you guys should meet up.
But you need to allow it to do that location tracking.
That's like one concept, for example.
Yeah, that would be that that would be super convenient because then you you'd also not have to worry, oh, hey, let's meet up.
Oh, I'm in France, right?
Right.
That that's gonna be hard.
Okay, well, that was a waste of a message for me.
Yes.
The thing is that the people would have to also want to be location tracked.
It has to be done in exactly the right way that they feel they feel good about it.
Yeah.
Um, okay, so internet communities, I mean, there's another angle on this, which is uh, for example, things like self-driving, things like many of the biotech things that we're interested in.
We can potentially have those within special economic zones.
And uh, you know, did you see my post from a few months ago on the special Elon zone?
Oh, I didn't see that.
I got to look at that.
That sounds a good post, yeah.
Yeah.
Or just all Elon's tech gets to work for free.
Right exactly, yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That's right.
So my my thought was what is the sort of westernized version of the Asian cause of the special economic zone, the special Elon zone, or more generally, the special founder zone, would be find some swatha territory.
Maybe it's in the US, maybe it's Elon Salvador.
Okay, so Elon gets uh, you know, because Tesla's a global business and so on.
So some country gives or some state carves out a piece of territory and says, okay, Elon, you can move at the speed of physics rather than permits.
You can crank out all the humanoids you want, you can mine stuff out of the ground.
Uh and what they would do is they'd import existing regulations on, I don't know, graffiti and stuff like that you don't have to rewrite every single law.
You just allow, however, quick changes to existing laws.
And the crucial thing being that it's like an essentially an uninhabited territory, as close to burning man as possible.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts on something like that?
Yeah, no, I think that's a I by the way, I think it's very doable.
There's so many states in the US that would want to do that.
I know Nevada would want to do that.
Um, and I mean they have burning man.
They would certainly uh rather have something that um was productive.
Uh so I think that's super viable.
Um, you know, there are certain sites, of course, you could never do it, um, but but but for sure.
And and I think it could be I it it could not only be really productive, but it would also kind of create a very special community, um, almost of of kind of both like-minded people and then people who knew how to build techs.
That's right.
And actually, the thing about this is if it worked for Elon, then it could work for Palmer Lucky to have the drone zone.
And uh right, and you could have uh, you know, different kinds of you know, like a more mundane thing, um, manufacturing.
Exactly.
So on that point, rare mighty mining.
Exactly.
That's right.
So, like uh, if you know about how Deng Xiaoping reformed China, when he took over, the country was like all brainwashed total communists, and he couldn't like reform it all at once.
So he just set up a few special economic zones, especially Shenzhen near Hong Kong.
And actually, he didn't allow everybody in.
They actually, there was like a membership process or an admissions process where only the most capitalist sympathetic people were allowed in and they weren't going to make trouble.
They weren't still diehard Maoists, right?
And and of course, that became this gigantic, you know, Chinese city there.
And this way they could gradually reform communism rather than try to change it for the whole country at once.
They could experiment with new laws and and so and so forth.
So for manufacturing, all of the OSHA, you know, EPA type stuff, right?
You could suspend that in this one zone.
And everybody who came in signed a new social smart contract that would basically say, guess what?
I'm coming into this totally desolate piece of territory, and uh I'm coming because of the new rules.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I I think that would um I think that's a great idea.
That would be very good for the it would be amazing for the US if we could do it here.
Yes.
So here, not there where you are.
Well, I well, we can't.
Or you could do it there too.
We could do it in Singapore.
Yes.
So so I I'm I I want to uh of course it'd be amazing if we do it in the US.
And in a sense, if you can do it in the rest of the world, then that gives you a template to bring into the US, potentially, right?
So we can we can parallel path potentially.
So okay, on to on that topic, actually uh relatedly, um, there are a bunch of uh countries that are pursuing interesting kinds of pro-tech legislation, like digital nomad laws, crypto laws, Dow laws.
I'd love to know your thoughts on the progressive, for example, in in Wyoming, they had the they did the first Dow Law, Tennessee had uh followed up with the Dow Law.
I'd love to know your thoughts on the jurisdictions, politicians, et cetera, that are kind of pursuing the most progress technologically progressive interactions with not just tech companies, tech currencies, protocols, sharp communities.
You you must have some thoughts on this.
Yeah, so so I mean, you know, in the U.S., it does tend to be the like the states that want to do that do tend to be the red states or the purple states at least.
So, you know, Wyoming, Nevada, Florida, um, Texas to some degree.
Uh a lot of the southern states are very kind of open to manufacturing and and these kinds of things.
Um, you know, around the world, it's been interesting.
So uh like worldcoin, I think their most kind of active country per capita is Argentina.
Um, and uh I think half the citizens of Buenos Aires are are uh active users on worldcoin.
Um and then they also made a lot of progress, surprisingly with Malaysia, um, which uh is pretty good.
Um, you know, of course, uh in the UAE, uh Dubai's been very, very aggressive uh and uh so they've been good.
So I think countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete, but it tends to be the, you know, it tends to be countries that want to grow as opposed to, you know, what's going on in uh Europe or uh, you know, some some of some other places or in you know, California, even, um, where they kind of are like, well, we're rich enough, and now we need to divide up the pie and and uh protect our our children, the people.
That's right.
They see they're basically unfortunately just taking prosperity for granted.
Yeah.
And then uh there the the you you mentioned this thing about places that want to grow.
One of the things I've been most pleasantly surprised by over the last five years or so is small states putting themselves on the map like El Salvador.
Yeah.
But also like like small cities like Palau, Marshall Islands, you know, they've taken very pro-crypto kinds of you know uh approaches.
And my my general pattern on this is actually that um you know there's 190 to 193 UN members and it's there it's a little bit like uh a reverse merger or digital asset treasury company where you've got kind of a listed company and it's got a symbol and you've got a coin and then this guy has a symbol and in political legitimacy but not capital and it says capital but not legitimacy and then they merge together.
That's a digital asset treasury company or reverse merger.
Yeah.
And that that can now be done at the level of the state or whether a sovereign state or like a US state.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that is uh yeah it's a very, very smart move, I think, by by those states.
I mean, I think it's uh it it it's really interesting that you can differentiate just by thinking about how to grow and how to maintain prosperity, that there are whole societies that have given up on that idea.
Um yeah, we uh Mark and I just had dinner with uh one of the um kind of potential accountants for prime minister of the UK and she was uh going through like you know, like what's your differentiation?
She's like growth, like we're like we can grow the economy.
And I was like, wow, that's a very interesting differentiator.
It it's interesting also because, you know, historically people have said natural resources a differentiator.
But I actually think it is um, you know, human resources, so to speak, or or capital, like basically letting the human resources do their thing, yeah.
Yes.
And and we we should come up with a term for that, but I'd like to at some point organize a conference of small countries and pro-growth jurisdictions, and that's kind of like one side of a two-sided market.
And we have all the tech founders and venture capitalists as the other side of the two-sided market and put put them together.
I mean, network state conference is like the V1 of that, right?
And we've got a bunch of, you know, folks here who are who are who are doing that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for sure.
Well, I like think that goes together.
You know, people who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested in in kind of pushing forward into the future.
Yeah, because we can bring talent and capital there, just like crypto, just like, you know, just like tech itself.
So now uh are there um what has uh you know what what has surprised you about um the last five, 10, 15 years in terms of tech and policy, or or did nothing, or maybe maybe there's so many things.
Um, but what what have you found to be uh to be interesting or something that we should look at, pursue, pay attention to?
Well, so I think the big wake up call for me was um first kind of how interested, you know, uh nation states got in technology policy, um, which is very like all of a sudden, uh, because we ran my whole career, nobody cared.
I mean, you know, like what were the issues?
Stock option accounting, H1B visas, like real, like relative fringe stuff compared to um, you know, the like we're gonna ban crypto, or we are going to call Google and Meta and tell them what they can publish.
You know, that that was a real change.
And I think that, you know, my big conclusion is what the state cares about is power.
And as tech kind of rose in power to the level of the state, um, then they got very, very interested.
Uh so, like, you know, it's always under the guise of of safety, but it's really power.
Uh and you know, it's been it it's been quite interesting.
I mean, like, it took us a long time to unravel like why the Biden administration was so keen on banning crypto and like taking the US out of a whole technological space, probably, you know, one of the two most important kind of technology platforms for the next 25 years.
They're also anti-AI.
Yeah, yeah.
Why wh why are we calling the other two?
Yeah, and AI.
Well, both of them, right?
Yeah.
Why would you withdraw from that?
And it really has to do with well, you know, control.
If we can if we can't control the money, then we can't control the speech.
And if we can't control the speech, then we can't control the people.
And, you know, both AI and crypto are like, well, we better shut them, we better have control of those things.
Like they better not be in control of somebody else.
And that's, you know, it's just a really interesting learning.
Um, that that's I I guess I had to grow up and learn how the world works, but but that is how it works.
Yeah.
It it is interesting because, you know, f for, you know, you're you're a little bit older than I am, actually.
I mean 15 old yeah, and you know, there during the period where for for many years we had to convince people that tech was important.
Yeah.
And then suddenly they're like, it's too important.
And that happened right in the mid 2010s or thereabouts, after about 30, 40 years of building the internet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, no crazy.
It is it's just so we were probably you know it's the same with all the I mean the first thing the the first sign I got of it was um you know the big push for like women in tech and like which was always surprising to me because it was like well you guys are discriminating against women there's not enough women in tech but like nobody wanted to go into tech.
Like going into tech was like a weird ass thing when I went into it like I I got like ridiculed and my friends like what are you doing that for like you know like really computers this and that um you know it's so hard and like you know there's not that much money in it and this and that and the other and like all you do is work.
And and so like going in in that world and then all of a sudden you know Google and meta hit and people are getting so rich and uh and then people all all of a sudden it's like, well, you guys are discriminating.
You're not letting people in.
And it's like, oh, okay, you want in, okay.
No one cares about the demographics of of plumbing, for example.
Right.
Like they're they haven't ex yes.
So now, but the other part about that is tech is actually, in a real sense, very globally meritocratic because we've got people from just about every country that are participating in tech in some sense.
Well, that's how we always thought of it, right?
Like it's like, oh, there's all these Jews, Chinese, Indians, like all these people are coming from all over the world.
They're doing tech.
You know, like it's it's not the, you know, kind of canonical um white man or whatever who's doing it, but but it was all self-selected, you know.
It wasn't like there was no no nobody ever cared.
Like there was never a conversation in any of the companies that I worked at like that would get you to think anybody cared what race or gender you were.
Like, like it just was never a thing.
Um, but nobody wanted, but but nobody applied.
You know, just it's one of those things.
And look, if you were kind of uh not uh Jews, Chinese or Indians, you would definitely feel low on the outside, because that's what most people were.
I mean, it's just kind of it worked like that, yeah.
Well, yeah, about the Midwest too, I guess.
Uh yes, that's right.
So we I mean, they see we have many different demographics, but you know, the thing about this is one thing I've been formulating is the thesis of the internet is to America as America was to Britain, like the version 3.0, it's like 10x bigger.
And in particular, lots of traditional American values like freedom of speech or protection against search and seizure.
You can protect them on the internet with encryption in a way that is is stronger than the protections of uh of a law, for example, right?
And so, like a smart contract is rule of law, you know.
You know, for example, Delaware is melting down, but smart contracts are booting up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We just actually moved the uh we reincorporated the firm into Nevada.
And that's an opportunity, right?
For many countries.
I mean, I I know you guys are like in are in Nevada now, but the fact that, you know, Delaware was was a stable jurisdiction for for decades, maybe centuries, depending on, you know, how long that you think the Chancery Court was was the main event.
And so now I think there's sort of a jump ball where if, you know, there's some jurisdiction that could say, hey, guess what?
We've got a better Dow law and we're better than Delaware because we allow you to port your company from place to place.
We've got the crypto stuff, it feels there's a real opportunity in rule of law integrated with rule of code.
If maybe maybe you'd agree with that.
Well, I definitely think so, because the thing that we've seen, you know, in the US over the last probably mainly over the last five years is, you know, we've always kind of a huge strength of the US has been rule of law and the amount of case law and like the predictability of the law.
But that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law who were judges and you know, prosecutors and these kinds of things.
And so then what's happened in the last five years is you know, particularly in the Delaware Chancery Court, is the chair of the Delaware Chancery Court just chose to completely ignore the law and make up our own law.
Uh, which you know, uh it was quite stunning.
You, you know, like the board of directors, uh didn't have a say, and then even the shareholders didn't have a say in how the company is the Tesla case.
Whatever she imagined would be the right thing.
And you know, like it took a lot of us by surprise.
It was like, okay, wow, so um Delaware doesn't have rule of law anymore.
Um which it doesn't, like it absolutely doesn't, and it's hard to even get to a point where you think it does.
Uh but yeah, there was also if you look at you know, the the there was the prosecution of Trump over the real estate deal, which was also, you know, like forget about the law.
Like I, the prosecutor and I the judge will just go like the law about, you know what it means to have an agreement with a bank to get a loan is no longer the law.
It's what I believe.
And because I believe that they shouldn't have given you a loan because I don't like you, then therefore uh you were cheating other people.
Um, but it it's like, well, if I go to borrow money, I disclose the thing, you kind of evaluate my collateral and I lend you the money.
That's not legal in New York, um, or it wasn't legal for that case.
So, you know, you get into this, we're we're in a different world where the law has been very politicized, I would just say.
And, and you know, as a result of that, you're kind of you were in like uncharted territory a bit.
So I do think that creates an opening.
Absolutely.
I mean, yes, my my view on that is if you imagine like a house and there's two factions and they're fighting over the territory, that house is now a battleground and it can have a window blown up here, or some guys can take it and shoot down from here.
And so all of these formerly neutral institutions are now political battlegrounds.
Yeah, one side and then maybe another will will weaponize uh, you know, what you're doing.
And I think it's on now, right?
Like I think we've got we've we've gone through a bit of a one-way door on this because I think that once one side does it, uh like I don't think the other side is like morally higher on higher ground, uh I think that'll uh i it's gonna be the same kind of thing, but in reverse for sure.
Exactly.
So that is why my view is with crypto, with the blockchain, with the internet, with these special economic zones, we can potentially rebuild a new internet first version of those things, which uh now puts more of the or as much as possible of the rule of law into rule of code.
So that, for example, the property can't be seized since the private keys, you have to break encryption in order to seize a property.
For example, to break the contract, you have to break the smart contract.
Yeah, fix it.
So what's your thought?
Smart contract, then a little bit by definition, there's no room for a judge to say the contract was invalid, which is which is kind of the case in both the Delaware courts and in the uh kind of Trump New York real estate case where there was a contract, um, and that's all of a sudden, for whatever reason that contract the state decided the contract was invalid.
Um that that's that's interesting.
But if it was a smart contract, then there's no, you know, there's no third party.
That's right.
And you know, one of the things I think about a lot is when I'm at a tech conference in, for example, Dubai or in Singapore, the vast majority of people there are not American, often not white, they're from Africa, they're from the Middle East, they're from, you know, Asia.
But they all trust Bitcoin.
They all trust smart contracts.
And so that is something which actually addresses the concerns of both the left and the right, because clearly people of every race, religion, ethnicity, and so on trust Bitcoin and smart contracts and so on.
But it's also fair, certainly to the right, because it's now like it is it is sort of provably fair, which is new, and that's like a new standard that can, you know, outweigh what, you know, what is what is no longer thought to be fair by by both sides.
Yeah, I the end.
This is actually one of my kind of favorite ideas of yours is you know, they are called consensus protocols.
And they are a way of getting kind of uh mathematically strong consensus to the point where um everybody in the world agrees to the penny who owns every bit of the whatever it is, uh three trillion dollar uh Bitcoin market cap.
Like that's a hell of a magic trick if you think about it.
I mean, get everybody in the world to agree that a thing like that is is quite spectacular.
And I think that um the I think it's probably the only future that works given you know what's what we're seeing now uh with the US in terms of the law.
I I think that's so and the reason part of the reason also is everybody from every culture can read code, can diligence code, can do the math, can determine for themselves it's correct, whether they're, you know, Pakistani or Indian, Japanese or Chinese, right, Democrat or Republican.
And so that is, I think, part of the goal of network state is to come up with a series of templates that can sort of restore order from the cloud.
You actually, you know, you guys pioneered this in some ways like reboot from the cloud.
Yeah.
Yes.
Right?
Like in a in a data center, you know, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, for sure.
So restore from cloud backup is kind of how I think about a big chunk of what we're doing.
But not simply the state of a server, but the state of a society, you know, we could we can do that.
Um and you know, an interesting question is how far we can take that.
Because you can you can have like minus one and plus one Bitcoin and you can have a smart contract that governs identity, but actually many other kinds of contracts.
For example, you could have a marriage and a birth registry on chain.
People people have started to do things like that.
You can even have a jury of peers where people all turn their keys like Klaros and you know or things are done, things like that.
So I think a really interesting question is see how creative we can get how much of the old world we can replace or or at least partially replace with internet first variants.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Yeah, I I mean I think that I think we have to get the infrastructure deployed more broadly first.
Like so I I do think step one, you know, the the the biggest challenge right now you know a big challenge for the world is like we did crypto is not pervasive.
Like not everybody has a wallet.
Not everybody has keys um but it's really important that they do you know first of all just from a security standpoint, like having all of your uh PII in the cloud and 400 different websites is the most dangerous thing.
People are going to look back on that and go, like that was crazy.
That was much worse than driving without seatbelts and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day like that clecking it saying.
Like, what are you guys doing?
Um, but we we have to get that underpinning um in order, you know, and I think that needs to be the way that money gets distributed to citizens and the way people vote and the way um, and then you know, when you have that basis, then there's a basis to move the law on chain.
Um, but I think it's the the trickiness of it now is um it's just not pervasive.
And and then we really need it to be provided.
We need it to be like the internet, uh, and it's not quite there yet.
And then, you know, a lot of that has to do with um, you know, the the kind of assault on it over the last four years from the Biden administration, and so it's fragmented around the world and and and so forth and so on.
But um I I think like it's definitely the future.
The question is just how fast.
So yeah, I think we have exactly years, but by some measures, we have hundreds of millions of crypto of holders at least, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And it's funny because it is whatever trillion dollars and it's a big enough deal that it was like a camp major campaign issue, and you know, blah, blah.
But it's a weird thing where um like on a like I use it actually quite a lot for wire transfers and other stuff.
But uh my view on that is where we have Solana in base, which basically means you can just blast transactions on chain as well as uh as well as other L1s.
And we have USDC and stablecoins legal.
We have Apple removing its issues where it's blocking a lot of apps in the App Store.
Hey, Apple is a huge problem.
A huge problem, right?
And we also have the regulatory assault has been pulled back.
So there should be like uh, you know, a spring of a of a bunch of stuff that was pent up that should come out there.
And then two other things.
But uh I do think we need more developers um back in the field.
So one of the, you know, it the the the combination of the assault uh from you know the administration and the power of SFB and then the rise of AI kind of shifted a lot of the software development energy over to AI from crypto.
And uh we we need to get a lot of that back to rebuild.
Well, so I actually think AI is gonna subsidize crypto in the sense that AI makes everything fake and crypto makes it real again.
Yeah.
Ah, right, right, right.
Right.
So because how do you know right AI is probabilistic?
AI is probabilistic, crypto is deterministic, and that that wallet allows you to digitally sign something to show it came from you.
And then you can have an you know, essentially a content ID on everything.
And I actually think exactly, we're gonna have proof of human social networks.
I think WorldCoin could help boot something like that up, for example.
So um, so I think that that is another subsidy here.
And then on your point on privacy, um, you know, I've talked with some of the folks in, you know, the Ethereum community, Zcash community on uh HTTPZ.
Like, you know, HTTP, HPS, HTB Z, uh, which is conceptual, whether it's literally HPZ, but it's basically zero knowledge.
Yeah, zero knowledge.
This is zero, very good.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I know it's clever, right?
And so we could uh a lot of the privacy that's another major potential subsidy for crypto is the all the zero knowledge techniques that have been built up for not just privacy but also scaling could be applied.
Uh for example, homomorphic encryption and secure multiparty, all that kind of stuff is now starting to be something that you might be able to use in traditional web apps with the with the right packaging of it.
And that packaging has to be done.
Maybe we can put out some prizes or something to Yeah, yeah.
There's definitely work that's going on on the on the packaging that's getting better.
I mean, I write it.
The the usability of um of being on-chain did you know that was one of the big the two things that you you know when the assault started that we needed to get better at where performance and and the usability and they kind of are related.
Uh we made a lot of progress on performance, not as much on usability.
Yeah.
And I think with hopefully we can get a lot of that over the next year or so.
I think starting to see the front cast or with base and so on.
Um and and NS.com earned it's back.
Yes.
Let's just go.
Good idea then, it's a good idea now.
Yes.
You know, it's funny is we're yeah, my my view on this is you know how um Evan Williams, he did blogger and they did Twitter, he did Medium, right?
And it's iterations on a theme.
And so I think Earn 2025, 2026 ha is kind of like that.
It'll be iterations on a theme from everything we learned from six, seven years.
Because lots of stuff works now that was only just barely starting to work back in 2017, 2018.
Yeah.
Um, so I'll see.
Um okay, cool.
All right, so um anything.
So anything else that people who are building Storm Societies.
So actually, if you're building Star Society intra community network state, should you come to Anderson Horitz uh and and pitch Anderson Horwitz?
Yeah, I mean, I I I think that for sure um we're very interested in it.
We're um you know, we're we're investors in uh network state.com.
Ns.com.
Exactly.
Yes, that's right.
So yes, exactly.
That's right.
So no, we believe in it.
We believe in it.
We're uh we believe in the you know the the the whole thing from the sovereign individual on up.
So we want to be part of it for sure.
Awesome.
Well, thank you very much, Ben.
All right, thank you.
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